Peeking, freshly painted and proud from a grotty east London thoroughfare, where the uptight City surrenders to the studied insouciance of Shoreditch, is a new business venture that could perhaps only raise its head in this particular corner of the capital.

But then nothing about the location of the Vape Lab, which bills itself as London’s first electonic cigarette store cum coffee shop, was left to chance. The former hair salon, now a sleek m lange of oak floors, white tiles and vintage tables, sits close enough to Bishopsgate to appeal to pinstriped nicotine cravers and sufficiently near Hoxton to attract hipsters seeking a post prandial e cigarette after sauntering from the Andean soul food restaurant just down the road.

“We live here and we really love the vibes of this neighbourhood,” said Pierre Durand, who co owns the shop with fellow expat Frenchman and fellow City worker Jonathan Cadeilhan. “Maybe this is the only place where you could start off this concept. People here are open minded.”

If only the same could be said of some of the passersby. Although the Vape Lab has been open for a mere five days, some Twitter users find the shop a perfect opportunity to riff on east London stereotypes.

“On Shoreditch High Street obviously there is now the Vape Lab, an e cigarette and coffee shop,” wrote one. “Oh, it’s just like Vienna, 1900.”

Another was even more withering “Jeeeeezus, just gone past ‘The Vape Lab’, an e cigarette and coffee shop in Shoreditch life spirit oozes out onto the floor of the bus .”

The affable and enthusiastic Durand and Cadeilhan, however, are confident that they know their products and their consumers.

The idea for the establishment, where punters can as the website puts it “experience an old fashioned coffee and an e cig with our exceptional range of fair trade and organic Java and beautifully engineered electronic cigarettes”, was hatched in January, and by the beginning of March, the pair had found a shop and began making it over with the help of an interior designer friend.

Cadeilhan, who has seen e cigarette shops proliferate in France, is convinced that the refillable brushed metal devices that the store sells are the shape of fags to come. “In France, it’s a major market already there are maybe more than a thousand shops in France and about 300 in Paris,” he said. “Here in London, it’s a young market you see people here with disposable cigarettes and they will switch to electronic cigarettes. In five years’ time, there will be no more tobacco.”

Electronic cigarettes, which are becoming increasingly popular, contain a battery and a heating element that warms a nicotine solution to create an odourless vapour hence using e cigarettes is known as vaping rather than smoking. Unlike smoking, it is legal to vape indoors.

The shop offers an extensive range of flavoured “e liquids” from custard to Cuban tobacco, absinthe to gin and coconut to tangerine. And while its products do not come cheap reusable base units start at 45 10ml bottles of flavoured solutions at 7 Durand and Cadeilhan argue that a 10ml bottle is equivalent to seven packets of normal cigarettes, making it a vastly cheaper fix.

They also insist that vaping could not be more different to its now leprous forerunner. Supporters say the e cigarette gives people a nicotine hit without the toxins that are present in tobacco cigarettes.

“People sit here and talk to each other,” says Durand. “The vaping attitude is completely different. When you smoke, you have a cigarette, you have a short length of time, you have to go outside where it’s cold. When you vape, you can relax. Most of the time, customers who don’t know each other sit down and start having a chat.”

Customers were not much in evidence when the Guardian visited the Vape Lab on Tuesday afternoon, but presumably even City types and hipsters have commitments that preclude an outright abandonment to weekday sybaritism. But if all goes well, the Vape Lab’s owners wouldn’t mind expanding their business to Mayfair and South Kensington, home to so many of their exiled countrymen.

First things first, though Durand and Cadeilhan’s next project is the establishment of a private molecular cocktail bar in the basement.

Smoking & cardiovascular disease (heart disease)

E-cigarettes should be encouraged not stopped

Cigarette and tobacco smoke, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, physical inactivity, obesity and diabetes are the six major independent risk factors for coronary heart disease that you can modify or control.

Cigarette smoking is so widespread and significant as a risk factor that the Surgeon General has called it “the leading preventable cause of disease and deaths in the United States.”

Cigarette smoking increases the risk of coronary heart disease by itself. When it acts with other factors, it greatly increases risk. Smoking increases blood pressure, decreases exercise tolerance and increases the tendency for blood to clot. Smoking also increases the risk of recurrent coronary heart disease after bypass surgery.

Cigarette smoking is the most important risk factor for young men and women. It produces a greater relative risk in persons under age 50 than in those over 50.

Women who smoke and use oral contraceptives greatly increase their risk of coronary heart disease and stroke compared with nonsmoking women who use oral contraceptives.

Smoking decreases HDL (good) cholesterol. Cigarette smoking combined with a family history of heart disease also seems to greatly increase the risk