Clocking Off: Lève Office Bar in Turin by Fabio Fantolino.

For two decades, office design has been borrowing from everywhere else—the lounge room, the café, the hotel lobby—all in the name of making work feel a little less like work. Fair’s fair, then, that hospitality should start raiding the office for ideas.

We clocked the swap recently in Seoul, where Indiesalon QDC dressed a Gangnam coffee shop in workplace nostalgia. Now, Fabio Fantolino has taken the conceit somewhere far more knowing with Lève Office Bar.

Overlooking a garden in central Torino, Lève reaches back to the 1960s—the decade when office interiors took composition and material quality seriously—and reinterprets that heritage through chrome-plated metal, stainless steel, mirrored surfaces and saturated colour.

A Compact Seoul Café That Borrows the Language of the Office.

The name—Quick Daily Coffee—borrows from the medical abbreviation qd (once a day), framing coffee as a ritual of productive calm.

The result is a precise system of reflection and contrast, choreographed to guide guests differently as the hours tick over: coffee-bar calm by day, loosening into something more charged by night. Anyone who’s followed Fantolino’s Turin hospitality work will recognise the mid-century fluency at play.

The space unfolds across three rooms, each its own sequence. The first is anchored by a long stainless steel counter that resolves into deep red enamel at its far end — a custom Fantolino design, minimal by day and opening into a cocktail station by night. Underfoot, herringbone in warm brick tones takes the chill off all that reflective metal.

Casa Mille in Turin by Fabio Fantolino.

Casa Mille unfolds in a series of decadent spaces. A light, creamy palette is occasionally interrupted by pops of deep seafoam green seen on tables and doors, before entirely swallowing the kitchen.

The second room, set over double height, leans hardest into the office reference. Below, cool steel, chrome and mirror meet the warmth of wood and leather across a continuous field of green resin floor, while a luminous ceiling grid amplifies the play of reflections. Upstairs, small sofas — leather seats, bouclé backs — are arranged as low partitions, a sly nod to the open-plan American office, framed by a red timber-and-laminate boiserie trimmed in fine metal.

Lighting does much of the talking. A run of retro-style pendants marches above the upstairs tables, keeping the geometry taut, while Lambert & Fils’ Ipoli 06 and Ipoli 01 lend graphic precision at the counter and Santa & Cole’s Maija casts a softer glow at the cashier.

The upshot is a bar that wears the office as costume rather than constraint — proof, perhaps, that the most rigid spaces in our lives are exactly the ones worth reimagining over a negroni.

[Images courtesy of Fabio Fantolino. Photography by ELLER Studio / Serena Eller Vainicher. Styling by Alessandra Orzali.]