Greyhouse Coffee
& The Lobby

Greyhouse Coffee has been a West Lafayette gathering place since Campus House started it in 2008 — built on hospitality and a real love of coffee. In 2023 that warmth moved to downtown Lafayette as The Lobby, a spot for breakfast, brunch, and cocktails in addition to the same great Coffee. In collaboration with a few staff, they handed me the online side of both brands — strategy, design, build, and the complicated technology underneath. To put it simply, my job was to take the website development work off their plate so they could stay focused on the day-to-day of operating a business.

The decision that made the website effective came early in the process. Greyhouse’s visual identity is an important part of how it stays creative and relevant on a college campus. Although the brand was already established, the team continually adapts how it tells its story to a changing clientele, with a fresh group of students arriving every year. Rather than creating a one-time redesign, I built a website the Greyhouse team could update themselves. Modular, flexible Shopify sections gave them the freedom to respond to ongoing changes without rebuilding the site with a new foundation. Over the past eight years, the business has evolved significantly, but the website has endured without a major rebuild. It has only needed occasional updates, such as new photography, refreshed hero content, color changes, or changes to their menu.

The site was also designed to do more than present information. It works for them by supporting an online store for coffee beans, merchandise, gift cards, and subscriptions (see images below to see stickers that I designed for them); a fully categorized food and drink menu; a booking system that sends each morning’s reservations directly to the staff’s Toast display; and links to third-party mobile-ordering platforms.

The Lobby showed up a few years later with a different set of challenges. I was able to expand the Lobby’s young visual identity from a few logo assets into a simple art-deco look for the website — largely inspired by their interior design— with a dynamic single-page menu that their team can updates themselves.