Inside a small cafe along the Brigade Road-Church Street stretch, a group of four visitors take turns positioning themselves in front of a rough grey stone wall, built from large granite-like rocks, adjusting their angles to take pictures. The space is crammed and staged with warm lighting, textured surfaces, and deliberately framed corners.
Among them is Khushi, a 23-year-old student who regularly visits cafes across Bengaluru. “I don’t really care about the food,” she says, “as long as the place is pretty enough for me to get good pictures.”
The cafe she is standing in is not all that different from dozens of others across the city.
Across Bengaluru, similar visual motifs now repeat themselves from café to café: exposed brick walls, industrial pipes, Edison bulbs over raw wood, hanging plants, reclaimed wood, vintage furniture, muted earthy palettes, and minimalist “Japandi” interiors inspired by Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetics.
These elements appear so consistently across independent cafés that many spaces have become difficult to distinguish from one another, or even place within a specific neighbourhood.
For many customers, cafes are now discovered, evaluated, and remembered through Instagram. Aesthetic appeal and online presence increasingly shape where people choose to go, often alongside food and ambience.
Social media has also changed how customers interact with these spaces once they arrive. “People come in, take pictures first, and then sit down and enjoy themselves. It’s for the ‘gram’ first, and then for themselves,” says Smriti Senthil Kumar, a postgraduate student.
The most photographed corners, the seats customers gravitate towards, and even what catches their attention are increasingly curated by design. Isha, a cafe enthusiast, told TNM that they miss discovering spaces organically, without social media quietly directing where to look and what to notice.
The architecture of going viral
For architects working in Bengaluru, this shift often begins long before a cafe opens. Architect Bijith G Bhaskar says clients today come with references assembled from Instagram, Pinterest, and other cafes they have seen online.
Where architects once conceptualised spaces largely from scratch, they now frequently work from moodboards, screenshots, and saved posts curated by clients themselves.
The expectation that a cafe should photograph well has become increasingly common, even if clients do not explicitly describe it as “Instagram-worthy”. Bijith says some openly ask for spaces that can “go viral”, treating social media visibility as a form of marketing in itself.
Architect and partner at design studio Hundred Hands, Sunitha Kondur, says clients rarely ask for “10 Instagrammable spots” outright, but the expectation is often implied.
“It’s become so important now to be Instagrammable, especially with the younger crowd,” she says. “Having some element in the space that is really photographable and interesting gives so much visibility.”
Designers say cafes today are expected to function as multiple things at once: workspaces, meeting spots, social venues, and lifestyle experiences. In that shift, visual identity has become commercially valuable.
Still, Sunitha says the visual element should not overpower comfort or functionality.
“Everybody is looking for a space that is really comfortable and easy to go to,” she says. Good design, she adds, naturally creates spaces people gravitate towards for photographs rather than artificially forcing those moments.
Writer Kyle Chayka, in his 2024 book Filterworld, describes this phenomenon as “AirSpace”, the way social media platforms reward certain aesthetics, encouraging businesses across cities to adopt similar visual languages in order to remain discoverable online.
The result is that independently owned cafes in cities as different as Seoul, Sydney, and Bengaluru increasingly begin to resemble one another despite having no direct connection.
The cost of looking good
But designers and customers alike point to a more complicated question: are cafes being designed this way because customers demand it, or have customers begun expecting these spaces because this is what cafes increasingly look like?
According to Impact of Urban Cafe Culture on Consumer Behaviour by R Kumar, published in the International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology in 2026, the rise of “Instagrammable” spaces is closely tied to changing consumer behaviour, where visual appeal influences both customer engagement and repeat visits.
The practical consequence of this shift, several customers argue, is that aesthetics sometimes begin to outweigh other aspects of the cafe experience.
Shruti, a regular cafe-hopper, says many customers today first evaluate whether a place is visually appealing before considering the food itself. Multiple customers told TNM that cafes with strong online aesthetics do not always meet the expectations created by their social media presence.
Pratiksha and Neha, friends who create Instagram content and frequently visit cafes across Bengaluru, say they often avoid ordering full meals at heavily aesthetic spaces.
“We don’t order the food because the food is usually terrible at aesthetic places,” says Pratiksha. “So we just order drinks.”
For cafe owners, however, visual appeal has become one of the most affordable forms of marketing available.
“It won't look like an advertisement, but many cafes are getting a lot of customers only because of these reels,” says Daniel, who runs the lifestyle page Unseen Bangalore on Instagram and has worked closely with over 200 cafes in the city.
He says visually distinctive spaces often draw crowds regardless of food or service. “Social media is a huge advantage for newer cafes,” he says.
Who are Bengaluru’s cafes designed for?
The rise of cafes designed around visibility has also sparked broader conversations around exclusivity and belonging.
The Basque Bakery controversy in Bengaluru, widely debated online, highlighted how pricing, curation, and “experience-led” branding can blur the line between hospitality and exclusivity.
The Koramangala bakery faced backlash online over its expensive and over the top reservation-based dining model and social media responses to customer criticism that many viewed as rude, dismissive and elitist. What began as outrage over pricing quickly turned into a larger conversation about whether some contemporary cafes and restaurants are becoming curated lifestyle spaces that feel welcoming only to a certain kind of customer.
South African academic Sarita Pillay Gonzalez observed a similar dynamic on Kloof Street in Cape Town, a historically non-white neighbourhood, in the late 2010s. Speaking to Chayka, she described these globally familiar cafes as “oppressive in the sense that they are exclusive and expensive”.
Bengaluru’s cafe culture exists in a very different context, but some designers and customers say the broader question remains relevant: what kinds of people are these spaces ultimately being designed for?
Sunitha says that spaces that are overly curated or formal can sometimes feel inhibiting for customers. “Most people want spaces where they can just go there and be themselves,” she says. She believes cafes work best when they remain comfortable and unpretentious.
“It almost feels like you want to be at home, but have service with it,” she says.
Bijith, however, says cafes today are expected to deliver more than food and seating. “People are paying for the experience now,” he says.
When cafes are designed for people, not feeds
Not every popular cafe in Bengaluru began with a moodboard. Ria Belliappa converted her grandparents’ house in Jayanagar into Juny’s Bakehouse, drawing from memory rather than online trends.
“A lot of it is inspired by things that I grew up around, or experienced while travelling,” she says. “Just some memories that are attached to some experiences.”
Ria says she never designed the cafe with photographability or social media visibility in mind. She has never hired influencers or accepted barter collaborations in exchange for online coverage.
Still, the bakehouse developed a strong online following organically through customer photographs and word of mouth.
Sunitha says photographability itself is not necessarily artificial. “It’s always fun to have something that’s beautiful as a highlight,” she says. “People naturally photograph those spaces because they become a backdrop to creating a nice picture.”
At Cafe Zubaan in Koramangala, Modestar, who helps run the cafe, says the intention behind the space goes beyond aesthetics.
“Food is just a part of it. At its core, the idea is to educate people and attempt to create a safe space for everyone,” she says, referring to the cafe’s monthly “Kahwa aur Kitabein” sessions that encourage discussions around caste, class, gender, religion, and other social issues.
“The fresh flowers are a reminder to look up and away from your screen,” she says. After 6 pm, the cafe switches to dim lighting because “white light can be overwhelming. The dim light gives you a sense of calmness.”
While bloggers are welcome, visits are scheduled on quieter days so they do not disrupt other customers’ experiences.
The limits of the Instagrammable cafe
For cafe owners, the relationship between design and social media visibility offers a genuine marketing advantage, particularly for independent businesses that cannot afford traditional advertising. For architects, designing visually appealing spaces has become one among many considerations alongside comfort and functionality.
But several designers and customers say the shift also raises questions about what gets lost when cafes increasingly begin optimising for visibility.
As cafes converge around similar aesthetics shaped by the same platforms, references, and trends, neighbourhoods can begin losing some of their distinct visual character. And while striking interiors may attract first-time customers, many regular cafe-goers told TNM that they continue returning to places because of food, familiarity, comfort, and ambience rather than photographability alone.
That kind of cafe can still photograph beautifully. But Bengaluru’s growing cafe culture is increasingly negotiating a tension between designing spaces for the camera and designing them for the people actually sitting inside them.
This article was written by students interning with TNM.