a new Gin Bar Brings Victorian London To the guts Of San Francisco

a little bit over a year in the past, Martin Cate—the restauranteur and cocktail professional best possible known for his San Francisco rum bar Smuggler’s Cove—determined to enlarge into new territory. His business companion, Alex Smith, needed to tackle gin, however they failed to want to open up just any other gin bar. As Cate puts it, they wished to “smuggle-ize” it: design an immersive expertise that makes their shoppers feel like they’ve stepped out of San Francisco and into a Victorian Steampunk fantasyland.

expanding on that imaginative and prescient, Whitechapel, which opened on Monday, riffs off the London underground teach station constructed within the 1800s. “the internal concept came to me from the idea that lately in London there are over a dozen abandoned underground stations all the city, right under your ft whilst you’re strolling round,” says Cate. He wished the position to really feel as if a bunch of friends during the Victorian generation had found one of these deserted stations, damaged in and created a private clubhouse and gin distillery.

“each area I’ve performed has a backstory and thought at the back of it. I prefer to have a story to inform, to each make it an immersive, enriching for company and to information the interior designers—the whole lot has a objective and a meaning,” says Cate. “It helps while you’re designing to say: ‘this is an underground station that’s been deserted, there needs to be rust, to be water injury to the ceiling.’ There’s a nice patina of age to it that makes it more actual.”

Upon entering the bar, visitors need to cross thru a narrow carrier tunnel—full with a fake ticket booth—that opens up into an expansive bar area called The Platform. Working with fashion designer Ignacio Gonzalez, Cate in-built high barrel vault ceilings that echo the shape of the Underground platform with 4 metal buttresses and middle lamps which are a duplicate of the old lamps at the teach stations. behind the bar, Cate has put in a “last call bell” solid with the aid of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the U.okay.’s oldest repeatedly working business—and the same foundry that produced big Ben and the freedom Bell.

at the back of the principle bar room there’s an area that resembles an old distillery with “a Jules-Verne-below-decks-industrial feel to it,” says Cate. hold a left to enter the final component to the bar: an opulent lounge area called The Gin Palace, according to the properties gin producers would buy and restore up to serve gin in all through the early 1800s.

the key to making a fantastical, immersive area, Cate says, is to stay true to your vision down to the every remaining detail. check up on more of the design features in the gallery above.