2020 Eat Drink Design Awards: Best Bar Design

Jury comment

Everyone deserves a local bar like this one. With its timeless European style, Leigh Street Wine Room on Adelaide’s most happening eat street seems like it’s been around for years. Built on the site of a former dry-cleaning business (the original signage remains intact), the ultra-narrow footprint has been artfully overhauled by local firm Studio Gram on an impressively compact budget. The cosy room has an immediately welcoming vibe, and cocoons its customers with feelings of warmth and intimacy. A dazzling vaulted archway integrates a mezzanine level over the terrazzo bar serving intelligent drops and substantial snacks. A library of more than 400 bottles of minimal-intervention wine fills an entire wall, showcasing what this place does best. While the eclectic design scheme has been carefully curated, it never feels overworked. The result is an instant classic that demands to be visited again and again.

Design statement

Paying homage to the classic wine bars of yesteryear, Leigh Street Wine Room is a wine bar and a wine store in the heart of Adelaide. It’s that place around the corner that you call home, a “simple” wine bar to entice the casual sipper and the serious sniff and swirler. The client’s desire was to reference the institutions found throughout Europe, a venue altogether different from what has become expected of an Australian wine bar. The narrow shopfront houses a wine shelf and simple signage, hinting at what’s inside. Views through of the centralized bar draw the eye to the rear of the space, enticing people to enter the venue. The long space – only 3.4 metres wide – was further accentuated through the introduction of a vaulted arch, which enhances the narrowness of the space while drawing the eye from the front to the rear, where a compact kitchen is cleverly tucked under the mezzanine. The compact nature of the site saw the introduction of the mezzanine to house a cool room and a dry store for the small kitchen, and to enable functions at the venue.

Leigh Street Wine Room
9 Leigh Street
Adelaide, South Australia
leighstreetwineroom.com

Studio Gram
Shop 1, 2 Union Street
Goodwood, South Australia
studio-gram.com.au

Project team
Graham Charbonneau, Dave Bickmore, Alistair Reeve

See the whole gallery of images at the Eat Drink Design Awards website.

The 2020 Eat Drink Design Awards are organized by Architecture Media and supported by supporting partners Chandon Australia, Latitude and Roca.

The Eat Drink Design Awards are endorsed by the Australian Institute of Architects and the Design Institute of Australia.