I have a shop in my head. It has been there for years. It is not a business plan. There is no spreadsheet, no location scouted, no lease negotiated. It is a fantasy, fully formed and completely impractical, that I return to the way some people return to the idea of living in the countryside or learning to sail. I know I will probably never build it. I think about it anyway.
It is a bookshop. But not just a bookshop. It is a bookshop-cafe, which is the kind of hyphenated concept that only works if you get both halves exactly right. And in my head, both halves are exactly right, because in your head is the only place where that's possible.
The space
The location changes depending on my mood. Sometimes it is in East London, somewhere between Hackney and Bethnal Green, on one of those streets that still has an old shopfront with original tiles. Sometimes it is in Marylebone, near the Wallace Collection, where the foot traffic is slower and the money is quieter. Sometimes, in my most indulgent moments, it is in Tokyo, in Shimokitazawa, above a vintage clothing shop, accessible only by a narrow staircase that you wouldn't find unless you knew.
The interior is always the same. Dark wood shelves, floor to ceiling, but warm dark, not oppressive dark. The kind of wood that looks like it has been there for decades even if it hasn't. Brass fixtures. Exposed filament bulbs, not because they're trendy but because the light they give is warmer and less even than LEDs, and unevenness is the point. You want pools of light, not uniform brightness. You want some corners to be dim. You want people to lean in to read a spine.
The counter is marble-topped, scratched from use but clean. Behind it: a simple drinks menu written on a chalkboard in neat handwriting. Hot chocolate. A few teas. Maybe one very good filter coffee for the people who need it, but the hot chocolate is the thing, made properly, not from a machine, and served in ceramic cups that are heavy in your hand.
The shelves
This is the part I've spent the most time on in my head, which tells you everything about who I am. The books would not be organised alphabetically. They would not be organised by genre. They would be organised by vibe, which is a word that sounds unserious but is actually the hardest organising principle there is.
Imagine a shelf where a Haruki Murakami novel sits next to a Japanese photography book sits next to a book about jazz sits next to a book about loneliness sits next to a collection of Edward Hopper paintings. None of these are the same genre. But they are the same feeling. They are connected by something you can sense but not quite name, and the act of browsing that shelf, of picking up one book and then noticing the one next to it and understanding why they are neighbours, is the experience.
This is curation, real curation, not the algorithm-driven version where you're shown more of what you already like, but the human version where someone with taste has made connections you wouldn't have made yourself. The shelf is a sentence. Each book is a word. The meaning is in the arrangement.
By the counter, there would be magazines. Current issues of the ones still worth reading, but also back issues of the ones that shaped how I see things. Old copies of The Face. i-D from the early 2000s. Dazed from when it still felt dangerous. These would not be for sale. They would be for sitting with, for spending time with, for remembering or discovering what print culture felt like when print culture was the internet before the internet.
The sound
Vinyl. Always vinyl, played at a volume that is present but never intrusive. You should be able to hear it from every corner of the shop but never feel like it's demanding your attention. The record collection would be curated with the same instinct as the shelves: not by genre but by mood. A Japanese ambient record followed by a Balearic house compilation followed by Miles Davis followed by something you've never heard of that sits perfectly between the last thing and the next thing.
There would be no speakers visible. The music should feel like it comes from the room itself, as if the space is humming. Nothing kills the atmosphere of a considered space faster than a visible Bluetooth speaker sitting on a shelf between two beautiful books. The details matter. All of them.
Why I'll never build it
The economics of independent bookshops are brutal. I know this. Margins are thin, rent in London is obscene, and the café side of the business would need to do the heavy lifting that the books cannot. The fantasy works because it doesn't have to survive contact with a profit and loss statement. In my head, the shop is always full but never crowded. The hot chocolate is always perfect. The vinyl never skips. Nobody ever asks if we have the latest celebrity memoir.
But here's the thing I've come to understand about this fantasy: I am building it. Not physically. Not in bricks and wood and brass. But digitally, one product at a time, in the only medium available to a person who can't write code and doesn't have the capital for a London lease.
Every product I've built carries something of the shop. Modern Retro is the visual identity, the aesthetic sensibility that would define how the space looked. Trove is the curated shelf, the system for connecting things by taste rather than category. CultureTerminal is the magazine rack by the door, surfacing what's happening in culture right now. Each project is a room in the shop. The medium is different, but the instinct is the same: make something considered, arrange it with care, and trust that the right people will find it.
Taste made physical
What the bookshop fantasy is really about is taste made tangible. It's about the gap between having a vision for how things should feel and having the means to make that vision real. Everyone has a version of this gap. The meal you'd cook if you had the kitchen. The outfit you'd wear if you had the budget. The room you'd design if you had the space. The thing you'd build if you had the skills.
I spent years on the wrong side of that gap. I had opinions about how things should look and feel and work, but no way to make them real. Then I found Claude Code, and the gap started closing. Not all the way. I still can't open the bookshop. But I can build digital spaces that carry the same sensibility, the same attention to detail, the same insistence that every choice should be considered.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe the shop doesn't need to exist in Marylebone or Shimokitazawa. Maybe it just needs to exist, in whatever form the world makes available. The shelves are URLs now. The hot chocolate is a metaphor. The vinyl is still playing, somewhere, in the background of everything I make.
I'll keep designing the shop in my head. I'll keep changing the location, rearranging the shelves, updating the playlist. And I'll keep building its digital equivalent, one product at a time, until the feeling of the place exists even if the place itself never does.
If you happen to know of a small shopfront in East London with original tiles and reasonable rent, do let me know. Just in case.
