Bar Central
Bar Central serves food and drinks from central Europe, a region difficult to define geographically. Our intention was to create a vaguely familliar environment, a kind of timeless place that you might pass through travelling through Europe. Early on we knew that we wanted to incorporate a beer table, common in the Czech republic for instance. The beer table is traditionally lower than a bar counter and you don’t order your drinks at the bar, instead you are being served at your table. In this case we tried to make some kind of compromise and the table is about 1 meter high. The beer table has an intergrated cooling bath for the beer mugs and the mugs are handwashed before each filling. All according to Czech tradition. The fully visible cylindrical beer casks of 500 liters each and the copper cooling spiral underneath the table becomes visually interesting details.
By polacing the beer table in the middle of the room it was possible to divide the space into different compartments with different speeds and modes. There is an upper red seating area with higher seating, you can sit at the end of the beer table, on the opposite side there is a big round ”community table” and along the walls you have more quiet cushioned seating. The idea is that the guests can move around according to their mood or their party.
During construction we revealed an existing greenish marble floor that we kept and it was aloud to contrast against a red linoleum floor in the upper compartment. The contrasting colours red and green reoccurs in the stained wooden panels and details. The forest green felt padding of the chairs and benches made us think of the classic Austrian Loden coat.
The zig-zag pattern in the ceiling is a comment to the original Bar Central in södermalm we made a couple of years earlier where there is a terrazzo floor in the same pattern. The arch shaped lighting fixtures was specially comissioned for the project together with the chairs ”Stalker” that we also designed for the project.
