Editorial
The best bar design in the world solves a specific problem: how do you create a space where people feel comfortable enough to stay for three hours but stimulated enough to keep coming back. Great design is invisible when it works. You only notice it when it fails. We have been tracking the bars that get this right — spaces where the architecture and spatial decisions shape the entire experience — and these are the ones that consistently lead the field.
The Asia-Pacific region has produced more architecturally ambitious bar design in the past decade than anywhere else globally. The combination of serious hospitality investment, architectural talent, and a culture of building new rather than restoring old has created conditions for genuinely original work. These rooms are the current standard-bearers.
European bar design sits in interesting tension between a preservation culture that protects existing fabric and a hospitality sector that demands continual novelty. The best outcomes happen when operators work with the existing building rather than against it — finding the latent atmosphere that was always there.
American bar design has moved decisively away from the mid-2010s warehouse aesthetic — exposed brick, Edison bulbs, reclaimed wood — toward something more considered and individual. The best rooms now have a clarity of concept that was rarer five years ago, and a willingness to invest in materials and craft that was rarer still.
The best bar design globally shares a quality that is easier to describe in its absence than its presence: the room feels intentional at every scale, from the width of the bar counter to the temperature of the lighting to the material of the floor. Maison Premiere in Brooklyn and Bar Benfiddich in Tokyo achieve this through opposite approaches — one through maximalist period reference, one through radical compression — and both succeed completely.
For design-focused travellers, the rooms worth prioritising are those where the operator and the designer clearly spent serious time together before anything was built. You can tell the difference within thirty seconds of walking in. The conversations those rooms generate are worth more than the drinks.
Priya covers global bar culture with a focus on architecture, design, and the relationship between space and experience. She has documented bar design across thirty countries and writes about hospitality design for several publications outside barsforkings.com.