Frisson bar by Gabriel Freitas

The first line of this story is from 2018, when, on a trip to Canada, I visited a series of secret bars, the famous speakeasy. One of them marked me the most, named The Cold Room.

The bar is hidden in an alley in the historic part of the city, and with the address in hand, I set out to search for it. A night walk in the cold, I arrive at the address and nothing… an empty street with notices of works, I looked, looked, and looked, and, because of the cold, it felt like I was looking for hours.

What to do, then? I opened my cell phone and went back to searching for information about the place, until in a random photo I managed to understand the marking of where the bar was.

I found a kind of intercom and rang it. A waiter came, and escorted me down two flights of stairs, a metallic structure that looked like a factory. As I went down, the lights dimmed, and on the last flight the stairs the frisson took over me. A bar appeared, rustic, warm, sophisticated. To this day, one of the best “old fashioned” I have ever had. Was it the barman? Was it the drink? Was it the feeling?

I always imagined myself reproducing this feeling in a product, but which product? To answer that, I will tell you the second story. For this one I invite you to go back further, back to the 90s, it was the time when I was growing up.

I grew up in a lower middle class family. I was not connected to the design classics, but one piece of furniture always caught my attention, the bar. The bar was a very exhagerated piece, very bulky and not practical at all, but it was the highlight of the home at the time.

A little historical research and you will discover that the speakeasy appeared at the time of the “prohibition” that Canada produced and smuggled a lot of fake bourbon and rye to the United States. Mafias formed around this product, those mafias that today we see as charming, a dangerous charm that can leave you caged.

Solving the problem of that 90’s bulky furniture, creating a contemporary bar, a 360º fluid object, a circular shape, supported by bars (like the cages that held the mobsters), the distance between the bars brings the charm to the drinks, that game of hide and show, that game of hold and release, and the frisson?

The frisson materialized in the functionality with two camouflaged doors that you need to figure out how to open, a way to show and protect your alcoholic treasures.