Heavy Metal Meets Toy Bunnies

By NANCY KEATES

Portland, Ore.

Few people in Portland are as Portland as Duane Sorenson, founder of indie brand Stumptown Coffee.

Photos: Duane Sorenson's Portland Home

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Chris Mueller for The Wall Street Journal

Duane Sorenson with 8-year-old Ava, 2-year-old Pearl and 6-year-old Angus

He's a bearded, mustached, heavily tattooed, flannel-and-Chuck Taylor-wearing 39-year-old in thick black glasses. Mr. Sorsenson—who loves to cook, but only if he can use locally sourced ingredients—fits right into the city's ethos of being both woodsy and hip. So while Stumptown has gained international fame and has expanded into New York, Mr. Sorenson has no plans to stray far from home.

He lives in the heart of inner southeast, an area that used to be called "The People's Republic of Portland" for its leftist cafes and food co-ops but has become increasingly gentrified over the past decade. His condo is on the top floor of a recently built four-story contemporary building with rusty-looking Core-Ten steel and angled aqua glass panels. At the base is an artisanal bakery, where Mr. Sorenson grabs a Stumptown black coffee when he's rushed, and an exercise place that touts itself as "a yoga studio for everyone." Bicycle racks take up three parking spots worth of space out front.

"I've only ever lived in this part of town," said Mr. Sorenson on a recent night at home, as he prepared a dinner of braised short ribs rubbed with Stumptown's Holler Mountain Blend coffee, baguettes from the bakery below and bottles of Oregon's Cameron Pinot Noir.

Mr. Sorenson owns two side-by-side units on the top floor: a two-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot corner apartment with floor-to-ceiling glass windows, purchased in 2008 for $476,000, and a 900-square-foot studio bought two months ago for about $250,000. He plans to combine them eventually, but for now the two-bedroom is a toy-strewn living space which he shares with his 31-year-old fiancée, Hillary Lieberman, who is pregnant with their second child, their 2-year-old daughter and Mr. Sorenson's 6-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter from his first marriage.

Half the condo's furniture is clean-lined handcrafted tables and shelves from Made, a company around the corner that often uses trees knocked down in adjacent neighborhoods by storms. The other half is designer Italian modern, with a rust colored L-shaped sculptured Togo sofa by Ligne Roset, an oval Eero Saarinen dining table with a white marble top and a large, white, fiberglass, amoeba-shaped Eames La Chaise lounge chair.

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Chris Mueller for The Wall Street Journal

The steel and glass building

"It's a little industrial, a little modern, a little nostalgic. It has an urban, underground design feel that isn't cold," says Bo Hagood, founder of Made, which made the furniture for Stumptown's coffee bars.

Reached by a separate door out in the hallway, the almost empty studio is currently Mr. Sorenson's hangout. It's where he grinds coffee in the mornings (so he doesn't wake up the kids) and stores his heavy metal records and his eBay-purchased collection of Olympia beer memorabilia and Zig Zag rolling-paper tins. The refrigerator is stocked with microbrews like Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA and La Roja Artisan Amber Ale.

When the units are joined, Mr. Sorenson plans to use the studio's kitchen as a lab, a place where he will experiment with different roasts and grinds. For now most of Mr. Sorenson's multiple espresso machines remain at work: His insistence on perfection and on cleaning the equipment correctly means a single cup of coffee can take hours to make. At home he uses a Chemex: a one-piece, hourglass-shaped vessel made of glass which he said makes perfect coffee, fast.

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Chris Mueller for The Wall Street Journal

Ingredients for dinner

Mr. Sorenson grew up in Puyallup, Wash., a town southeast of Seattle known for its large state fair. His father, a sausage maker, was passionate about his ingredients and method. Mr. Sorenson worked in the sausage kitchens and spent his weekends helping his grandmother can beans and fruit. Later he hitched rides with older kids to Portland to skateboard at the city's Burnside skatepark.

While Mr. Sorenson attended Seattle University he worked as a barista at independent coffee shops (he shunned Starbucks, which he called "played out" by the early 1990s). He dropped out of college to take on an apprenticeship at Lighthouse Roasters Fine Coffees, becoming the company's head roaster. In 1999 he bought a vintage roaster for $8,000 and set up shop in—where else—inner southeast Portland. Stumptown, an old nickname for Portland, once a logging town, now roasts 1.5 million pounds of coffee a year and has nine outlets, including a cafe in the Ace Hotel in New York and a coffee bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that shares a warehouse with its roastery. It limits its growth, turning down wholesalers and cafes. "Our coffee isn't right for everyone," said Stumptown's head of operations Matt Lounsbury, who started as a barista.

While he now has an apartment in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn and travels the world buying beans, Mr. Sorenson said his home base will remain his Portland condo. "I'm a pretty mellow guy. I'm not that aggressive," he said. He points at his tattoos to illustrate the point: There's "Puyallup" inked across his knuckles, and an assortment of Americana icons, including a rocking chair, a steam engine and a rooster. Still, one tattoo says otherwise: an enormous battleship on his belly.

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com