Uptown Escape

Those two demand curves are complementary. As the café trade falls away, the cocktail trade begins.

The opportunity was one hospitality business that changes mood, use and spend over the course of the day: a café that keeps its relevance after dark, and a bar that earns before it.

Uptown Escape was conceived as one venue that trades two ways, under one name and from one bar. It could not read as two concepts sharing an address, and neither the café nor the bar could feel like a compromise made for the other.

Rish Saini and BDS led the project as a full hospitality consultancy, from concept development and restaurant design through to the completed venue. The business logic shaped the concept first, and the interiors followed from it.

The room had to feel approachable in daylight and warmer and more intimate after dark, so it is built from materials that hold up in both. A black-and-white patterned tile floor runs through the dining room to the bar, giving way to dark timber boards at the entrance and along the windows. The walls are deep olive, hung with framed photographs of forest and landscape.

The furniture keeps the room relaxed by day: cane-backed timber chairs with olive seats, woven tub chairs, and white-topped tables, round and square. Long taupe banquettes with diamond-stitched backs and olive cushions run along the walls, a curved, buttoned booth gives the room a more private corner, and high woven stools line the bar and the counters by the entrance.

The ceiling carries the change from day to night. An open grid of dark beams holds slatted timber lanterns and copper-toned planters trailing ferns, and over the entrance and the window seating, bare bulbs are strung through vines. By day the light comes through large black-framed windows; after dark it comes from the lanterns, the wall sconces and the lit back bar.

The bar is where the two trades meet. An espresso machine sits at one end of the white-topped counter, and behind it a wall of lit, glass-fronted cabinets holds teapots and tea as readily as spirits.

The offer changes over with the room, from coffee and tea through the day to cocktails in the evening, served from the same counter with no second fit-out.

For the guest, the change should feel natural rather than staged. A table that suits a long coffee in the afternoon also suits a cocktail in the evening; what changes is the light and what the bar is pouring.

That is the commercial idea made visible: one room that gives people a reason to come back at a different hour.

Rish sets out the thinking behind venues like this in Cafe by Day, Cocktail Bar by Night: Designing Around Dayparts.