Coffee and Art

Michael Page

Every partnership needs balance. Every kitchen needs heat and calm. Every good story needs tension.

Michael is that other half for me—the yin to whatever the hell I am on any given day.

We were born in Douglas, Arizona, a border town that teaches you early how to read people and improvise. We didn’t stay long. Our father’s military career turned our childhood into a rolling suitcase: Seattle, Washington D.C., and more states than I can list without a map. New schools. New accents. New ways of fitting in—or not.

Michael fit in effortlessly. I worked at it.

From the beginning, his path was obvious. Creativity wasn’t a phase for him—it was the operating system. He drew. He designed. He entertained. He was gregarious, funny, and visually dangerous in the best possible way. We both competed for attention from hardworking parents who were busy building a life, but Michael had that rare gift: he could make a room turn toward him without trying.

Our paths overlapped in family and geography—but professionally different spectrums.

By the late ’90s, while I was deep in the grind of building restaurants, Michael carved out his own universe in Los Angeles. Not paint and brushes, he preferred a different canvas: Apple’s latest high-resolution screen. He became a digital creator at a level most people never see up close.

You’ve seen his work even if you don’t know his name.

Set designs for The Voice. The Grammys. The Oscars. The Country Music Awards. Concerts for Rod Stewart, Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney. Big rooms. Big lights. No margin for error.

And somehow, in between all that, he kept designing for us; quietly, shaping the look and feel of Bisbee’s Table, Santiago’s Mexican, Hotel San Ramon, Tombstone Coffee Co., and Bisbee Coffee Company. Always showing up. Always making it better.

So how does an artist of that caliber land in Bisbee, Arizona?

Two things bring creatives to towns like this: magic…and family.

Sometimes a brother sweetens the deal.

In 2006, just after we opened Santiago’s Mexican, Michael and his wife Tamara packed up and moved to Bisbee. He went straight to work. Santiago’s and Hotel San Ramon became his new playground, and his eye for design helped push both into award-winning territory and onto every “best of downtown” list that mattered.

Then came COVID.

Restaurants everywhere were folding. We pivoted. Michael did what artists do when the world breaks—he rearranged reality. Counters moved. Concepts shifted. “Open” became the message. When dining rooms went dark, he helped turn us into a grocery store overnight so people could still eat and we could still breathe.

And Michael is once again laying down the gauntlet.

Now here we are—three decades into this coffeehouse life and the canvas gets even bigger. With our new website, we’re opening the door for guests to design their own coffee bags and, in a very real way, their own coffee experience. Upload an image. Create a label. Make it personal, strange, beautiful, or deeply specific. The coffee inside is the same carefully sourced, thoughtfully roasted Bisbee Coffee you’ve always known—but the outside becomes yours. It’s part art project, part storytelling, part quiet rebellion against sameness. Coffee shouldn’t just wake you up. It should belong to you.

Bisbee Coffee Company…Online.

Same town. Same brothers. New canvas.

Coffee and art, still tangled together—exactly where they belong