The same bakery, twice: why one branch took seven stations and the other four

Delibros at Komuna e Parisit is 7 stations, 40 overlays, 25 navigation arrows, 14 distinct connections and 12 information popups. Delibros on Rruga e Kavajës is 4 stations, 13 overlays, 13 arrows, 8 connections and no popups at all. Same client, same brief, same city. Both tours sit at exactly 2.00 connections per station, and that is the finding: density is a property of how the rooms connect, and the count is a property of how much building there is. Nothing about the second branch was made smaller on purpose.

Almost nothing in this trade is a controlled experiment. Every job has a different client, a different brief, a different budget and a different building, so when a station count comes out high it is never quite possible to say which of the four did it. These two are the exception. One artisan bakery and coffee house, one brief, one city, two premises, shot by the same person to the same standard — and one took nearly twice the stations of the other.

The two branches, side by side

The identical density is the part worth stopping on. Two premises of different sizes, built months apart, both land on exactly two distinct destinations per station. Across the whole seventeen-tour archive the figure is 2.15 with a range of 1.50 to 2.43, so 2.00 twice is not a coincidence so much as a demonstration: connection density describes the shape of a room, and station count describes how much of it there is. They are different questions and a per-square-metre rate answers neither.

What the seven stations at the first branch are

The view of it from the street, the entrance, the front desk, the coffee lounge, the dining area, the main junction of the room, and the end of the hall at the back. Seven named places for seven stations — one each, no repeats.

Two of those seven carry no product at all. The street view exists because a customer who has never been needs to recognise the frontage from the pavement, and the main junction exists because the room runs back and something has to join the front half to the rear. On a seven-station job, two stations of pure circulation is a large share, and it is the honest cost of a deep room.

On top of that sit twelve information popups attached to what is on the counter. A room like this sells on atmosphere and on what is in the cabinet, and the second of those is exactly what a photograph flattens. Three of the forty overlays here do nothing when clicked — labels, and on a rebuild they would come out.

What the four at the second branch are

The frontage, two positions inside the room, and the toilets. Four stations, three published names — because the tour labels two of its four stations with the same Albanian words for the interior, and we translated rather than invented. On a four-station job in a single room there was nothing to be gained from making up two different names for two positions in the same space, and a station list padded with invented distinctions is worse than a short one.

That is the whole difference. The second branch is one room with a frontage. The first is a deeper premises with a front desk, a separate coffee lounge, a dining area and a hall behind it. Nobody decided the second branch deserved less; the second branch is less, and a tour that pretended otherwise would have been a tour of a building the customer will not find when they arrive.

The area question we cannot answer

The obvious next question is what the two floor areas are, so you could check whether area predicted the count. We cannot tell you. We did not record the floor areas of either branch, because floor area plays no part in how we quote, plan or build a tour, so nothing in our process ever asks for it.

That is an inconvenient answer for a post like this and it is the true one. It is also, in its way, the argument: a studio that priced by the square metre would have both figures on file. Ours does not, because we price per 360° photograph and count positions instead. If a client sends a plan we will draw one — at €0.60 per square metre, minimum €45 — but that is a deliverable, not an input to the quote.

Why one is in English and one in Albanian

The Komuna e Parisit tour is built in English and the Rruga e Kavajës tour in Albanian. We are not going to construct a strategy for that after the fact. What is true is that the language layer is a separate piece of build work over the same capture, priced at €100 per language, and that neither branch was built bilingual. Either could be, without going back to the building.

What we would do differently

• The second branch gets popups before it gets a fifth station. Twelve popups at branch one carry what is on the counter — the single most persuasive thing about a bakery — and branch two has none. If the point was to make the two read as one business, that gap does more damage than the missing stations.
• Both branches in both languages. A bakery in Tirana serves people who read Albanian and people who read English, and the tours currently pick one each.
• The three dead overlays come out of branch one. An object that looks clickable and does nothing teaches a visitor to stop clicking, which is expensive on a tour whose value is in twelve popups.
• Nothing on the counts. Seven and four are both right. We would refuse to shoot the second branch in seven, and we would refuse to cut the first to four.

Both tours are public, ungated and openable in a browser: Komuna e Parisit and Rruga e Kavajës. Every number above was counted out of the delivered files rather than estimated, and nothing here is cited to an outside source because there is no outside source for it. What each branch cost is between us and the client — the rate card is published in full and the arithmetic is yours.