Miranda
Vienna, Austria
Cocktail Bar
Completion July 2015
Our architectural practice recently relocated to a larger space. Rather than give up our old address – a lovely storefront on the Esterhazygasse – we decided to transform it into a small cocktail bar. Alas, Miranda was born from both pragmatic and nostalgic impulses. It was the perfect opportunity to create an environment quite opposite to the first bar we designed and own, ‘If Dogs Run Free’. Miranda is Dogs’s brighter more colorful little sister. While Dogs is dark and immersive, Miranda is open to the street, revealing a pale color palette of greens and pinks, blues and yellows. She’s the newest addition to the growing and tightly-knit neighborhood on the Esterhazygasse. The room is dominated by a 6.5 meter long green granite bar. The idea was to create a kitchen counter, a place where people gather to mingle and drink but also to watch the alchemy of drink-mixing in action. The original industrial herringbone oak flooring was left intact and references the space’s use as a woodshop at the turn of the 20th century. Plush leather stools surround the bar and three small round tables along the façade. The façade is organized around four arched bays, each with glass doors that open to the street. With the exception of a large illustration featuring a dense jungle scene, the walls, partitions, bar counter and lighting fixtures are reduced to single colors. This creates a playful overlapping of color planes in space. The back counters and shelving are all stainless steel. Polished perforated stainless steel panels are clad around the bar below the stone counter and reappear in the bathrooms and exterior signage. Three 6 x 2 meter platforms composed of metal flooring and powder-coated steel mesh create a terraced garden along the street. The bar pays homage to tropical modernism, a time when clean lines and bright colors co-existed, as well as local design icons such as Josef Frank’s illustrative fabrics and Adolf Loos’s use of chromatic stone. With Miranda we want to hint at the tropics but be firmly rooted in Vienna.
Location: Vienna. Austria
Principal use: Cocktail Bar
Total floor area: 70 m2
Number of stories: 1
Design Team: Chieh-shu Tzou, Gregorio S. Lubroth
Photos by Atelier Olschinsky