The Best Bar Design in the World

The design of Bar Benfiddich works through radical compression — a room that seats twelve, with every square metre considered to the point of discomfort-becoming-intimacy. The drying botanicals hang from the ceiling at precise heights, the back-bar shelves display house-made spirits in hand-labelled bottles at exact angles, and the single pendant light above the bar creates a circle of warm light that makes everyone at the counter look like they are part of the same painting.

Order: Seasonal botanical cocktail — the design and the drink are designed to be experienced together

Ryan Clift's Tippling Club occupies a shophouse space that has been stripped back to its structural bones and rebuilt with an industrial precision that makes even the bar drainage visible as a design element. The kitchen and bar are not separated — the entire operation is visible from every seat — which creates an unusual transparency that most hospitality design conceals. The result is a room that feels like a working laboratory, which is exactly what it is.

Order: The current tasting menu cocktail pairing — designed to be experienced with the food progression

Noriyoshi Muramatsu's design for Zuma Dubai represents the upper end of what commissioned bar architecture can achieve with an unlimited budget and a serious design brief. The double-height bar room uses Japanese material principles — natural stone, darkened timber, hand-cast concrete — at a scale that should feel cold but reads as warm through the layering of textures. The bar counter itself is a single slab of Thassos marble quarried to specification, eleven metres long, with no visible joints.

Order: The Yuzu Margarita — the drink that justifies taking a seat at the marble counter

Ryan Chetiyawardana and designer Alex Cochrane created a room that responded to the Thames rather than turning away from it. The botanical mural behind the bar — hand-painted across forty linear metres of wall — references the lost gardens that lined this stretch of the South Bank before industrialisation, giving the contemporary design a historical rationale that most concept bars lack. The cocktail programme was designed to match the room's colour temperature, which sounds like a design brief too far until you sit in it at dusk.

Order: Anything from the botanical spirits section — designed specifically to be drunk in this room's light

Le Syndicat's design is a deliberate rejection of the Parisian cocktail bar aesthetic — no brass, no marble, no leather banquettes. Instead: peeling posters, fluorescent lighting mixed with warm pendant lamps, concrete floors, and a back bar built from reclaimed industrial shelving. The result looks effortless but is clearly considered — every element is exactly ugly enough to be interesting. The French-spirits-only bar programme matches the design's values completely.

Order: The French whisky Highball — Breton single malt, carbonated water, an argument for local production

Soho House Group's best bar design work is consistently the rooms they create in converted residential buildings, and the Bicyclette is the most complete example. The ground floor Victorian townhouse has been opened up while preserving every period detail — original floor tiles, working fireplaces, a marble bar top that responds differently to the light at different times of day. The room works in the afternoon and at midnight, which most bar spaces do not.

Order: Negroni Bianco — white vermouth, Campari, gin, served with a thick slice of ice

William Elliott's design for Maison Premiere is the most complete realisation of a bar concept in New York — every element, from the tiled bar floor to the absinthe fountains to the ceiling fans to the wicker chairs, references New Orleans with scholarly precision rather than thematic looseness. The room is not a theme bar; it is a serious architectural argument about what the Belle Epoque American bar could look like with the resources and skills of a contemporary fit-out.

Order: Absinthe drip — prepared tableside with an antique fountain, the defining experience of the room

Occupying a converted 1920s Hollywood bungalow with a rooftop bar, No Vacancy's design is the most coherent example of site-responsive bar architecture in Los Angeles. The bungalow's original structure is intact and each room has been treated individually — the entry speakeasy, the main bar room, the garden terrace, the rooftop — rather than given a single theme. The result is a bar complex that rewards exploration rather than demanding you sit in one place all evening.

Order: Old Hollywood Gimlet — seasonal citrus, house gin, from the original bungalow bar

The ceiling of Celeste is a continuous installation of hand-blown glass orbs suspended at varying heights to recreate the night sky over Chicago on the date the bar opened. It sounds like a single-night novelty and it is not — the effect changes completely depending on where you sit and at what time, and the design team calibrated the bar's lighting programme to ensure the installation reads differently at 6pm, 9pm, and midnight. The drinks are good. The ceiling is the reason people come.

Order: The Celestial Spritz — the bar's house aperitivo, made to be drunk while looking up