Inside Sydney’s hottest nightspot, where shoes are off, laptops are on and customers drink matcha

A ‘study cafe’ has opened on the site that once housed the radical Gould’s Book Arcade – and students are paying by the hour to be there

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In a cavernous space once occupied by a radical bookshop, the big lights are off, laptops are out, lo-fi beats are on and the matcha is flowing. It’s 6pm on a Wednesday night and the students of Sydney are living it up. It’s not what one would expect from a venue on King Street – a strip better known for rowdy live music and anxious mornings after.

“The whole point of it is that we don’t want to remind you of work,” says Luca Yang, founder of O3 Space. On LinkedIn, the startup says they are creating the “best study products the world has ever seen”. In real life, this looks like 24/7 study cafes, which Yang says are commonplace in Asia but relatively new in Australia.