haus VE/LA
Step into our Global Flagship Cafe
A 9 meter high window facade in the heart of Thonglor, Bangkok.
haus VE/LA is our global flagship. The place that anchors everything we take around the world in one small, specific room. You'll find familiar faces here: our founder, the people from our behind-the-scenes, and occasionally someone from the office upstairs pulling up a chair to ask what you think of something we haven't launched yet.
This is a place we call home not because it's named that way but because it feels that way. We hope it does to you too.
thonglor, bangkok
Five years in the making, haus VE/LA is a celebration of our first half a decade
in praise of quiet moments
Five years to the day since a queue first formed outside a borrowed corner on Sukhumvit 42, VE/LA opens a front door with its own name on it.
haus VE/LA, the global flagship, opens 26 July 2026 at 186/67 Sukhumvit 53, Watthana, Bangkok. It is the first space the brand has built as a home rather than a location, and it opens with The Archives, a five-drink signature menu written from VE/LA's own five years, served here and nowhere else.
Founded in Bangkok in 2021 by Pete Kasidit Prasitrattanaporn under The Apostofi Group, VE/LA has grown from a single espresso bar in the corner of an art store into eleven cafés across Bangkok, a first international flagship in Mayfair, London, and a Singapore opening now underway. haus is the room all of it comes back to.
How the haus came to be
Five years, one borrowed corner, and the long way to a front door of our own.
VE/LA began as a small espresso bar in a borrowed corner of an art store on Sukhumvit 42: a sixteen-year-old founder, a secondhand machine, and, somehow, a queue that ran two hours out the front door. The idea was never complicated. Specialty coffee without the pretension, made with genuine love and care, and a way of ordering that asked you to choose your time. Dawn and Dusk were the original two: a fruitier medium roast akin to sunrise, or a darker, more chocolatey cup in homage to sunset. "Vela," the Thai word for time, felt right. The slash between VE and LA quietly referenced the hands of a clock.
The years that followed were anything but a straight line. There was the year we signed and opened three shops in three months and barely slept. The year we were lost, and learnt more from being lost than we ever had from winning. The year of the affair, when VE/LA Blended and our matcha collection took the spotlight and changed everything. And then the year the idea travelled halfway across the world, further than we ever thought it could.
By our fifth year we had plenty of locations. What we had never built was a home. Somewhere slow and steady enough to hold everything the brand had learnt; somewhere a guest could sit with the whole story rather than pass through a chapter of it. A home rather than a branch.
We looked for over a year before we found 186/67 Sukhumvit 53. Thonglor gave the idea what it needed: a soi calm enough to slow people down, close enough that nobody has to plan a pilgrimage. The building had good bones and even better light. We did the rest.
The menu
A menu exclusively at haus VE/LA, and nowhere else.
A space this personal needed an opening menu to match. The Archives is five drinks, five years, told in order, each one a taste of the year that inspired it. Each of those years is poured somewhere on this menu. That is what the Archives is for.
2021 Sweet Sixteen · Banoffee Ombre
Sixteen years old, a corner of an art store on Sukhumvit 42, and a two hour line out the front door. The idea was simple: specialty coffee without the pretension, comforting enough to come back for tomorrow. The Banoffee Ombre keeps that warmth, a dessert memory built over a serious long black. Whipped banana cream floated over a double Dusk vanilla long black, salted burnt caramel across the top, honey glazed banana crisps added at the last moment.
2022 All or Nothing · Old Fashioned Cold Brew
Three cafés in three months across Bangkok's biggest malls. It could have gone horribly wrong, and instead became the most pivotal year in our history. The Old Fashioned Cold Brew carries that nerve: slow-steeped Dusk, lemon distilled milk clarified until crystal clear, carrying cinnamon, passionfruit and wild honey through the brew. Lemon twist expressed over the cup, cinnamon stick on the rim.
2023 Sticky Situation · Mango Sticky Rice Latte
Year three, the year every founder questions everything. We were walking blind. But being lost meant trying everything, and trying everything is how we came out stronger. Hausmade mango juice as the base, one shot of Thai Pangkhon Dusk espresso marbling down through the centre, sticky rice and coconut cream spooned on top, toasted rice scattered over. It still changes sip to sip, exactly how that year felt.
2024 The Affair · Earl Grey Matcha
The year we crawled back to the surface and found the answer wasn't only coffee. VE/LA Blended and VE/LA Matcha launched and became our most successful launches ever. The affair won. Toasted milk perfumed with bergamot and pulverised earl grey, a clean blue horizon between the two worlds, Sundown matcha from Mie whisked into the crown. It unfolds the way that year did: matcha first, something else waiting the deeper you go.
2025 Home · Haute Brewage Pour Over
Five years in, things finally settled. Processes fell into order, the business found its balance. Home stopped meaning only a place. It became new routines, new people, and new reasons to smile. Your choice of our finest epicurean coffees, Morning, Midday or Midnight, brewed hot and dripped into a decanter seated in salted ice at minus twenty, then swirled, aerated and poured into a chilled haus cup at the table. The Haute Brewage closes the Archives the way the years earned: slowly, precisely, and in full view.
A house, considered
Most shops are fitted out. This one was composed. Every surface, joint and shadow at haus VE/LA was drawn before it was built, then built exactly as drawn.
haus VE/LA was designed backwards. We began with how the room should feel at four in the afternoon: low sun on handmade tiles, conversation over tables carried from our earlier shops, the smell of drinks made with genuine love and care, and worked outwards until the architecture agreed. Every decision in the house answers to that hour. Designing it took around five times longer than usual. Our typical one-month turnaround became almost five months of meticulous thought, case studies, material sourcing, and going into every single detail.
Nothing in the house is pretending to be something else. It is an assemblage of materials we love, each at its very best, the intricate details harmonised by their neighbours: multiple shades of wood, selective use of stone, reclaimed antique teak, accents of raw stainless steel. The house is meant to keep the marks of the people who use it. Directly behind the bar is a wall of handcrafted tiles from Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand, hand-formed, laboriously coated and recoated, and fired just days before their installation on site.
The main room faces its light. Deep windows over ten metres high reveal the sun as it reaches the tables in the late afternoon. After dark the house drops to a candle-warm glow that gently settles over everything. Pools of light gather over each table rather than an even glare, and the bar is lit like the stage it is.
The room
The bar runs the length of the room in a slab of stone, and it breaks with every VE/LA shop before it. The machines that usually stand at the front of the counter have been moved to the back, bringing human interaction, pour overs and the assembly of the signatures to the front bar for the first time. Drinks are prepared right there, with nothing between the guest and the craft. If the pour is the theatre, the bar is its proscenium.
At the very centre of the room, on a coffee table, sit the brand archives. Half a decade of crafting something with genuine love and care, laid out to be leafed through: the first logo sketches, reference books, notebooks and journals.
Tucked beneath the wooden spiral staircase, in what feels like an alcove the house saved just for it, stands hardcopy: a receipt photobooth created by our friend Ploy, its founder, invited to bring her machine to live at haus VE/LA. Stand before it, and a moment later the house hands the moment back, printed on a receipt: your photograph, the haus VE/LA mark, and a code that carries the picture home with you.
Do it beautifully, or don't do it at all. A principle from our founder, Pete, woven into the very fabric of haus VE/LA. It reaches the smallest things here: the weight of the door handle, the way each wood panel gently intersects, the little notes we leave on every wall, mirror and slope. None of it is necessary. All of it is the point.
The Haus Collection
Made for this address only.
A small run of objects made only for haus VE/LA. Nothing here travels to our other locations, and nothing goes online. Available at the counter only, while the run lasts. When a piece is gone, it is gone.
The Haus Tote. Heavyweight natural cotton in two designs: one printed with the haus logo and address, the other with a playful jumble of the VE/LA mark. Sewn and handcrafted with love in Bangkok.
Letterpressed postcards. The very core of the brand, in two collections: one of the ten gradients at the heart of our menu, the other a few favourite pages from our brand guidelines. Printed and finished by hand in Bangkok.
The Haus Umbrella. UV-blocking and collapsible, printed with the house's logo. For the seasons when the soi decides otherwise.
The Teak Cup. Hand-sculpted by artisans in Thailand from a single block of teak, then laser-etched with the brand's mark. The grain decides the rest, so no two are alike.
The Haute Brewage Brewer. The same borosilicate glass set used to brew the 2025 haus signature menu. Exactly what stands on the bar, nothing adjusted for the shelf.
A letter from Pete
Our story started with a sixteen year old boy in his bedroom. Then a small coffee bar in Bangkok. Then London happened. Singapore is happening. And the thing that still surprises me is that I get to do this at all.
Not the growth. The craft. Sitting with a drawing until the light is right. Arguing about a chair. Imagining a light filled room a stone's throw from Thonglor, and then actually getting to build it.
The entire menu exclusive to haus is one I created myself, and it is the closest thing to a personal journal I will ever show in public. Some details were crafted as a love letter to the people I love most in this world. Some of them hold stories nobody knows yet, and might not for a while. They are still on the counter regardless, which feels fair for five years.
We are growing quickly. haus will become the room that keeps us grounded and honest. Somewhere the whole thing can come back to and remember it started with a person making something for another person, with genuine love and care.
See you on the 26th.
haus VE/LA · 186/67 Sukhumvit 53, Watthana, Bangkok · Opening 26 July 2026 · 7am - 8pm Daily
Come and spend some time. It is, after all, what we are named for.
186/67 Sukhumvit 53, Bangkok 10110
