Bar design has evolved to encompass a full range of “concepts,” from imitation dives to sci-fi tiki to minimalist spaces, all carefully composed of a series of choices that align with the menu of drinks. But as the bar world has positioned itself as destination-worthy and diverse as the world’s great restaurants (with 50 Best lists to match) one thing has remained relatively static: the bar itself. 

To Sam Millin and Alex Ruas, founders of Oslo, Norway–based Behind Bars, the disparity between the changes happening in and around bars versus the fixed nature of the equipment behind them all looked like an opportunity. Bartenders by trade, they began BB in 2014 as full-service bar consultancy, advising local clients in Norway on things like concept development, staff training and menu development. Their expansion into bespoke bar designs was motivated by their own frustrations. “We were working with kitchen suppliers,” says Ruas, “and we were not getting what we needed.” 

After a while, it became clear that where they could create the biggest impact was in rethinking stations to better suit the needs of modern bartenders, whose workspaces hadn’t kept up with the demands of their craft. “The bartender has grown professionally to be recognized as equal to a Michelin-star chef,” says Ruas. And yet, while the idea of a ‘chef’s kitchen’ has been so absorbed into the culture that it’s now part of the HGTV vernacular, the specific design needs of high-performing bartenders haven’t enjoyed the same widespread recognition. BB has built a business on reframing that perception, moving the bar from an “appendix” of a project to a position central to the project’s success, changing the guest’s experience of bartending in the process. 

What began as a two-person consultancy has grown into an international agency, with clients ranging from “bartenders opening their first cocktail bar, to cruise ships, to chain hotels, to Michelin-star restaurants,” says Millin. The project that gave the agency a “voice” in the industry, Ruas says, was the custom bar station for London’s Tayēr + Elementary, commissioned by friends and bartenders Monica Berg and Alex Kratena. The bar, which opened in 2019, was the agency’s first big international project. Its custom two-person, island-style station is highly flexible; its perforated stainless steel hexagonal inserts can be flipped to function as a work surface or storage. The design is now one of a few models the agency offers as off-the-shelf solutions. 

“What initially drew us to BB was their reputation for pushing the boundaries of bar design and their deep understanding of what differentiates exceptional bars,” says Sten von Kühn, who manages the food and beverage program at The Social Hub, an international chain of hotels, extended-stay and coworking spaces. Von Kühn initially engaged BB to create a “bar design toolkit” to set a benchmark for quality across the brand’s properties, and has since worked with the agency on a number of locations, most recently in Glasgow, Scotland, and San Sebastian, Spain. “All our projects are quite unique and would have been hard to deliver with a traditional designer,” says von Kühn. 

Most bartenders effectively do back-of-house work front and center, balancing nonstop operations with attentive hospitality. Modern setups like the one at Tayēr’s, in which a high-volume workstation sits within a customer-facing perimeter, consider both parts of that labor, while open bar designs, like those at the recently reopened Quince in San Francisco (a BB project) and Double Chicken Please (an in-house design) in New York, feel more like kitchen counters than traditional bars. The division between bartender and customer dissolves. Drinks are prepared on the same plane they’re served on, and because there’s no rail to reach down to, the bartender never goes out of sight.

Faye Chen, co-founder of Double Chicken Please, says the kitchen counter–style bar design in The Coop, the high-concept bar in the back of the space, is meant to create an “intimacy” with the bartenders and the cocktail-making process. The “homey atmosphere” that Chen and her team sought to cultivate comes through in overt interior design choices, like the warm, vertical-grain wood, as well as the absence of a traditional backbar. The large drip trays positioned atop the bar, for example, aren’t there just for functionality. They also act as a kind of lampshade, evenly dispersing the light emitted by the neon underneath, and gently illuminating the drink being made atop it. 

Sometimes a custom design is more about better containing what’s happening behind the bar than involving guests in it. For Vlad Novikov, general manager at Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., a recent refit from Behind Bars has meant more flexibility in staffing and better service. The bar’s previous station had double speed rails and two large ice wells, which made for a lot of bending over. There was also room for only two people, leaving the expediter—the person who garnishes and samples drinks for quality before they’re served—to stand on the side of the bar. With the new design, they’re integrated into the station, which means they don’t have to reach over the counter (or guests) to access the drink.

And that’s just one update. For Novikov, the benefits are manifold: drawers that slide smoothly and close quietly; a seamless, welded surface that’s easier to clean than the nooks and crannies found in traditional modular setups; rounded edges that soften impact against the body. “It’s not only one thing, it’s like a hundred little details that add up,” says Novikov of the redesign. “And it’s the same approach that we take in hospitality, where it doesn’t matter that the water is refreshed, or you make sure the napkin is good, or the coaster. Like, none of those things individually matter, but a hundred of them add up.”

That sum-is-greater-than-parts assessment is shared by Sondre Kasin, principal bartender at Cote, a Korean steakhouse with locations in New York, Miami and Singapore. Originally from Oslo, Kasin knew Ruas from his pre-design days as a bartender in Norway, and recently enlisted BB on the design of Coqodaq, a buzzy fried-chicken spot near the original Cote in Manhattan. The layout of that space, with a long, straightforward bar along one side, made it a good candidate for one of the agency’s ready-to-install options (a hybrid of the Paloma series).

But Cote’s next New York location—a restaurant located across three floors in the recently redesigned 550 Madison, an iconic postmodern skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson that once served as the HQ for AT&T, and later, Sony—is a bit more involved. Part of that space will be centered around a circular bar, a signature feature of Cote steakhouses. It’s a design choice that creates energy in the room, often at the cost of efficiency behind the bar. “The challenge with a round bar is that you don’t really have everything you need, constantly,” says Kasin. That project is currently in the works, so details on the BB design are still sparse, but Kasin says the mindset shift of making “every single piece of space count” has been “eye-opening.”

Behind Bars’ collaborative design process (it often involves 3D models and virtual reality testing, which allows bartenders to account for the position of every bottle and the contents of every drawer) has made Kasin and his team reconsider details they’d taken for granted. “I think the bar department has always been the department that always figures it out, in a way,” says Kasin. “It’s nice that someone has given the attention to actually make it as good as possible for everybody.”

That change, toward thinking about bar ergonomics not just in terms of operational efficiency, but also employee satisfaction, is something that designers like BB have both benefited from and helped create. Sam MacRae, the agency’s designer and creative director, says that in recent years there’s been more consciousness among owners for the health and wellness of people working on the front lines. “It’s not across the board, obviously,” she says. “But there’s a leaning. And of course, your workplace, the physical workplace, plays a huge part in that.”

Fittingly, Behind Bars has noted a greater willingness among clients to include people who will actually work behind the bar in its design process. It’s that approach that cultivates differentiation, something people talk about a lot in hospitality these days. To Ruas, a competitive advantage starts with creating an environment that attracts the best people. The rest—the feeling of the space, the level of service and, of course, the quality of the drinks—will follow.