If you’re one of those people who frets at the gradual feminisation of public space — we tend to be called men — then the forthcoming proliferation of Fifi and Ally could well be a cause for concern. You worry that you’ll soon be obliged to air-kiss the guy who brings your double espresso.

I refer, of course, to the surprise takeover of the ailing Beanscene — a butch sort of coffee shop, with overstuffed sofas and framed snaps of jazz greats and hairy guitarists. This familiar stalwart of the Scottish high street was last week bought up by Fiona Hamilton (Fifi) and Alison Fielding (Ally), whose concept cafes drape the pashmina of food around the shoulders of retail.

In Fifi and Ally’s world, the champagne is all but administered by intravenous drip and no item on the shelves can ever be too dinky or utterly darling. Fifi, incidentally, currently favours Ila spa products, clothing by Et Vous and pinot noir; Ally likes Escentric Molecules perfume and black skinny jeans by Hoss.

There are currently two Fifi and Ally outlets, both in the city centre of Glasgow, and they’ve developed a respectable reputation on the food side of things, so the pair behind them are hardly novices in this sphere.

“As soon as Beanscene’s sale was announced we started doing a tour of every branch in the country,” says Fielding. “We’d go in together or separately, sit for a couple of hours and imagine what exactly we’d do with the places. We’d go on day trips to Ayr and St Andrews. It was obvious that better food was needed, a substantial overhaul all round. It had all got a bit tired and sad.”

Prior to the takeover, the pair had been considering opening a branch in London, having been named most stylish cafe in last year’s Scottish Style Awards and one of Retail Week’s top 100 stores in the world: “Someone from Elle Decoration came in and asked, why isn’t this in London?” remembers Hamilton.

“We thought, good question, let’s do something about it. And then we thought, don’t Glaswegians deserve something that Londoners don’t have? And then we heard that Beanscene had gone into receivership.”

At this point it struck the pair that here was an opportunity to drum up business seven days a week: from the informal and caffeine-starved grazers in Beanscene Monday to Friday to the better-dressed appointment socialisers at weekends in Princes Square and Wellington Street.

“We wouldn’t want the Beanscenes to be fancy or exclusive for their own sake, though,” Hamilton says. “We’ve had a little old lady who’s come to Princes Square since we opened in 2005, every Saturday she has a glass of champagne and a cake, without fail. Hopefully we put personality and specialness into the places to make that appropriate.” Most of the properties will remain as Beanscenes, except the branch off Glasgow’s Byres Road which will become the third outpost of the Fifi and Ally brand.

Fittingly enough, we meet in the Hempel hotel, a minimalist establishment sited in Bayswater. The hotel was designed by the former James Bond girl Anouska Hempel and it’s full of sniffy staff who look at you as though you might be related to Albert Steptoe.

Hamilton is staying here because she’s attending a business event. The rest of the time she lives in Kilmacolm with her husband and nine-year-old daughter Tori. Fielding resides in Streatham, south London, and has a seven-year-old named Millie, but she gets up to the Scottish shops several times a month. They’re cousins; Fielding’s parents left for London in the early 1970s.

It’s quite a Fifi and Ally sort of place, the Hempel — chi-chi and aesthetic and slightly sci-fi in its suggestion of a future where men are prohibited from dirtying the soft furnishings with their muddy shoes, but I wouldn’t imagine that the pair take it completely seriously.

Though wholly and sincerely dedicated to a Sex and the City premise of lovely things for lovely ladies, neither is much of a brittle fashionista or neurotic human shoe-tree. Fielding has that sweet quality of mumsy Englishness, even though her day job is in rock‘n’roll; she’s art director of the Beggars Group, a stable of independent record labels which harbour Radiohead, Beck and Damon Albarn. More direct and specific, and given to the look that the fashion world dubs boho-lux, Hamilton is the talker, the business brains, while Fielding cherrypicks the oochy-goochy itemries for the shops.

Neither will disclose how much it cost to secure the 16 branches of Beanscene — eight in Glasgow, four in Edinburgh, and one apiece in Stirling, St Andrews, Ayr and Hawick. The Bank of Scotland helped get the duo’s first shops and restaurants up and running but, perhaps fortuitously, were out of the picture by the time it came to the Beanscene buyout. There were 160 bids for the chain in the end. The hospitality tycoon Stefan King, says one catering insider, was runner-up to Hamilton and Fielding, despite submitting a higher offer; Alex Knight, the restaurateur husband of Carol Smillie, lost out too. The administrator, KPMG, thought it was Hamilton and Fielding who had a formula that could be diluted successfully for the high street.

Hamilton funded the sale wholly from her own pocket, which makes it a very impressive pocket indeed. She sold the quantity surveying company she founded in the early 1990s nearly a decade ago and has concentrated since on being a retail strategist, helping develop outlets such as Glasgow’s Princes Square.

“It’s only now that I seem to be an entrepreneur,” says Hamilton. “I was setting up companies throughout the 1990s and doing property deals but it didn’t seem to count for much, it was just business, it had no glamorous handle. But the moment you go into conspicuous lifestyle suddenly you’re an entrepreneur.”

What this means, though, is that the pairing of Fifi and Ally won’t be wholly equitable. How Marks and Spencer or Fortnum and Mason divvied up their responsibilities we can’t know, only that, despite Fifi and Ally’s all-girls-together complexion, it’s Hamilton who has the most riding on the new venture; only one of the cousins stands to lose their Vivienne Westwood blouse on the enterprise: “Having your emotions at stake can mean more than having your money at stake,” says Hamilton.

“Ally is staked emotionally in the company; we both are equally. Compared to that the money is just a detail. You don’t fall out over something as trivial as money with someone you played with when you were six.”

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