The Rev. Ben Morris knows his coffee beans.

The associate pastor of youth, culture and mission at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Livonia, worked in a coffee house while attending Central Michigan University and spent hours in them during his days in the seminary.

“I lived in Germany and there’s a big coffee house culture there. Every day at 4 p.m. was coffee and cake time. I loved that. Everyone would get together and eat a good piece of German torte and talk. I like places where people congregate.

“Livonia has a lot going for it. I’ve spent a lot of time at the rec center and I love it there, but there aren’t a lot of places to just hang out. Why not offer a place you don’t have to pay to participate in it?”

When members and visitors last year began to walk the newly-installed brick labyrinth, a meditative centerpiece of the church’s front lawn, Morris sought a way to make the indoors and outdoor space contiguous. An old library room that looked out onto the church’s patio, gardens and labyrinth, seemed to be the perfect spot for a gathering space for conversation, quiet contemplation, study and a good cup of coffee.

The Abbey Coffee House, a gathering for the community and church members, opened last December, approximately a year after the labyrinth was installed. Both projects were built by volunteers, with church member Jeff Dudek leading the work. Both will be featured in an open house on May 4 and will be dedicated on May 5, as a part of the church’s 50th anniversary celebration weekend that also will include a dinner and worship service.

Including the community

Jeff Schuman, church council member, said the labyrinth and coffee house are meant to “make people feel comfortable and welcome.”

“It’s almost like a public space, as opposed to walking into a closed, holy place, where if you don’t know the rules you will feel out of place,” said Schuman, describing the coffee house. “You want people who aren’t accustomed to being in church to come in and use the space. You want to be open.”

Schuman said the labyrinth, coffee house and associate pastor position are the first “real public” results of a transition that started when the congregation said goodbye to its former pastor and brought in a new pastor, the Rev. Dana Runestad.

He stressed that church members were committed to maintaining the integrity of the worship service — “We didn’t want to be an entertainment venue” — but also wanted to reach out to the community, attract young members, families and those who don’t attend church regularly.

“As we went through the transformation process with the new pastor, we started talking about how to reach out to the community. You can’t just expect people to walk in on Sunday morning and say, hey, we’re looking for a church,” Schuman explained. “What we were looking to do was to create an environment that is accessible and usable by the community that would invite someone to come into a haven or shelter or attractive area to experience the quiet.“

The labyrinth, a winding brick path set inside a circle, serves that purpose.

Schuman said church council members walked a labyrinth at the Inn at St. John in Plymouth a few years ago. When they began to brainstorm ideas for Holy Cross, they remembered the experience. It took approximately a year to complete what the congregation calls the church’s “front porch.” It includes the labyrinth, a fire pit, fountain, landscaping, brick pathways and a patio.

Schuman noted that last June several teenagers posed for photographs on the “front porch” on prom night. He said the church may offer refreshments in the garden to prom-goers this year.

Coffee and conversation

The Abbey, open during church office hours and some evenings, regularly attracts both members and non-members. Morris said college students often stop by to study together. Saturday night is game night.

“When we were building it someone said, ‘we can put in a big flat screen,’ and we said nope,” said Morris, explaining that the space is meant for conversation, face-to-face relationships, or quiet contemplation.

“There are a lot of neighborhoods around here. My hope is that eventually the neighbors here will start to feel like this is a place they can come on a Saturday morning and read the paper. I’m sure people will engage with the spiritual life of the community, and that’s one of the hopes. But if they don’t, that’s okay.”

The room includes both new, locally-bought items and repurposed furnishings.

A portion of the communion rail, which was removed from the sanctuary because of accessibility issues, was turned into a stand for brewing and filling coffee cups. The base of the coffee bar is from an old choir loft and The Abbey Coffee House sign that hangs on one wall in the room came from an old pallet.

A wall at the back of the space sports photographs from a local artist.

Volunteers who tend to the coffee bar brew each cup individually using a method called “pour over.” They grind the beans from Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company for each cup, then place them in a coffee filter inside a ceramic funnel, with the coffee mug stationed below, ready to catch the liquid.

Several different kinds of beans are available, along with tea and other beverages. Suggested donation is $1.

For more information visit www.holycrosslivonia.org.

Project by project, a two-bedroom, circa-1927 house across from Davenport’s Garfield School is getting a fresh look.

While retaining the charm and character of an older house — arched entryways, hardwood floors and an open front porch with Craftsman-style pillars — Ryan and Amy Orr are giving their home a fresh look, with new colors, landscaping and a total re-do of their galley kitchen.

Anyone who’s ever lived with a galley kitchen — a relatively small rectangle — knows that space is limited. But working with Dan Marine of Oak Tree Homes in Wilton, Iowa, the Orrs made the absolute most of what they had, gaining about six square feet of counter space and additional cabinet space compared with what they had, which was a remodeled space from the 1990s.

In addition, they now have all-new everything: stainless-steel appliances, custom Mission/Craftsman quarter-sawn oak cabinets and black granite countertops. The only original feature is the oak floor that Ryan “revealed” one weekend when Amy was at a conference, pulling up the carpet that had been glued to a type of subfloor that had to be removed with a plane.

The capstone, though, is how the space was reconfigured. “There was no option of adding on (or tearing down walls), so we wanted to get as much function into (it) as we could, with a new look,” Ryan said.

On the south wall, they put back a window over the sink that had been covered up in the previous remodel. And in a corner where there were two windows, they moved one window to center it in the wall, and they covered the other with a floor-to-ceiling, multipurpose, built-in cabinet.

They like to call this built-in a “mini mud room.” It has a bench that gives them a place to sit down and take off their shoes. The space below stores shoes and dog food. Hooks hold sweaters, and the shelves above display Amy’s cookbooks and decorative glassware.

The built-in is highly usable, but they debated considerably before going ahead with it. Amy didn’t like losing a window and the light it provided, but the promise of a place for her cookbooks eventually won out.

The north side of the kitchen was another challenge. Because the home had a wall-mounted heat register, previous owners kept the space between the floor and the countertop open — “wasted space” for the sake of air circulation.

Marine moved the register to the floor, with circulation through the kick plate area, and filled in the “wasted space” with cabinetry topped by several more feet of countertop. All cabinets were custom-made by Pearl City Wood Products of Muscatine.

At the other end of the north wall was a pantry closet that was so high  it was difficult for even Ryan to reach. The Orrs removed that, replacing it with a half-wall below and a pot rack (think more storage) above.

The focal point of the kitchen is the five-burner gas stove, topped with a stainless-steel range hood from Ikea and a backsplash made of 30 brown/gray/rust slate tiles.

“We sat in the aisle at Lowe’s and went through four boxes (of tiles) to get just the colors we wanted,” Ryan said.

The Orrs recommend talking with professionals before embarking on a remodel. They had about 95 percent of their ideas before they met Marine at a home show, but he helped them in ways they didn’t anticipate because he knows what’s available in the trade and has experience with what works and what doesn’t, they said.

BEIRUT: When listening to Tamara Zantout explain what her new website is all about, one would be forgiven for wondering how The Urban Fusion would be able to encompass all these topics: furniture, fashion, real estate, architecture, landscaping.“Everything urban,” she said.

The Urban Fusion launched its beta website last week at an event in Downtown’s Saifi Village. And though the breadth of the website was at first difficult to comprehend, the outdoor party attended by designers, artists and lovers of both art and design was in many ways a physical example of what the website would entail.

Simply put, Theurbanfusion.net is a gathering for all those interested in design with an urban flair.

Designers, from contemporary artists to furniture makers, can promote and sell their products through the website. Pages highlight the work of interior designers, urban planners and architects. Buyers interested in mind-blowing real estate can skim through luxury apartments located in Beirut or anywhere else in the world.

And people with a passion for contemporary design can gawk at avant-garde nargileh pipes, modern stretch-canvas paintings and conceptual lighting fixtures.

A subsection of the website is also dedicated to book authors who’ve written about such topics mentioned above.

So what is the unifying element between a landscape architect and a funky rocking chair? Space. They both affect space: One builds our outdoor space while the other completes our interior space.

That is the whole purpose of the website, to bring all of these somewhat disparate design categories together on one platform in order to incite collaboration and inspiration, Zantout said.

“Form in its integrity has shaped the world, whether through architecture, urban planning or industrial design,” said a statement released at the website’s launch party. “That is why we have chosen to create a space, where these fields can interact, and become one.”

Indeed the idea for The Urban Fusion was born when Zantout took a trip abroad about a year ago. She was looking for a website to sell some of her furniture wares and decided all of them were too narrow, focusing exclusively on either fashion, architecture or furniture.

The launch party offered a taste of the interaction she envisions.

A handful of designers and artists already featured on The Urban Fusion presented their work in a small outdoor gallery, compiling the mixed-media artwork of Nayla Kai Saroufim, the abstract fantasy painting “Book of Life” by Sari al-Khazen and a pair of designer stools by Zantout, among others.

Art dealers could meet artists; fashion designers could find inspiration in Arabesque art; architects and furniture designers could discuss collaborations. “The sky is the limit,” Zantout said.

Just as last week’s opening drew design-minded people from around the city, The Urban Fusion will host events to bring designers together not only online, but in the flesh, to trade ideas.

Only a small team spread out in Beirut, London and Dubai runs the website now. For now the site focuses on those three locations, as well as the rest of the Middle East.

The site has also teamed up with the American University of Beirut and the the American University Sharjah, whose design faculties are also interested in creative collaborations.

“I want to become the hub of everything urban,” Zantout said. “Urban Fusion is everything encompassing the city and the art within it.”