Walmart's Bentonville home office campus has a coffee bar at its center, and it belongs to a local roaster. The Porch is Airship Coffee's fifth cafe and its newest, built the way Airship rooms are built — to the site rather than from a template. Airship's other settings run to the woods and the greenway; here the site is a corporate campus, and reading it produced a porch. Talk Business & Politics put the room at about 1,800 square feet when it opened, and by the company's own account more of the seating sits outside than in. If a cafe at Walmart's address sounds like it needs a badge, it doesn't: The Porch is open to the public. Take the coffee outside. It's a perch on the campus, not a destination.
A Bentonville roaster with four cafes and no template: an open-air bar in the woods at Coler you reach only on foot or by bike, a restored 1954 waterworks building in the city's oldest residential neighborhood, a Walmart-campus porch with more seats outside than in, and the original 5th Street room, still the working roastery. Each one is built to the ground it sits on and put where people are already going.
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