Bar Blau | SOMAA

A small house, painted in a strong blue, marks the entrance to the bar in a striking and at the same time restrained manner.

Via three steps and a wooden door of the same color as the cottage, the guest enters an anteroom measuring about two square meters. Its only source of light appears behind a round mirror of unusual dimensions for the small room. A curtain of deep green velvet noticeably marks another threshold.

The "setting", which is much more of a built atmosphere than an architectural space, is based on the visual language of the painter Caspar David Friedrich - the depiction of natural phenomena whose reality exists and yet is intangible. As a bar with a culinary offer, the restaurant wants to be a place of contemplation - in the figurative sense. A surreal world in the midst of urban reality. A place of retreat to oneself.

Fading shades of blue in a wide variety of nuances overlap in surfaces, dissolve the space, counteract the perspective and play with the guest's perception. Brass-colored frames of different dimensions then seem to pleasantly structure the space again. The tables made of highly polished black-green marble recede into the background while the seating elements, homogeneously finished in natural leather by local craftsmen, form a clear contrast. Their arrangement creates a wide variety of lounge qualities: from intimate seating niches and generous seating groups, to an openly designed seating landscape or a half-height sit-stand table as non-binding places of communication.

"Blue tones fading in the most diverse nuances overlap in surfaces, dissolve the space, counteract the perspective and play with the guest's perception."

The bar area, with its darker color scheme, clearly stands out from the world of colored surfaces that loses itself in endlessness. A carpet starting at the floor allows the guest to feel the access more haptically than visually at first - it invites into a soft and muted world - continues at the wall and results in an acoustically effective stretch ceiling. The strongly dimmed light puts the focus frugally on the faces of the guests - the warmth and structure of the deep black lacquered wood of the counter remains more perceptible than visible - the guest's gaze is drawn to the bar, which is clad in real brass and partially mirrored, and which reappears space-forming in the wall of differently tinted, reflective glass surfaces opposite it.

The reduction to a few authentic materials such as leather, brass, wood and the use of haptically and acoustically effective textiles, in the color scheme of the monochrome, geometrically structured wall surfaces and neutral mirror surfaces creates the desired irritation of the perception of space. The result is an interior that negates its own dimension and at the same time expands it.