Design in bars is not decoration. The best bar interiors serve a purpose: they make you feel something before you have even ordered. We visited 18 bars where the architecture, the light, and the spatial design are as seriously considered as the drinks list. These are the spaces where the room itself is as much a part of the experience as the cocktail in your hand. Every bar on this list also features in our broader bucket list of the world's 20 greatest bars — the places that belong on every serious drinker's itinerary.
The Connaught Bar — London
The Connaught Bar is a masterclass in restraint. Designed by David Collins Studio, the room is Silver Art Deco at its most refined. The space does not shout. It does not need to. The panelling, the proportions, the light filtering through frosted glass, the leather banquettes that have absorbed decades of important conversations—all of it suggests that you are in the presence of excellence without ever making that excellence feel like an effort.
The bar serves 28 martinis. There is a martini trolley. The room is effortlessly correct, which is perhaps the highest compliment a bar interior can receive.
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Bemelmans Bar — New York, Carlyle Hotel
The murals are everything here. Ludwig Bemelmans, the author and illustrator of the Madeline books, painted the walls in 1947, and the space has never recovered from the joy of it. Every wall, every surface is covered with Bemelmans art—animals, children, whimsy rendered in watercolour and ink. The room feels warm, theatrical, and completely irreplaceable. It is one of the few bars in the world that feels like an artwork you can sit inside.
Paradiso — Barcelona
Enter through a 1950s hairdresser cabinet, and you descend into one of Barcelona's most impossible-to-reach bars. The interior features honeycomb arches and is deliberately intimate—only 40 seats. There is always a queue, which is perhaps the most honest design statement a bar can make: scarcity signals value. The space itself, with its curved architecture and brass fixtures, feels like stepping into a different era entirely.
Bar Hemingway — Paris, Ritz Hotel
This room is leather, burnished brass, and hunting trophies. It is the most convincingly masculine room in hospitality, not because it aggressively asserts masculinity, but because it simply embodies a moment in time when such restraint and material quality were achievable. The bar serves cocktails named after Hemingway's works. The room itself feels like a Hemingway novel.
Szimpla Kert — Budapest
The world's most famous ruin bar, Szimpla Kert occupies an abandoned factory and transformed the space into something that felt revolutionary when it opened. Mismatched furniture, plants growing through every surface, bathtubs serving as seating, string lights creating pools of warmth in the darkness. The design philosophy is radical simplicity: take a broken space and let life happen inside it. The aesthetic has now been copied across the world, but the original remains the standard.
American Bar — Vienna, Designed by Adolf Loos, 1908
This bar is so narrow that two people cannot walk through it side by side. The space measures 5.4 meters wide and has become a national monument despite (or because of) its impracticality. Designed by Adolf Loos, the bar is a study in vertical space, with every inch of the walls and ceiling utilised for bottles, mirrors, and materials. It is proof that constraint produces elegance.
Atlas Bar — Singapore
A six-storey atrium in the heart of Singapore's business district, Atlas Bar is a gallery of gin. More than 1,000 bottles are displayed floor-to-ceiling, lit dramatically, creating a sense of abundance that borders on overwhelming. The 1930s Art Deco aesthetic is immaculate, and the scale is designed to make you feel small in the presence of collection.
Bankers Bar — Chicago, Palmer House
The Palmer House is 125 years old, and Bankers Bar has accumulated grandeur for all of that time. Chandeliers hang from hand-painted ceilings. Marble columns frame the space. The design is not minimalist or contemporary. It is lavish, which works because the hotel committed to maintaining that lavishness rather than reducing it. This is what luxury looks like when it does not apologies for itself.
The Clumsies — Athens
A converted townhouse opened in 2014, The Clumsies uses mismatched furniture, abundant plants, and candlelight to create a space that feels like you are drinking in a friend's living room if your friend had impeccable taste and a professional lighting designer. The design is intentionally humble, which is perhaps why it feels so welcoming.
Florería Atlántico — Buenos Aires
You enter through a flower shop. Below ground lies a submarine aesthetic, with portholes, vintage maritime fixtures, and an Argentine spirits focus. The design makes sense conceptually—a hidden world beneath the surface—and the execution is meticulous. The mood is created entirely through material choices: brass, copper, aged wood, and porthole windows framing underground rooms.
Bar Luce — Milan, Fondazione Prada
Designed by Wes Anderson, Bar Luce inside the Fondazione Prada is a work of cinema made three-dimensional. Pastel colours, bar-top pinball machines, symmetry carried to its logical conclusion. It feels like being inside one of Anderson's films, which makes it feel completely unreal and completely perfect at the same time. This is design as narrative.
Nightjar — London, Shoreditch
No sign on the door. Inside, a 1920s prohibition-era jazz cellar recreated with archaeological precision. The design does not announce itself. You arrive, and then you discover it. The room is lit by table lamps, and the bar sits at the room's centre. The aesthetic is historically informed but not museum-like. It feels lived in.
Experimental Cocktail Club — Paris, Pigalle
The building once operated as a 1950s brothel. The new occupants have maintained the plush red velvet, the antique mirrors, the sense of theatrical intimacy. The design is unafraid of colour and texture in a way that contemporary minimalism often is. It is sensual and unironic.
Employees Only — New York, West Village
Unchanged since 2004, Employees Only has a psychic in the window, an Art Deco interior that was right then and is still right now. The design is timeless not because it aspires to transcend time but because it represents a moment so specifically that it becomes eternal. The restraint is radical.
NoMad Bar — New York
A library room bar inside a beaux-arts mansion, NoMad Bar considers every surface, every detail, every material choice. The design feels curated rather than decorated. The space is one of the most conscious bars in the world, which makes it also one of the most relaxing.
Dead Rabbit — New York, Financial District
Two floors of Irish-American visual storytelling. Murals, woodwork, stained glass, each element tells a story about Irish immigration and the bar itself. The design is narrative-driven, which makes it memorable and emotionally resonant in a way that purely aesthetic design can sometimes miss.
Dante — New York, Greenwich Village
A stripped-back Italian brasserie, Dante's design philosophy is radical simplicity: white tile, marble, iron, natural light. The bar counter is marble. The light is perfect. Nothing is extraneous. This is design by subtraction.
Terraza at Grand Hotel Central — Barcelona
A Gothic Quarter rooftop with views of Barcelona's spires and sky. The design is simply not competing. The room borrows its beauty from the city itself. Vermouth in hand, you are perched above centuries of architecture, which makes the bar design almost irrelevant. Almost. For a different angle on exceptional spaces, our guide to bars with the best views in the world ranks 12 venues where the panorama is the primary draw.
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