Alright, let us ask you something.
What city are you in right now? Or what is the nearest major city to you?
Now think about the trendiest neighbourhood there.
You know the one.
Does it have specialty coffee?
Do they sell cookies the size of a dinner plate?
Is there someone working on a laptop while drinking matcha?
A record store? A running club? A natural wine bar? A ceramic studio?
Perfect.
You have your own version of Brooklyn.
And that is exactly what started this conversation. Because somewhere along the way, the coolest neighbourhoods in the world began looking surprisingly similar.
Not the cities but the neighbourhoods. It actually started to stand out to us while we were travelling around the world. After a few cities we start noticing patterns.
The places where old warehouses become cafés. Factories become apartments. Railway arches become bakeries. And somehow everyone collectively agrees that exposed brick is a personality trait.
We have seen it in Tokyo. Copenhagen. Melbourne. Lisbon. Seoul. Mexico City. London and even Madrid.
Different cultures, different language but same damn cookie levain or tahini miso style.
And honestly, we are not complaining. At Jade Peak, we spend far too much time in these places ourselves mainly for the good coffee.
But once you notice it, you don’t stop thinking about it. Sorry, you are no longer the special kind of hipster
The neighbourhood where everyone somehow looks both effortless and extremely well-curated at the same time.
The fascinating part is that these places are not copying each other directly or is what we think so.
They simply attract the same type of persona: Curious, Creative, travellers, some cool people that love design. The people who somehow know about a restaurant six months before everyone else. You know that friend who always spots places… and if you don’t have one, it’s probably because it’s you.
Our New Objective
The strange thing is that many of us travel searching for authenticity, only to discover that our favourite neighbourhood abroad feels remarkably similar to our favourite neighbourhood back home. With a different skyline Brooklyn became a prototype. And yet, we keep coming back to it. We keep getting drawn to these places with good taste, good coffee, good design. We will probably always love them. But at the same time, we are still looking for something underneath it all, something that feels a little less curated, a little more real, a little harder to replicate. Come on this journey with us, because we are about to start looking more closely at places around the world that break away from the expected.
Originally published at jadepeak.com.
