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Foreign Exchange News, the coffee shop, bureau de change and newsagents located on a quiet road near Paddington station, is a celebration of the surreal. At the front you can buy coffee (£3.60 for a flat white), a slice of Reemies banana cake (£4.50), a pain au chocolat from Kuro Bakery (£3.60) or a vitamin shot (£2.99): at the back you can trade US dollars ($100 for £71), Japanese yen (¥10,000 for £49) or Saudi Arabian riyals (SR100 for £18) (rates likely to fluctuate). And while the rest of the café is kitted out with panels of caramel-coloured timber, the bureau employees sit behind crescents of bulletproof glass. The effect is undeniably dramatic. “When we first opened, people thought they were actors,” explains the shop’s founder and designer Gabriel Chipperfield.
The collaboration between café and bureau de change that began early this year was occasioned by a marriage of needs. The currency exchange, owned by the same family for two generations, was struggling with overheads. Chipperfield, who is developing a residential building down the street with his design firm Wendover, wanted to create a hangout for its potential future inhabitants. “People said it was so ridiculous it could work,” he says. And it has. Now “you’ve got cool kids coming in for coffee and you’ve got a different generation coming to change money before they go on holiday”, he says.
Design-wise, Foreign Exchange News is “Palm Beach meets Naples”, says Chipperfield. The Italian inspirations can be felt in the marble counters, mosaic-tiled flooring and long central counter, partly inspired by a classic coffee bar he visited in Noto, Sicily, several summers ago. Florida, meanwhile, can be felt in the overall sense of opulence, and a slightly tacky leaf-shaped ceiling fan. Also decorating the space are Gio Ponti metal teapots, a print from Angelica Jopling’s gallery and a black-and-white photo of American baseball player Jackie Robinson being run out. “It’s special because you never normally see anything negative about [him],” says Chipperfield. “He’s always scoring a home run.”
Beyond selling coffee and currency, Foreign Exchange News acts as a kind of luxury newsagents, stocking newspapers, independent magazines (Interview, Bomb, Frieze), cigarillos (£2 each), Fatso chocolates (£6.70), Chips de Madrid truffle crisps (£2.50) and Peppersmith mints (£2.20). It also deals in design objects, including the white cups (£15) and saucers (£5) with racing-green stripes that the café uses, and a rotating cast of carefully curated vintage books: Susan Sontag’s On Photography (£18) and Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism (£38) were recent titles. The café also has an alcohol licence, meaning the space is now optimised for evening events.
The clientele of Foreign Exchange News is split between tourists and locals, with famous clients including former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, actor-director couple Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson “who come on their bikes”, as well as Borat creator and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Chipperfield enjoys eavesdropping on customers talking about the shop’s wares: “A client of mine said he liked the irony of a low-risk business next to a high-risk one.” (The high-risk one, with its high margins and overheads, is coffee.) “It’s about being fun and exciting. I want people to come in and say: ‘What’s this?’”