If you’re sitting at Dreamscape Coffee in Woodstock and are able to pull yourself away from your perfectly prepared latte to watch people come through the door, you’ll immediately know which people are visiting for the first time. They are the folks who had the same reaction you did when you first stepped into the town’s newest coffee spot, a café that looks nothing like any other you’ve been to.  Dreamscape Coffee’s walls and ceiling are a warm-grayish black, which is a sharp contrast to the usual white you find at most cafés. In choosing to go dark instead of bright, the four owners, Rachel Williams and her husband James Williams, and Rachel’s sister Brieanna Perez and her husband Austin Perez, have created something unique to Woodstock and coffeedom.

How They Got Here

For Rachel and Brie, opening Dreamscape Coffee was a chance to return to Vermont. The twin sisters lived with their family in Rutland until they were five, and then they moved to Arizona. Years later, Brie met Austin, and Austin introduced James to Rachel. When Rachel and James married, James says, “We just did a whole bunch of odd jobs. And I got to do a lot of fun jobs like being a barista at a plethora of coffee shops and donut shops.” In the meantime, Rachel was working at her parents’ real estate company, but together, they knew they wanted to have their own business and move east.  Owning a coffee shop seemed like an idea too big to become a reality. “You almost feel like it’s impossible,” Rachel says of pursuing their ambition. “How would we ever get there?” Fortunately for them, Soulfully Good, the café that occupied Dreamscape Coffee’s space for years, came on the market as the foursome searched for a business to buy. Rachel saw it as a sign. “Maybe it’s not all that far-fetched,” Rachel recalls thinking when they visited the shop last September. “Maybe we’re supposed to be here.”

New Look, New Vibe

The team closed on the business in January, moved to Woodstock the same month, and began renovations in earnest. They took down walls and moved equipment out of the seating area to create nooks, removed a long mirror—making the space seem smaller and more intimate—and painted every inch of wall and ceiling. They brought in two velvet Victorian-style couches and faced them feet apart from each other.  Considering the small kitchen tucked in the back corner, they decided that, unlike past iterations in this space, they would not be preparing food. Instead, customers will find a case on the counter filled with delectable morning pastries, including croissants, muffins, and Danish pastries, to accompany their beverage.

A Third Place

James talks about a café being a third place. “It’s not your work. It’s not your home,” he says. “It’s where you go to get a cup of coffee, meet and chat with friends, and stay for at least an hour, a significant amount of time to break up the day.” More poetically, he says that Dreamscape Coffee offers “traditional coffee when you need to focus or when your head is in the clouds.”

On a day I could stay for a while, I was in mind to do both—work and get lost in what I was seeing—four friends relaxing on the sofas and riffing off each other in a free-flowing, high-spirited conversation, two women at a small table catching up on what had happened since they last had the chance to chat, young parents talking with an older gentleman who offered suggestions about things to do in town, all the while keeping an eye on their two boys playing with wooden toy cars, and a man sharing the communal table with me, perusing a statistics workbook and typing away on his computer. As it was for me, I imagine their experiences in this bold, dark café were peaceful, bright points in their days.

Dreamscape Coffee Company
67 Central Street
Woodstock, VT
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>