Updated with soft lighting and furnished with tables and cabinets built from reclaimed old cypress from a home that was torn down, the Cooper Street Coffee shop has reclaimed a historic building in Jeanerette.

JEANERETTE — When Anatole and Jennifer Larroque purchased the large, brick warehouse building down the road from their house on Cooper Street in Jeanerette almost 10 years ago, they had no idea what they would do with it.

They used the building for storage originally, unsure what to do with the space.

“It’s been vacant off and on,” Jennifer Larroque said. “It was used for storage and different things. It was built in 1925. That’s when the first business was here. It was a Louisiana Public Service, a (direct current) power plant, from what we’ve heard. We’re trying to get bits and pieces of history.”

In later years, she said it was used in conjunction with the Moresi family’s bottling plant, the first Coca-Cola bottling plant in the Teche Area, that was nearby.

“They did repairs for some of the equipment here,” she said.

Since then, the facility has had a string of owners and a metal warehouse attachment in 1979, according to the initials and date carved into the concrete where the addendum begins. There was an auto mechanic shop owner, who ran his business out of the metal section for some time, Anatole Larroque said.

When they bought the property, all of the windows had been bricked in. They were unsure for how long, they said. The inside of the windows was filled with cinder block, while the outside was done in red brick to match the building’s color, all of which was mortared into place.

Photos from before their construction efforts show cracks in the buildings facade and the deteriorating exterior. The building had clearly long been in a state of disrepair.

About three years ago, however, the couple finally decided what they wanted to do with the place.

“It was always in the back of our minds. ‘You know this would make a good coffee shop or something,’ ” Anatole Larroque said. “We (the Larroque family) had Superior Fabricators in Baldwin, and we owned Moresi’s Foundry right here, a machine shop. After my parents passed away, the rest of the family wanted to get out of the business, so they sold it. I was 47 years old at the time and looking for a new direction. We were going to fix it up for our own use but we decided to go full commercial.”

Once the couple knew what they wanted, they set out to design their future coffee shop. The Larroques visited several other cafés and similar businesses to get ideas for what they wanted to do, each said, drew up their own plans and presented them to an architect for approval.

Construction started and, just like the design, the Larroques’s were heavily involved in the process themselves, knocking out bricked up windows with sledgehammers and regrouting bricks.

“We poured a whole new concrete (floor),” Anatole Larroque said. “The original concrete was poured in small sections, and they had broken into pieces. We had to get help with the plumbing, which was in the floors, so we raised the floor about 8 inches.”

They turned the garage area that led into the metal attachment into two full-size restrooms, each with three toilets. Larroque noted that most coffee shops only have single restrooms, but they wanted to leave their options open for the future in case they decide to cater or host events.

The other side of the garage became the kitchen, where all the edibles they make are now prepared. They knocked another hole in the wall to serve as the service window from the kitchen. They also had to install fire walls, as per state regulations, and spray a fire-retardant lining on the inside of the tin roof.

They still had work to do on the outside of the building.

“We scraped out all this (dirt) and put limestone in for the parking lot,” Anatole Larroque said. “We poured the patio around the side. We added all that.”

Once the building was complete, they needed tables, cabinets, counters and window frames of wood. Anatole collected old cypress from a house being torn down to be used in the making of these items.

“All of the wood I collected is old cypress,” he said. “All of the furniture, the cabinets the tables are all made of recovered cypress. The tables were done by my neighbor Torger Brown. There was a house on Minvielle Boulevard. This wood came right out of that house and was from the Bourgeois plantation house before that.”

“So it’s all been recycled twice,” Jennifer said.

Brown said he was pleased to see the old building also on his block get a face lift and that the couple used the street’s name in their new business, Cooper Street Coffee.

“It was vacant for many years. It’s great they were able to bring it back to life,” he said. “Cooper Street came from the person who owned my home. He was a Cooper. He made wooden barrels to put sugar in, which were then loaded on barges to ship out by steamboat. It’s nice they used it in their building name because it has a lot of history. It’s a great opportunity to utilize the old building and help the community by having a place to go visit.”

The whole process took about two years, they said. Which was much longer than the three or four months they were told. The Larroques spent a small fortune to get the old building to where it is today, but they said they have no regrets.

“I never put pen to paper, but we put in at least half a million dollars,” Jennifer Larroque said. “We may never get our full investment back.”

“It’s a labor of love,” chimed in Anatole with a smile.