O3 Space opened recently in Newtown, Sydney, and was quickly filled with students and young entrepreneurs keen to make use of the study cafe. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian View image in fullscreen O3 Space opened recently in Newtown, Sydney, and was quickly filled with students and young entrepreneurs keen to make use of the study cafe. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian Sydney 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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Isabella Lee Sun 2 Aug 2026 17.00 CEST Last modified on Mon 3 Aug 2026 02.37 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I n 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.
View image in fullscreen Luca Yang, 27, owner-operator of the newly opened O3 study enterprises in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian 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 .
View image in fullscreen Hiba Maricar and Zainab Kashif, both 20, from Silverwater say they enjoy the O3 space to study and see friends outside university. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin/The Guardian 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,…