Two weeks after we opened the doors on Walcott Street, I finally sat down and looked through the photos on my phone. They only go back a few months, but they already feel like they belong to another shop. People ask what this place was before it was Sinamon, and the honest answer is that it was an ice cream shop, a little gelato bar in Mount Lawley, and for one strange month it was a building site with an oven in the middle of it. This is the before and after.

The day we first saw it

The first time I stood on this corner was a cold Tuesday afternoon in August. The gelato bar had already shut for the winter, the candy striped shutter was down, and the painted girls with their sundaes were watching an empty footpath. Through the glass there was one curved display cabinet built for ice cream tubs, a soft serve freezer pushed against the wall, white tiles, and not much else. I paced it out at roughly ten square metres, then did it again, because the number seemed too small to argue with.

I went home that evening and baked. The tray came out of the oven a little after nine, and somewhere between the first roll and the last I decided that a room that small could not hold much more than an oven, a cabinet and a queue, and that maybe that was the whole idea.

The shop we were handed

When we got the keys, the gelato days were over but the shop had not been told. The old sign still read GELATO above the awning, and the painted girl who came with it kept watch over the corner the whole time we worked underneath her. Inside was one small room, a cold cabinet made for tubs of ice cream, and not much else. I remember standing in the middle of it with the lease in my hand thinking that a bakery needs an oven, a proofer, a coffee machine and somewhere for people to stand, and that the room seemed to disagree.

A month of fitout

October was the month everything happened. We kept what deserved keeping and rebuilt the rest. The display cabinet was scrubbed back and repurposed for buns instead of tubs. A second hand espresso machine came apart on a bench, got new seals and gaskets, and went back together as our first coffee machine. Timber crates became shelving, warm bulbs went in over the counter, and in between all of it we ran the oven again and again, tray after tray of test bakes, until the recipe from my kitchen behaved the same way in a shop.

The evening the woman went up

The biggest change was the wall. One Friday afternoon the installers arrived with ladders and a stack of panels, and by the time it got dark the gelato girl had handed the corner over to the woman with the dark bob holding her cinnamon coffee. If you have read In The beginning you have already met her, she is the drawing that started as a doodle next to the first recipe notes. Watching her go up piece by piece above Walcott Street, taller than the shop itself, was the moment this stopped feeling like a project and started feeling like a bakery.

The after

By the last week of October the corner looked like this. Navy awning, our name on it, the mural above, and a room that smelled like cinnamon instead of paint. We stocked the old ice cream cabinet with warm buns on timber trays, opened at 6pm and told Instagram we would be there every evening until 10.

And then Mount Lawley showed up

I have already written about the first night, the line down the footpath, the apology we posted the next morning because people waited far longer than anyone should for a cinnamon roll. Two weeks on, the line still forms most evenings, and I still step out sometimes just to look at the wall and remember the GELATO sign that was there in September. To everyone who has stood in that queue, thank you. You turned a renovation into a bakery.

The Original Sinamon Roll that came out of those October test bakes is still the first thing we put in the cabinet every morning. More pieces of this story live over on Stories, and the buns themselves live in the online store.