The brief was to establish a night-time bar within an existing building to complement the client’s adjacent day-time café. The busy road and neighbouring steelworks provided an unlikely industrial context, amplified by the existing graffitied steel roller door and dilapidated brick façade.

Figureground’s strategy was to embrace the context and the ‘laneway’ space between the two buildings. The roller door and brick facade was left untouched. A new façade was setback to provide a small social area where patrons can occupy the threshold between private and public space. This façade is glazed and operable, allowing the bar to engage with the outside world. The bar area has been pushed back within the plan to centrally serve all seating areas and open up to the external ‘laneway’.

The front section is dominated by a concrete blockwork wall; a playful and sculptural form providing a variety of informal socialising opportunities. The brutal rawness of the blockwork and the‘as found’ concrete floor are balanced by the crafted timber seating, window joinery, mosaic tiles, colourful cherry blossom image and delicate wall mounted lighting. To the rear, the existing façade has been replaced by sliding windows that open up to the terraced seating below.

The bar owners, Ben Foster and Matt Wilkinson form a partnership of experience specialising in hospitality service and a passion for seasonal cooking. They wanted the bar to showcase their abilities, but also represent the evolution of Brunswick from the traditional, working-class suburb into an exciting hotspot of innovation and creativity. It was important that the bar felt inclusive and flexible, offering a variety of social spaces both inside and out.

The clients recognised the limitations of the bar floor area but felt that every opportunity could be taken to engage with both the street and the ‘laneway’ space already well loved by patrons of the café. They also requested that the new design would complement the existing materiality and language of the café space, but not replicate it. Only snack food was to be served, so there was no need to fall back on the default arrangement of chairs and tables. Instead, seating is ambiguous; the inside/outside window ledge, ablockwork wall and the rear deck terracing are all examples where patrons are challenged to occupy the space in different ways.

In order to feel like Figureground were creating something innovative, it was important that they first considered the bar’s context in time and place. Melbourn ehas come a long way from the boozy, male oriented ‘6 o’clock swill’ that defined drinking in the first half of the century.

Since the likes of Jimmy Watson and Mietta O’Donnell, Melbourne’s establishments have become more European, but without ever losing a sense of who they are. The bar looked back to examples such as Meyers Place - Melbourne’s first ‘contemporary’ small bar - as its starting point. This idea was then broadened to become a place that could bridge the gap between the familiarity of a local pub and the sophistication of a wine bar. The design attempts to do all of this within the framework of Melbourne’s ‘grunge’ culture and more specifically, Brunswick’s suburban-industrialcharacter. Above all, it was important not to change things too much. The moments of architecture, both inside and out are deft layers that allow the building to have a new life, without forgetting the old.