Bankhouse's Coast Roast Coffee coming to downtown Gulfport

GULFPORT -- The owners of the popular Bankhouse Coffee shop in downtown Long Beach have big plans for an old building in downtown Gulfport.

Shawn and Lynn Montella hope by April to open Coast Roast Coffee & Tea in a one-story building at 16th Street and U.S. 49.

"It's not even remotely going to look like the same building," Shawn Montella said. "It will be lit up with a lot of windows. It's going to be fun, very open and very airy. We're real excited."

Bankhouse Coffee on Jeff Davis Avenue was the couple's first venture into the coffee business. From there, they started Coast Roast Coffee Co,, a wholesale roast-coffee business. They've since opened Coast Roast Coffee & Tea shops in New Orleans and Pontchatoula, La.

"We started in Long Beach because we're from Long Beach," Shawn Montella said. "We had the bank building and wanted to do something with the bank building. We've always wanted to be in Gulfport, but other priorities took over. After Katrina, it was a long road for everybody."

He believes business has picked up enough that downtown Gulfport can support two coffee shops. Coast Roast will be located just up the road from PJ's Coffee on U.S. 49. The coffee shop will sit across 16th Street from Pop Brothers, home of handcrafted, frozen pops.

The Coast Roast building isn't as grand as the neoclassical 1920s bank re-purposed for Bankhouse Coffee, but the Montellas have some major improvements in mind. The Gulfport location will even have a canopy. The copper canopy at Bankhouse was painstakingly recreated with historical grant funds after Hurricane Katrina.

This story was originally published November 16, 2015 at 5:12 PM with the headline "Bankhouse's Coast Roast Coffee coming to downtown Gulfport ."