The coffee trade and the rise of the coffeehouse in the Middle East have been the subject of several important recent studies. They address issues such as consumption, trade, urbanism, political activity by non-state actors, etc. My study focuses on the development of the coffeehouse (15th-17th centuries) as part of the social history of space and architecture. Having appeared in the Islamic realm in the fifteenth century, this novel urban institution accompanied the spread of coffee from the shores of the Red sea to the Mediterranean and beyond, carried by transnational networks of trade, religion, and taste. Once transplanted into Europe, the coffeehouse emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries as the forum central to the rise of the “bourgeois public sphere” and the development of modern political culture. The coffeehouse’s inscription at the very origins of modernity has shrouded its Islamic beginnings and controversial early life. Borrowing elements of social practice from a variety of contexts, including mystical gatherings, the coffeehouse fostered a new type of sociability characterized by a hospitality of peers. The coffeehouse constituted the point of convergence of many historical vectors: the marketing of a new commodity, the consumption of a new beverage, the democratization of hospitality, leisure, and the popularization of elite pastimes. Mapping the urban location of coffeehouses suggests that they appeared on critical commercial arteries in tandem with other services: they represented an urban marker whose rise or fall indicated the importance of thoroughfares, or the reorientation of economic centers. Very few specimens of early coffeehouse architecture exist today. The study focuses on some early extant examples in Aleppo, and particularly the exceptionally well preserved and documented Coffeehouse of the Waqf of Iphsir Pasha, Aleppo (1653). This examination reveals that this institution built upon the vocabulary of Ottoman architecture to create a new type of semi-public space, characterized by an unprecedented accessibility and openness to the street. These major innovations became naturalized in Ottoman urban architecture.