Japan’s Geshary Coffee Buys Manhattan Building for $38 Million

Japanese coffee company Geshary Coffee has closed on a Fifth Avenue property in New York City for $38 million, with plans to occupy the building.

The purchase of the five-story building in Midtown Manhattan reached the highest price of any Fifth Avenue real estate purchase since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, according to the firm Colliers, which managed the listing.

At 560 Fifth Avenue, the building for 10 years has been home to a New York flagship store for the sunglasses brand Oakley. It is now expected to become the second outpost of Geshary Coffee, which debuted with a five-story flagship shop in Central Tokyo in 2019.

Designed in collaboration with Takeda Katsuya, the 100-seat store in Tokyo is intended to create an immersive experience for consumers, with a particular focus on high-end specialty coffees, especially the Gesha variety.

Geshary Coffee has not yet announced plans for the New York building, which was built in 1907 and boasts 13,580 square feet plus 125 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue. Oakley’s lease is scheduled to expire in March 2024, according to The Real Deal.

Geshary Coffee is part of a group of at least three Japanese companies with ties to coffee. Sibling company Tree Field Inc. made its public launch in 2019 with a technologically advanced automatic coffee brewer called the Furumai. The company has since released updated versions of the Furumai, while also introducing a grinder called the Kirimai. Both those machines can be found at the Geshary Coffee Tokyo location.

The Geshary Coffee ownership group also bought the 12-year-old Costa Rican coffee farm known as Hacienda Copey. The Tarrazú-based farm has produced Cup of Excellence-winning coffees multiple times over the past decade. A marketing message from Geshary Coffee says the farm is currently focused on production of the Gesha variety.

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