in august 2024 our courtyard at aventinstraße 1 held three things at once: christine schuhbeck's works from her summer exhibition, the concept store with its collectible design objects — and a café. calima specialty coffee had set up inside the space for a pop-up we imagined as a slow format: good brews next to good objects, a reason to stay an hour in a 19th-century factory courtyard in the glockenbachviertel.
the first weekends were exactly that. then word got around, the way it does in munich in august. the courtyard we share with our neighbours — part of it is genuinely private, people live there — began to fill by late morning. soon the line for coffee ran through the gate and onto aventinstraße itself. for a gallery that had spent three years trying to get people to cross that threshold, it was a strange kind of problem to have.
our neighbours were patient, and then reasonably, understandably, they were not. the property management stepped in, and they had a point: a quiet residential courtyard is not licensed to be a café terrace. we scaled back, then in early 2025 we made the decision properly and closed the public programme altogether — the pop-ups, the openings, the events that had defined the space since 2021. part of the team was moving to lisbon around the same time, which made the decision easier to accept, if not smaller.
what became of the café
calima did what a good pop-up should: it outgrew us. today it pours at mas/tava and has become one of munich's loved specialty coffee spots — if you are in the city, go. we think of the courtyard summer as its first chapter, and we take a little credit for the origin story, queue included.
what became of the space
the room never went dark. it hosts artist residencies — you can request one — and a small community of creative freelancers works from its niches, quietly, the way the courtyard prefers. the gallery itself moved fully online, where no property management can object to a queue. and in late 2026 the space reopens on purpose: as a members' club for creatives, where exhibitions and talks are hosted by the members themselves — a format the courtyard can actually live with.
the full history — 37 exhibitions, launches and gatherings between 2021 and 2024 — is in the archive. the story of those four years is here.