This Knightsbridge Café Will Distract You From Your Drink

Elan has opened a fifth London coffee shop on Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, with a sixth slated to open in Belgravia in 2019. The cafés, which boast a staggering 208,000 followers on Instagram, are known for their devotion to cutesy, striking visuals, long on millennial pink, plush furnishings, and floral feature walls.

Self-described as “chic and contemporary,” this particular Elan focusses on the plush and the pink over the florals — a sort of mish-mash between St. John’s Wood restaurant Oslo Court and any given Royal Housewives of interior fit-out. With the feel of a continental cocktail/coffee bar over and above the third-wave aesthetic of brick, wood, and metal, an embarrassment of millennial pink furnishings, cupcakes, lighting, bartops, and unicorns completes the look.

The #elancafe hashtag boasts over 26,000 posts, largely dominated by apposite drinks and snacks: avo toast; beetroot lattes; turmeric lattes; more avo toast. Head of coffee Joao Almeida is a three-time U.K. barista championship finalist, an accomplished latte artist, and no stranger to innovation, championing “espresso” made with rooibos long before the idea of the “tea” latte became so ubiquitous.

The floral feature wall isn’t a new bag for coffee — renowned San Francisco coffee shop and roastery Wrecking Ball’s pineapple wallpaper has been backgrounding selfies since 2014, but it’s also a background to some of the region’s best drinks. Elan’s not just about the interiors either — but it is, mostly, and it’s clear that millennial pink isn’t going out of fashion as 2018 bleeds into the new year.