The Most Extraordinary Bar Interiors in the World

The smallest room at the Ritz Paris holds twenty-six people at capacity and has been producing the best drinking atmosphere in France for over a century. The mahogany panelling, the framed Hemingway portraits, the brass fixtures, the single row of low-set candles along the bar top — none of it is extraordinary in isolation, but the combination produces a room where every conversation feels important and the night always ends later than intended.

Order: Clean Dirty Martini — the house preparation, served with the ceremony this room deserves

David Collins Studio's redesign of the Connaught Bar is the most admired hotel bar interior in London — a room that uses silver leaf, lacquered panels, and the Connaught's signature cream and gold palette to create something that reads simultaneously as 1920s and contemporary. The Martini trolley service — the bartender mixes at your table from a silver cart — was designed specifically for this room and cannot be separated from the interior experience. It is the best bar room in London.

Order: Connaught Martini — mixed tableside from the silver trolley, with your choice of bitters

The password-entry speakeasy format has been done badly in too many cities, but the Jerry Thomas Speakeasy in Rome does it completely right. The interior is a faithful recreation of a late-Victorian American bar — pressed tin ceilings, gas-effect lighting, dark wood bar with brass fittings, antique cocktail books displayed behind glass — and it holds that atmosphere with total commitment. The cocktail list is historically accurate and genuinely excellent.

Order: A Jerry Thomas original — the 1862 Whiskey Sour or the Blue Blazer if you can get a seat at the bar

Please Don't Tell is accessed through a phone booth in Crif Dogs, and the interior you emerge into — a hunting lodge aesthetic executed with absolute consistency, from the taxidermy on the walls to the Edison bulbs to the wood-burning stove that actually works in winter — is still the most complete bar room concept in New York. The concealed entry creates a before-and-after experience that no amount of interior design can replicate without it. Jim Meehan's bar programme matches the room's ambition exactly.

Order: Benton's Old Fashioned — bacon-fat-washed bourbon, maple syrup, Angostura, the drink that made this room famous

The Violet Hour's windowless facade gives no indication of the room behind it — a deep, high-ceilinged salon with floor-to-ceiling curtains in deep blue, a pressed metal ceiling, and chandeliers calibrated to the specific light quality of cocktail hour. Toby Maloney's design brief was a room that felt like the inside of a jewellery box, and the execution holds that quality completely. The cocktail programme — one of the most rigorous in Chicago — was designed to match the room's register.

Order: The Prairie — bourbon, cardamom, honey, lemon, the house signature that defines the room's mood

The Dead Rabbit operates across three floors of a 19th-century Manhattan building, with each floor functioning as a distinct interior experience — the ground-floor taproom, the upstairs parlour, the rooftop. The parlour is the most fully realised room: Victorian Irish graphic design covering every surface, bespoke furniture, gas-effect lighting, and a cocktail programme that won the World's Best Bar designation partly on the strength of the room it is served in.

Order: Coffey & Cream — Irish whiskey, cold brew, Kahlua, the parlour signature

The Caprice Bar's interior by Pierre-Yves Rochon is the most complete example of grand French bar design outside of Paris — the silk wall coverings, the bespoke carpet, the bronze fixtures, the single curved banquette that runs the length of the harbour-facing window. At dusk, with Victoria Harbour turning gold through the floor-to-ceiling glass, it is the most beautiful bar room in Asia. The wine list and cocktail programme are commensurate with the interior investment.

Order: Grand Sidecar — Cognac, Cointreau, lemon, served in this specific room at this specific hour

The interior at Nutmeg and Clove is built around the Spice Trade narrative — Singapore's founding commercial logic expressed through every material choice: raw timber, aged brass, hand-thrown ceramic vessels, dried botanicals. The result is a room that uses its historical reference with intelligence rather than sentiment. The cocktail menu maps directly onto the same spice trade routes, giving the interior and the drinks programme a coherence that is rare in concept bar design.

Order: The Straits Sling — gin, Benedictine, pomegranate, cherry, Singapore's historic cocktail reclaimed

Atlas occupies the lobby of the Parkview Square building — one of Singapore's most dramatically Art Deco structures — and the bar's interior matches the architecture with ambition. The centrepiece is a tower of gin bottles eleven metres high, housing over 1,300 expressions, that functions as both storage and sculpture. The room is one of the most photographed in Singapore, but the gin programme is serious enough to hold the room's credibility on its own terms.

Order: The Atlas Martini — from their collection of vintage gins, served in the shadow of the bottle tower