おかえり
A home cafe
away from home.
Sunday mornings, in our apartment in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, Tokyo.
Two of us, recently in Tokyo.
We are an international Australian and Japanese couple who share a passion for coffee, connecting with other people, creating warm spaces and learning and experiencing the world, through travel or communities at home.
We are creatives looking for an outlet beyond work, and to create meaning and communities in an infamously lonely and busy city.
A little family word that wouldn't leave us.
There's a small cafe near work where the barista says おかえり when we walk in and いってらっしゃい when we leave, and that tiny family word keeps landing in a way neither of us can quite explain.
We moved to Tokyo not that long ago, and one of the first things we noticed was how lonely a big city can quietly be. The trains, the tiny apartments, the workplaces that ask a lot of you, the friends who are too busy to meet often.
We wanted to make somewhere that does the same thing for the people we like, on the one morning of the week that should still feel slow.
A real cafe, inside a real home.
Tokyo is beautiful and exhausting at the same time. A third place, the kind that isn't your home and isn't your work, is one of the things that lets a city feel human again.
What it is is a cafe in our living room. Open sign in the window, stamp cards, a chalkboard menu, named drinks, real cups, all of the texture. Built like a real cafe, except it's still our home and you're still a guest.
Come, sit, drink, talk. Leave whenever you feel like it.
People who want a bit of their human spark back.
People who want to slow down in a city that doesn't really let them. Friends, creatives, locals, people building things, people doing the two-or-three-part-time-jobs kind of life.
Twenties and thirties mostly, foreign or Japanese, anyone who actually lives here.
Invite only. Up to ten people, including us.
Drop in whenever during the window. Sit, leave, come back. Stay twenty minutes or stay the whole morning.
No money ever. No tipping, no contributions, no anything. That's just not what this is.
Sunday mornings.
Sunday mornings, 10am to 1pm.
Open sign goes up at 10. Last pour is around 12:30. We're trying to bring slow Sunday mornings back to life. The kind that doesn't have a clock you keep glancing at.
Two minutes from the river.
Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, Tokyo.
In our apartment, two minutes from the river. The neighbourhood is quiet and slow on a Sunday morning, full of small cafes and old gallery spaces. It carries the temperature of the place we wanted to make.
The address is shared by DM after RSVP, never on the page. We keep it that way on purpose.
Mostly espresso. Pour-overs for the curious.
How to act.
Four small things. Nothing serious.
Be open.
Say hello to the stranger on the next stool. Most of the magic here is just two people noticing each other.
Be curious.
Ask about the bean. Ask about the record. Ask each other something you wouldn't on a Tuesday.
Be positive.
Sundays are slow on purpose. Bring the version of you that has time for a long sentence.
Phones welcome.
But try to keep them face-down. The room is the point.
If this sounds like your kind of morning.
Sign up to our waitlist below. We'll be in touch from a private Instagram with the small group of people in this little world.
Or DM us on Instagram at @homecafe.kiyosumi. Updates also live there for people in this little world.
また日曜日