OddBird Neighborhood Café: Custom Booth & Café Furniture Case Study
A New Café with Furniture Designed Around Its Interior
At 328 S 7th St in Akron, Pennsylvania, OddBird Neighborhood Café brings coffee, breakfast, lunch, and a personal approach to hospitality into a bright, nature-inspired setting. Its opening announcement introduced the café alongside LORA Collective, combining a place to gather with a neighboring destination for home décor, furniture, and gifts.
The furniture story is equally specific. Superior Seating supplied natural-finish Lola chairs, solid beechwood table tops, and project-specific custom booths. The booths depart from the original fully upholstered back design: exposed wood now surrounds a separate rectangular upholstered back pad made with customer-owned material. That change connects the seating to the timber-framed alcoves rather than treating it as a separate decorative layer.
Venue at a Glance
- Venue: OddBird Neighborhood Café
- Address: 328 S 7th St, Akron, PA 17501
- Venue Type: Newly Opened Neighborhood Café
- Opening Weekend: September 3–7, as announced with LORA Collective
- Offering: Coffee, breakfast, and lunch
- Interior Designer: New Netherland Interiors
- Furniture Supplied: Custom booths, Lola chairs, and natural beechwood table tops
- Color Palette: Natural Wood, Rust, Green, Mustard, and Gray
A New Opening with a Personal Story
OddBird's own account of its beginnings starts with Kim Zook's grandmother and homemade cookies. As a child, Kim received freshly baked cookies at the bus stop, with extras packed to share. That memory helped shape her interest in baking and the kind of hospitality that makes room for other people.
Kim and her husband, Floyd, describe their home as a gathering place for family, neighbors, and visitors. With their children grown, the café became a way to extend that welcome beyond their own table. The opening is therefore more than a new business address: it gives a familiar family practice a public setting.
The shared address also gives the opening a distinctive setting. OddBird and LORA Collective were introduced together, with coffee and meals alongside a home-focused retail concept. The café's furnishings make that pairing feel natural: pale wood, woven shades, botanical patterns, and upholstered seating have the familiarity of a lived-in room. Yet the dining tables and separate booth areas keep it organized as a place to eat rather than a showroom.
Interior Design by New Netherland Interiors
OddBird credits New Netherland Interiors with its interior design. The studio can also be found on Instagram at @newnetherlandinteriors. The installation photographs show a room organized around natural textures, gentle color, and smaller places to settle within an open commercial space.
White-painted roof trusses and visible ductwork keep the shell airy. Oversized woven pendants introduce warmth below the ceiling. Tree-pattern wallpaper appears inside geometric wall panels and along the booth corridor, while glowing wall sconces bring light down to the tables.
The timber structures above the booths are particularly distinctive. They suggest small garden rooms without closing off the ceiling. Elsewhere, rust-colored chairs, green lounge seating, plants, and striped upholstery add variety. The overall effect is Scandinavian-influenced and residential in feeling, while the booth rows and freestanding tables give the café clearly different seating areas.
The Challenge: Making the Booths Belong
The central design question was how to introduce upholstered comfort without concealing the wood that ties the room together. A fully upholstered back would have created a larger field of fabric. In this installation, the exposed wood is part of the intended appearance, not simply a structure hidden underneath.
There was also a question of balance. The wallpaper already provides pattern, and the overhead timber provides strong lines. The seating needed its own detail without adding another competing feature. A smaller upholstered panel offered a way to retain softness while letting the broader architectural composition remain visible.
The Solution: A Different Kind of Booth Back
For OddBird, customization went beyond choosing a different fabric. The reference design's fully upholstered back was reworked into an exposed wood back with a rectangular upholstered pad. Customer-owned material, or COM, was used for that pad, bringing a project-selected textile into a deliberately limited area.
The visible wood around the pad is essential to the result. It relates to the posts, overhead slats, table surfaces, and other light wood elements nearby. The upholstery becomes an accent within that structure rather than covering it. Mustard-colored seats provide another warm note beneath the quieter patterned backs. The padded rectangle also echoes the nearby tabletop proportions.
Repeated along the corridor, this combination gives each booth a defined place within the alcoves. The furniture feels connected to the interior because the same materials recur at different scales: timber overhead, wood at backrest height, upholstery where guests sit, and patterned wallpaper behind.
The important distinction is that this was a change to the booth's appearance and back treatment, not simply a stock upholstery selection. It demonstrates the value of discussing a design requirement before assuming the photographed standard model is the only possible result.
The Furniture Specification
Discussing Your Own Custom Booth
A standard product image can be a starting point rather than the entire brief. Speak with a Superior Seating sales representative about the booth your space actually needs. Share reference images, the proposed layout, dimensions, preferred wood exposure, and upholstery samples.
For COM upholstery, provide the fabric information so suitability and material requirements can be reviewed. Changes to the back design, size, finish, and upholstery should be discussed together, with feasibility, pricing, and lead time confirmed for the individual project. OddBird shows why that conversation matters: the right modification can connect the booth to the room's architecture.
COM selection brings another design consideration into that discussion. The pattern needs to work at the scale of the actual back pad, not just on a small sample. For a similar project, reviewing the pattern direction, its relationship to the exposed wood, and the contrast with the seat helps keep the custom detail connected to the room as a whole.
Materials, Colors & Everyday Use
The material palette connects the different seating areas without making everything identical. Natural wood repeats across the Lola frames and beechwood tops. Persimmon introduces a warm rust tone, while mustard booth seats, gray-patterned back pads, green accents, and white walls create a softer balance.
The Lola chair's published construction includes solid beechwood, mortise-and-tenon joinery, floor protectors, and fully assembled delivery for indoor use. The natural beechwood table tops have a 1-1/4-inch profile, eased edges, and a semi-gloss protective finish. These are practical furniture specifications beneath an inviting visual treatment; the custom booth's fabric performance should be assessed from its specific COM specification.
Have a booth design beyond the standard options?
Explore restaurant booths, then discuss your layout, back treatment, and material preferences with a Superior Seating sales representative.
The Neighborhood Café Experience
OddBird's breakfast, lunch, and drinks offering provides the daily reason to visit. The interior gives those visits different settings: a freestanding table for coffee and conversation, a booth tucked beneath timber framing, or a softer lounge area nearby.
The custom furniture does not need to compete with the café's personality. Light wood keeps the room visually open; upholstery brings warmth; botanical patterns make the setting recognizable. In the booths, the exposed back and rectangular pad are small-scale details with a larger effect: they make the seating feel designed for this room rather than selected independently of it.
That is the clearest lesson from the project. Customization is most meaningful when it answers a particular design question. Here, it preserved the wood that connects the interior while keeping upholstery where the design called for softness.
Ready to Create Furniture Around Your Café?
Bring your concept, floor plan, and material references to Superior Seating. Discuss custom restaurant booths, upholstered café chairs, and table tops as one coordinated specification, with details confirmed around your project rather than assumed from a standard photograph.
Contact our sales team to discuss your custom booth, or explore more Superior Seating case studies.
Furniture Inspiration & Moodboard
OddBird's moodboard brings together natural wood, rust, mustard, soft green, and gray. Light beechwood chair frames and table tops provide warmth, while Symphony Classic Persimmon upholstery adds color around the freestanding tables. Mustard booth seats, patterned COM back pads, botanical wallpaper, and woven pendant shades introduce texture against the bright white walls and exposed ceiling.
The focal point is the custom wood-backed booth with a rectangular upholstered pad. Leaving wood visible around the fabric connects the seating to the timber-framed alcoves, while the smaller upholstered panel adds softness without competing with the tree-pattern wallpaper. Together, these details show how furniture can carry the same colors and materials as the surrounding interior while retaining its own character.
