If you’re not familiar with the area, strike out for London’s Liverpool Street station and then veer towards Spitalfields, with its huge 19th-century market building now repurposed as prime retail space, its Hawksmoor church and cheery Victorian pubs. And then turn down Hanbury Street – past a much-lauded fish and chip restaurant, and another turning off towards the record store Rough Trade East – and bisect the curry houses and vintage clothing stores of Brick Lane. There, down the scruffy end of the street, lies Second Home, the buzzing, year-old co-working space imagined into being by former Downing Street policymaker and evangelist of entrepreneurship Rohan Silva and his business partner Sam Aldenton.

The former carpet factory is now fronted by a curved bubble of what might seem to be glass or Perspex but, in keeping with the project’s determination to celebrate innovation, is in fact a sustainable material that has never before been used in a British building. Behind it, Second Home’s tenants – a carefully blended mix of startups and established businesses ranging from tech and energy companies to film-makers, PRs and investors – sit in Jago, the canteen-cum-bar catered for by a former Ottolenghi head chef, which is also open to the public.

Now those happy eaters can gaze out on to another of Silva’s dreams made flesh: the bookshop Libreria, its name a nod to other places, and its inspiration The Library of Babel, a 1941 short story by the Argentinian master of mystification Jorge Luis Borges. When I visit Libreria a few weeks ahead of its opening, its windows are still taped up with brown paper, but it makes the reveal all the more seductive: wandering in, I’m struck first by ambient softness – gentle yellow lights, honey coloured wood – and then by the rows and rows of shelving, far more than the compact space should be capable of accommodating.

Part of this is a mirror trick – I suddenly see myself peering back – but the rest of it is down to the effective use of space that follows when you fill bookshops with – well, books, rather than books plus stationery plus lattes. Oddly, given the disparity in size and grandeur, it has a touch of Lello, the bookshop in Porto that always appears high on lists of the world’s most beautiful places to buy books.

But it is not all pure prettiness; and here the Borgesian link becomes interesting. The Library of Babel, a short jeu d’esprit based on the idea of an infinite library-universe in which hexagonal galleries contain all the books ever written and all of those to be written, is not so much a bibliophile’s fantasy as a meditation on the perils of endless choice and the painful quests to which it gives rise. “I have squandered and consumed my years in adventures of this type,” confides the narrator. “To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book.”

There's a growing awareness that being in front of your screen the whole time isn't great for happiness or creativity

Libreria, explain Silva and the shop’s director, former FT digital editor Sally Davies, will help with that very contemporary problem, an overload of information. Their solution is to tailor their stock and arrange it not according to standard categories – fiction, biography, science, and so forth – but in suggestive themes designed to provoke browsers into making unexpected connections; early examples include the sea and the sky, family, love, enchantment for the disenchanted, and mothers, madonnas and whores (“possibly my personal favourite,” says Davies). The spotlight will be on cutting-edge independent publishers; I notice a display of books from Fitzcarraldo Editions, the outfit behind highly praised titles such as Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream and the newly released Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox. Industry figures including Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books imprint, will also have a hand in selecting the shop’s offering.

There is, of course, the obvious objection: if you know what you want – or if you’re prepared to devote yourself to clicks and algorithms – you’re fairly likely to be able to get a book more cheaply from a giant online retailer, and delivered to your door to boot. “This not about being an on-demand service; this is not about serving an instrumental need,” explains Davies. “This is instead about providing a space that celebrates curation, that allows you to get an overview of the intellectual landscape, that allows you to immerse yourself in the experience of being in the store.”

‘I think we want to be deep; we don’t want to be afraid to be intellectual,’ says director Sally Davies of the new bookshop. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

That experience will encompass the occasional extremely late-night opening, events that range beyond the standard author Q&A, and a printing press in the basement on which customers can sign up for courses and print their own work. It is, I remark, all pitched at a pretty high intellectual level. “That’s fair to say,” replies Davies. “I think we want to be deep; we don’t want to be afraid to be intellectual. But I’m very conscious of the privilege I enjoy in being able to walk into a bookshop and feel extremely comfortable and know my way around. But I also recognise that that is a privilege and that they can be very forbidding spaces for people. We want it to feel very warm, very welcoming, very open; that you could come in and ask for the latest experimental fiction, but equally you could come in and ask for The Hunger Games and no one’s going to raise an eyebrow.”

But what will raise an eyebrow – even render you persona non grata, although I’m sure the staff would do it very sweetly – is if you walk into the shop in unholy communion with your mobile phone or tablet. Libreria will be a digital-free zone – a deliberate decision, Silva tells me as we retire to Jago for coffee, to emphasise how vital it is to occasionally decouple from your device. For many, including those at Second Home, he argues, “their lives are about endless barrages of digital messaging – so not just email and text messages, but Slack messages, Whatsapp messages, Instagram posts, Twitter, this whole welter of digital distraction and noise. And there’s this growing awareness, quite mainstream now in this community, that being in front of your screen the whole time, being plugged into digital technology the whole time, isn’t great for your happiness or your creativity.”

Silva points out that, as technology replaces many functional jobs, there is an increasing pressure to be creative, to do the bits that robots and machines can’t quite manage. I ask him whether the rise in popularity of cultural products and activities such as vinyl, retro bookshops and crafting carries with it an undercurrent of anxiety – the need to preserve what might otherwise be lost? His answer is characteristically upbeat: “I see in this something very optimistic, which is about people wanting to be happier and more creative, and looking for ways to do that. Losing yourself in something else, whether it’s knitting, whether it’s calligraphy, whether it’s a physical book, I think is absolutely part of a rounded digital life. It’s about a healthier equilibrium with technology.”

Has he himself ever felt overwhelmed by the constant noise of the digital world? “Completely. Completely. Completely.” Last year, he says, when he and Aldenton were getting Second Home up and running, he found himself acutely aware of the pressure that comes with starting a new business – and particularly his responsibilities to his new employees. He found himself working 20-hour days, seven days a week, and gradually becoming less creative, less productive and less happy: “For about six months last year, for the first time really, the happiness drained away. I’d walk into Second Home and all I’d really see were things that I thought were wrong. And when you stop seeing the joy in the world, that’s a sad thing.”

The biggest driver of becoming so frazzled, he maintains, was being constantly plugged in. Now, Silva attempts – “with some limited success” – to switch off between Friday night and Sunday morning. He and his wife, architect Kate McTiernan, turn off the home Wi-Fi and if you want to get hold of him you’ll have to call. His flat, he says, is about “80% books, 20% bed” and he definitely prefers physical books to ebooks, in which “distraction is just a click away”; he cites emerging research showing that we take in more information when we read from a paper book – perhaps, he suggests, because more of our senses are involved.

In many ways, Rohan Silva is the last person you’d expect to be hearing say all this. Now 35, he started his working life in the civil service fast stream, and was particularly “chuffed” to find himself at the Treasury when Gordon Brown was chancellor; the department was, as Silva describes it, “a real powerhouse of policymaking”. Appearances, though, can be deceptive: “And on my first day I realised I absolutely hated it. It was so bureaucratic and hierarchical. You were in your little box, and if you dared to contribute somewhere else, you’d get slapped and put back.” After 18 months, he was invited to go and have a coffee with George Osborne, having come to Osborne’s attention via Policy Exchange’s Nick Boles. During their encounter, it gradually dawned on him that he was being interviewed for a job. “I said, ‘George, I’m not an economist, you know’. He goes, ‘Oh, neither am I.’ And that was it.”

Rohan Silva, centre, with his business partner Sam Aldenton and Sally Davies, Libreria’s director. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

He didn’t think of himself as party political. But he was 16 when Tony Blair came to power, and “it was all Labour. All the energy, all the optimism, all the ideas were coming from the people around Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.” He had also grown up in Wakefield, and remembers that in Yorkshire had you been anything but Labour at the time it would have felt “just wrong”. But after reading law at Manchester University, he came to the LSE, and starting reading thinkers such as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Having started his intellectual life as “a sort of utopian leftist”, he explains, he realised that Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity” required a more complex approach.

He began to believe that government works best when it’s about “pushing down power to the lowest possible level, about becoming more transparent, about trusting in the distributed intelligence of millions of people, rather than a closed cabal”. In opposition and then in government, where he was part of David Cameron’s policymaking unit, he championed ideas such as open data, government transparency and behavioural economics, and played a central role in the development of east London’s Tech City. And the same love of thinkers that means he can base a bookshop on a Borges short story was fully in evidence; every six weeks or so, “I’d abuse the hell out of the fact that you could invite anyone in for a round table and they’d come. So I had Daniel Kahneman, Amartya Sen, Nassim Taleb – just really amazing people. I’m very jealous of people who get to live in the world of ideas and books the whole time.”

The ideas that most strongly propel Second Home have to do with collision and evolution: that creativity – and therefore business – is best served when talents and personalities of different types come together; and that we desperately need a new environment to nourish the enterprises that emerge from that melting pot. In the age of microbusiness, Silva argues, we need to move away from a landscape geared towards large, monolithic companies. On a practical level, small companies need flexible leases and space that can quickly grow or shrink; at Second Home, you can sign up for a three-month membership and add or subtract team members on a week-by-week basis.

Second Home is opening up in Lisbon in May, and Los Angeles next year; back in London, he and Aldenton are developing the car park next door to be their “first foray” into living space, with what Silva describes as “a vertical version of the Eden Project”, a communal living space in which you could crash for a night or set up home for 10 years. It is, he says, “a fight back against the kind of atomisation of the city” – and given that he thinks that cities are our “greatest invention”, you can safely assume he means business.

Great cities, of course, are defined more by their cultural and social identities than by their business arrangements – and Silva concedes that London, with its disappearing bars and music venues and its vast expense, is having a tough time, and will have an even tougher one if creative and tech businesses, huge drivers of the economy, begin to move elsewhere.

A sliver of bookshop in east London isn’t much of a bulwark against that level of change – and neither, in all probability, will it pose a threat to larger London stores such as the brand-new Waterstones on Tottenham Court Road or Foyles’s flagship store, also recently revamped. But in the world of bookselling, small really is beautiful: witness, for example, the immense efforts of the publishing community to help The Book Case in Hebden Bridge when it was devastated by floods in December. Despite casualties, London itself supports many exceptional independent outfits, from Peckham’s established Review bookshop to the newly opened Ink@84 in Highbury. But, as any committed book browser will tell you, there is always room for another little one – and Libreria might just be it.

Libreria at Second Home, 68-80 Hanbury Street, London E1, opens 25 February