Sydney's O3 Space Transforms Former Radical Bookshop into 24/7 Study Cafe

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.

O3 is yet to join the ranks of Sydney’s other, assuredly less wholesome 24/7 venues; while the study space promises around-the-clock access in future, for now it is open 10am to 9pm.

Yang opened his first cafe in Auckland in 2024 and has since built two more in Melbourne’s Southbank and Brunswick. The first Sydney outpost opened one week ago. The launch event was their biggest yet, taking Yang’s team by surprise, he says: the first weekend’s queues rivalled those of a nightclub.

I join the other patrons hovering awkwardly outside; to enter the space I need to scan a QR code on the O3 app. “It was a bit strange … because you don’t even need an app to enter a library or a university space,” says Annie McCann, an author who visited the cafe for a writing session last weekend.

My annoyance at having to download yet another app quickly dissipates after stepping into the warmth. The door opens to a truly whimsical sight: a set of sloping roofs line the centre of the space, with a plot of astroturf in the middle. An upside-down Japanese torii gate hangs from the ceiling.

The app says there are 126 people inside – and it shows. There are people cross-legged on the grass, sitting along a communal bench and splayed out over the various antique-looking sofas; it reminds me of another Japanese phenomenon, the cat islands.

Like everyone else I speak to, University of Technology students Hiba Maricar and Zainab Kashif found out about the cafe on Instagram; O3’s marketing team have a knack for making videos go viral. Maricar appreciates not having to buy a drink to stay in the space – although they both have vanilla cappuccinos, which they order “no matter” where they study. They’re sitting upstairs and look comfortable at their table. Says Kashif: “I feel like I’m in my own room studying.”

The cafe’s location is convenient for Torrens university students Melak Al-Zuhairi, Renin Hamdan and Raiha Mariam to hang out after class. It’s just a 10-minute bus ride from campus, and there’s a train station nearby.

When I ask if it’s their first visit, it dawns on the trio that they’ve been here every day since it opened. They laugh, sinking further into their seats up at the back of the cafe. Hamdan is curled up on a beanbag, with her shoes neatly parked to the side. “You’re not at home unless the shoes are off,” she says.

This “home” comes at a price. Visitors receive three free hours a week. After that, overtime is charged at $7.50 per hour. Alternatively, tiered membership plans give you more hours for between $10 and $50 a week.

Many of the students are happy to pay, though only for the entry-level, 10-hour membership. “It’s like the gym at this point. I’m always here. I’m always there. I’m happy,” says Hamdan.

Others think their free hours will suffice, with one patron saying she wouldn’t normally spend more than three hours at a library studying anyway.

It’s hard to ignore the sheer quantity of books tucked into corners and lining the walls. I accidentally knock a pile over while squeezing through a corridor on the second level. They’re remnants of the building’s former life as a cherished bookshop run by Bob Gould, an iconoclastic figure in Sydney’s far-left movement.

The cafe’s use of the space has drawn the ire of some locals. While Diane Fieldes, who has been involved in radical politics since the early 70s, has seen a lot of the backlash online, she says: “I don’t have that attitude at all.”

Fieldes, a proud member of Sydney’s Socialist Alternative organisation, has significant memories of Bob Gould, who died in 2011, and of Gould’s Book Arcade, which she says was Australia’s largest secondhand bookshop with a well-established collection of leftwing literature.

Gould’s Book Arcade lives on in a new form, now further south on King Street. But the original site has been standing empty for years, a “sad story”, says Fieldes. Seeing the place in use again is “wonderful”.

“I figure it’s better that it’s used, than it just gets pulled down and turned into some soulless apartments that are too expensive for people to live in,” she says.

“The bookshop was very much the spirit of Bob Gould himself, which was to be a radical, to never take a backward step in terms of arguing about politics … that’s not embodied in a physical space.”

Fieldes believes businesses like O3 are attractive to people because “there is kind of a natural desire to … be around other people. You want a space where you can actually interact with them.”

As the “3″ in the name suggests, the cafe aims to have the qualities of a third place, a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe social environments separate from home and work. Does it matter that they charge by the hour?

McCann is pragmatic: “It’s a third space for three hours. And then you have to pay.”