Hardly Homey: Q Bar, Bangkok.
January 2004
In a squat, turreted old house in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit neighborhood radically renovated, of course, but aspects of its domesticity are recycled into an atmosphere that is hardly homey.
The cozy interiority of the original house is preserved, even exaggerated. Upholstery, the universal symbol of comfort, has grown beyond the furniture ad crept up the walls, enveloping the entire space in a thick, soft, sound deadening leather blanket. Seams and buttons, once scaled to the human hand, are now deliberately distorted into something akin to supergraphics.
New upholstered chairs spring forth to fill the furniture void. But the new chairs are not at home in a house - they are thin, modern, public-space furniture; they are the barstools and restaurant chairs of the European ‘60s. They transform the space, functionally and aesthetically, into the retro-chic bar that it is.
Having left the chairs, the upholstery adopts a new function; lighting. The original house’s windows have been smothered in favour of an eternal, nocturnal interior. Now, illumination comes from mysteriously glowing objects: walls, cabinets, stair rises. On the first floor, a bright yellow band of wall behind a sitting area compliments the eerie blue light emanating from an adjacent wall, behind liquor bottles. Patrons are silhouetted, and it is never quite possible to tell if the one you are looking at is looking back at you.
Up a staircase illuminated by yet another ethereal glow, insiders find themselves in a second bar. Here, walls are padded in red leather with head-sized concavities in section. Illuminated from some out-of-sight lighting cove, the walls become horizontal bands of red shadows. Elsewhere, diagonal ellipses emboss every wall of a blue seating alcove, raised one neon-red riser above the main floor.
Whilst retaining the cozy scale of a home, Q Bar is in fact a captivating display of surfaces – of upholstery, of light and shadow. The wall-conquering upholstery at once provides a sense of homely comfort through its warmth and softness, and conversely serves to illuminate the surface-oriented culture of insiders on their night out. The paradox is pleasing, nonetheless.
