Posted February 13, 2010
Even before we began to put pencil to paper for the design of B Spot, Michael and Liz Symon communicated their initial vision for the concept to me and my team. One thing that kept coming up over and over again throughout the conversation was the notion of wanting the new concept to be part “biker bar”. However, we weren’t creating a theme restaurant so I realized that we needed to be subtle and artistic in the way we interpreted this concept.
As the plan for the space began to evolve, it became fairly evident that we were going to wind up having a central, floating bar configuration (meaning that the bar wouldn’t be up against a wall). The bar would be located in the middle of the space and approachable from all sides. Knowing that the footprint of the restaurant was fairly tight, and also knowing that we were going to be leaving the interior ceiling open and exposed, I realized that we were going to need to create a dynamic ceiling element over the bar to not only ground the space, but to bring the ceiling height down a bit in that area.
As we began to develop the design of the space, there was an overarching design rationale that was beginning to emerge. This was the notion of creating large scale sculptural statements from collections of smaller parts. The beer can wall was a piece that was all about construction; thousands of pieces creatively combined in a unique way to create a large scale, high impact statement. Since the ceiling element at the bar was the other main sculptural component within the space, I realized that it needed to play off of the beer can piece by creating a unique juxtaposition of ideas. Realizing that the beer can wall was a vertical statement all about construction, I decided that the hanging piece over the bar should be horizontal and should convey the idea of de-construction.
The last thing I was going to do was hang a motorcycle from the ceiling like some bad, cliche’ chain restaurant, yet I still liked the idea of finding a way to incorporate motorcycle components in to the design. Yet I was struggling to figure out exactly how to achieve this. I decided that we would deconstruct a motorcycle and use it’s components to create a statement. Michael Symon is a Harley Davidson guy, so we knew Harley components were going to be a must. We looked at buying an old bike or two but felt as if it would be too cost prohibitive so we looked at buying all of the components in pieces. At this point, I still wasn’t sure what we were going to do with all of these pieces to create something impactful but I knew that we still needed to build an inventory of parts. I spent some time on motorcycle auction websites and looked at photos of used parts. One particular photo caught my eye and sparked the idea behind our final creation. In this photograph, the seller had spread out all of the available parts on the floor and took photos to post online. Whether they realized it or not, they had arranged everything in a manner that caught my eye. The parts, as arranged in the photo resembled the plastic parts that come as part of a plastic model kit. The photograph even made it difficult to discern the actual scale of the pieces. I knew immediately what we needed to do; create a full size sculpture made from real Harley parts, but fabricated in a way to resemble a plastic model. I ran the idea past Liz, showed her the inspiration and she loved the idea. Better yet, she told me that her brother Russ would be able to get us all of the parts we would need to execute the final piece.
I immediately went to a hobby shop and bought a plastic motorcycle model kit and found our inspiration.
Here is the final rendering of the concept.
Next we needed to detail and fabricate our sculpture. Russ got us a bunch of parts and I called Paul Hadley at Classic Metal Studio to execute the finished piece. We met and discussed how to weld everything and discussed finishing techniques that would appear authentic. We ended up using a couple of different sizes of round steel stock (larger dimension for the frame) and laid everything out on the floor to get the accurate spacing. The tricky part of this whole installation is that we had pendant lights that needed to drop through the sculpture to light the bar. Somehow we needed to determine where these pendants would fall so that they would penetrate the plane of the sculpture without hitting any of the parts themselves. We had an approximate lighting layout, but still couldn’t be sure that the motorcycle structure would fall exactly where it did on paper. Regardless, we made our best guess and Paul got to work. Here are photos of the parts on Paul’s shop floor as we laid them out.
Photo of the bar under construction.
Paul did a great job with the fabrication. He was even able to weld in some number tabs. We initially had discussed chroming the parts, but felt in the end that they wanted to feel more like primed steel than finished chrome. In the end, it was the right decision and when those panels arrived and went up over the bar (2 days prior to open), they pulled the entire space together and created an enormous impact not to mention a lot of conversation. It couldn’t have turned out more perfectly. In fact, since the restaurant has opened and people have begun to blog about it, there have been several reviewers who have referred to the faux motorcycle parts. To me, this is a huge compliment because it means that we were able to execute our concept perfectly.
Photos of the final installation.
