Hard Water

San Francisco, CA, United States

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Hard Water

San Francisco, CA, United States

Firm

Lundberg Design

Type

Hospitality + Sport › Restaurant Bar/Nightclub

YEAR

2013

Photos

Ryan Hughes (9)

HardWater is an American Whiskey bar tucked into a historic bulkhead building on San Francisco’s Pier 3. It is our most recent project for longtime friend and client chef Charles Phan. Though primarily an architectural design firm, we have a metal fabrication shop and regularly create special pieces for our projects. With HardWater, we had the opportunity to fabricate majority of the interior (and exterior) elements. Materials were plied, bent and cut to produce visual and tactile experiences at every scale. This includes the reclaimed-buoy pendant that hangs over the Carrera bar, the barrel-stave signage, stainless steel frames and details, and of course, the double-height glowing whiskey library. To us, the project is a celebration of American craft—a notion that is at the backbone of this country’s whiskey making tradition, and carries through in the restaurant’s extraordinary whiskey selection and menu.

Our goal for HardWater is for it to be a place that you take your best friend to have a drink that you know they will remember for the rest of their life. As far as the design goes, we are trying to redefine the notion of what a whiskey bar is. The tradition is one of dark wood, leather, and nicotine-stained ceilings; and we admit to liking a few of those bars. But the ones we like are the real old ones, not a recreation. They have a patina of history, not a history created with objects from EBay. American whiskey is being rediscovered – a younger, more diverse crowd is discovering it, and this is a bar built for them. Just because bourbon is aged in charred oak barrels doesn’t mean you need to drink it in a similar environment. This bar is bright and modern and exciting – it is not a place to hide, it is a place to celebrate.