This Chesco business wants to create a ‘third place’ between home and work or school

When you walk into Koselig Nook, Aracelis Mullin wants you to feel a wave of calm. She intentionally designed the teahouse that way: From its welcoming furniture to its lighting, its green paint, its scents, it is meant to be a relaxing third space, a stopping point between work and home, where people can gather, craft, focus on wellness, or anything between. Don’t forget to take off your shoes. (Really. It’s a rule.)

Koselig Nook, a late-night teahouse, plans to open in Exton, at 333 E. Lincoln Highway, later this month. The business is relocating from Coatesville, where it opened in 2024, to be more central for customers within the county and traveling from Philly.

“The whole idea and the purpose is to bring the people out of their houses and to enjoy another place where they can network or just spend some time or talk,” Mullin said.

Named for the Norwegian term encompassing contentment and coziness, Koselig Nook’s seating is meant to be secure and comfortable — with plush, downy pillow seating and blankets, oils, and low lighting, inviting people to lounge.

So much of today’s gathering culture revolves around bars and drinking, Mullin said. Though sober options are opening in metropolitan areas, like Philadelphia, people in the county have fewer places — especially places open later, she said.

That’s the gap Koselig Nook seeks to fill, she said.

“I think there’s a big need for third places that are more calm; for introverted people, they can come and network, too, little by little, but they don’t have the pressure of society saying, ‘Hey, do you want to drink?’” she said.

Instead, customers can sit and study or work from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for $25 on Tuesdays through Fridays. Students spent a lot of time holed up in the Nook’s Coatesville location during finals week in December, Mullin said.

In the evenings, from 7 to 11 p.m. for $35 on Friday and Saturday, people can go somewhere that is not about drinking.

During various events offered week to week, people can come to workshops where they junk journal, cutting up pictures and pasting them into notebooks, or take a meditative break surrounded by gongs and chimes and singing bowls in a sound bath session, or spend time with a medium. You can pick up letters from a pen pal in another country or pen your own, facilitated through Koselig Nook. You can silently read your own book and then, in a formal discussion, chat about it with other readers, trading recommendations.

Some make events out of it. For one 24-year-old’s birthday, she and her friends journaled together, sipping their tea, and had a sound bath.

Others come alone and leave with connections: During a full moon ceremony, only two of the 15 women who came knew each other. By the end, “they all shared their phone numbers. … It was amazing,” Mullin said.

The business traces its lineage to when Mullin’s daughter, Victoria, was living in California in 2020. She frequented a teahouse where customers could reserve time and sit and enjoy themselves during the evening hours. After Mullin visited herself, she felt compelled to bring something similar to the East Coast. She picked the brains of the owners.

With her background — she ran a traveling tea party business for young girls and a birthday party business in Thorndale — Mullin embraced their model; her teahouse is reservation-only. There is unlimited tea, and a selection of premade snacks. Everything is provided without extra charge once you are in the Nook. Socks only.

“I wanted to have that community place where the people come and gather, regardless of what your politics and your religion, so we did it. I was scared to death,” she said.

She expected to have to go a bit more slowly in Chester County, for people to understand the business. But she was met with a lot of enthusiasm.

“The people are so in need of this that they love it,” she said.