Joe’s Bar in the award winning East Hotel in Canberra, is taking its patrons back to the 70s with its groovy interior created by Kelly Ross, director of The Gentry.

Located within the existing East Hotel, Joe’s Bar had to connect with the brand and foyer. The dedicated space was an empty shell.

The ambiance is nocturnal and interesting, fun and relaxed, imagine being in a conversation pit in the 70s… that feeling.

“Designing and installing a space that is in another city is interesting for programming,” commented Kelly. “During the project management stage I moved to Canberra and lived at The East. I used a local team however it was also interesting not being able to draw on my usual team.”

Kelly drove the concept from the beginning in terms of finding a story that celebrated the Bisa family, owners of the venue. She was across branding, uniforms, interiors and project management so it could be holistic solution.

“I gave Dan and Dion Bisa their homework, to reflect on a family story/ anecdote/ memory to make a concept catalyst,” she explained. “They simply arrived at “Joe’s Bar”.

With the name of their father the dialogue and design found a clear voice. Joe’s heritage is Venetian, many fine things come from this place and the more I visualized wine and its characteristics, I found comparisons with fine glass.”

With Venice as a crucible, Murano glass and its coveted beauty became coupled with fine wine. The colour palette was drawn from the translucent beauty of each.

“Because of the fun we wanted to foster, I also drew on palettes from the art glass of the 70’s and introduced some textures and materials from this era,” said Kelly. “There are parallels in the magnificence and process of making fine glass and fine wine so the environments they are forged from have a lot of comparisons… the mineral grittiness of the workspaces, use of natural materials informed the finishes. The colour palette and humour is derived from the art glass and fine wine. The large textured wall is like swishing around in a giant glass of pinot. Some of the palette is drawn from descriptives of wine - words like mineral, acidic, slate, bloom and the colours they conjure.”

The 7 metre long leather-finish granite bar is glamorous, unexpected and yet somehow completely honest in its colouring and scale. Orange transparent acrylic stools sit with it which give an opposing texture that’s speaking of textures that were popular in the 70s. There are a few shaggy and furry textures in there that relate to this too. Mesh ceiling panels that let pools of light into the space to create texture.

For Kelly, lighting is very important to create and make atmosphere. She had lights custom made in South Africa from mesh that shimmer and subtly move. They dip and pool into the space, some of them quite low to the ground. According to Kelly, this stirs a lot of curiosity and touch, there is something really satisfying in witnessing people feel inspired to touch and test objects you’ve installed. She also used a lot of spot lights to reinforce intimate corners and nooks away from busier spaces.

A standout feature is the concrete curtain which is something heavy and grounded imitating something light and ephemeral. It’s a nod to Canberra’s brutalism in architecture and the disruption of something not being what it appeared to be, again seeing people’s reaction to touching something cold and hard.

Kelly wanted to add a textural element which she found in 3D Wall Panels. The showpiece in the bar, a feature wall in the Pyramids design, has been a hit, with many customers enticed to touch it – something Kelly wanted to encourage saying: “Nowadays, so many things are forbidden to touch.”
Sound Advice in Canberra consulted on acoustics and an audio system that could be ceiling mounted and hidden behind Kelly’s installations.

EAST Hotel is an existing Sound Advice customer (they did the initial build and AV fitout a few years ago) that had a simple JBL Ceiling Speaker and Crown Mixer/Amplifier combination for the background music in the Foyer Spaces.

Sound Advice were engaged early in the brief to design, supply and install a background music system that could produce medium volume levels with a high quality hi-fi result.

They immediately identified that the space directly above the ceiling slab was a hotel room so they ruled out fixing anything that would direct couple low end frequencies to the guests in that room. Keeping that in mind, they solved the issue by using the JBL Control Contractor 60 Series Pendant speakers hanging from the concreate slab via s/steel cables. The JBL Control 60PS/T Subwoofers each with 4 off JBL Control 62P Mid-High Satellites offered an extremely flat coverage across the floor area (thanks to each 62P having 140 degree dispersion) and powered via the Crown DCI2/300 amplifier.

Due to physical space they ended up locating the amplifier and BSS Blu50 DSP to the existing Foyer system rack. This enabled them to share the music sources from the Foyer, Joe’s Bar and the DJ input to both of the Hotels main zones.

Intuitive simple control from the Crestron MPC-M5 Presentation Controller enables all staff to use the system simply. The Arcom dock enable us to continually power the iThingy and extract the audio to the BSS DSP.