New Yorkers love their Mediterranean delicacies and they certainly love their coffee. Connect those two in a West Village café and you’ll have Maza Café.

Located at 30 Carmine St, between Bleecker and Bedford streets, Maza offers more than the familiar, off-the-grocery-shelf Greek yogurt, honey and phyllo pastries. In particular, the yogurt menu is extensive and imaginative and gives the guests many reasons to return to try it in new ways. But we customers, of course, pay attention to the entire experience and Maza does not disappoint in the visual surroundings department either. Greek-born, London-educated and now Athens-based architect Eleftherios Ambatzis appreciates his Greek heritage and its visual sensibilities. He used the Hestia, the centre of the ancient Greek home, (Hestia is the Greek Goddess of the hearth), as the theme around which Maza was designed.

Also a sculptor, artist and furniture designer, the 32-year-old Ambatzis turned the traditional wood-fired oven into a sculptural space in which the guests enjoy their coffee and yogurt. The cafe is not a big hearth, but more of a comfortably homey but decidedly funky atmosphere created of the elements of the Greek hearth: The vaulted form, the materials – wood, copper and iron – and the light.

Design: Eleftherios Ambatzis

via The Coolhunter