Bar Tour
Bar Tour
T The Monarch
Kansas city, missouri
An architect looks to reinvent the bar experience.
44
Bar Business Magazine
he Monarch Cocktail Bar & Lounge took flight this past August, but the journey to get there was a long one. The design and build process was much longer than is typical in the bar and restaurant world—one year and nine months. But then again, Architect David Manica isn’t the typical owner. He poured his vision into the bar’s details over a nine-month drawing phase. “Since my office designed it and detailed it, we were able to spend a lot of time in the drawing phase,” says Manica. Shipping logistics also lengthened the timeline, as many materials were imported—like the white marble for the main bar, which came from Italy. “Those kinds of issues were challenging to work around but we were able to accommodate it,” says Manica. That time spent on the details translated into a fairly smooth build-out process on the other end. “It’s been a long project, but the biggest reason for that is we didn’t want to cut any corners,” says Mark Church, General Manager of The Monarch. “If we
were going to do this, it was going to be set up so that we’d be successful in the short term but also successful in the long term with how we structured things.” The first order of business was finding a location, and Manica choose a building in the West Plaza neighborhood of Kansas City, which also gave the bar the opportunity to fill a void—the neighborhood is an entertainment hub with many shopping and dining options but no real cocktail bar options. The building also checked all the boxes in terms of structural needs. The Monarch features the Main Bar, the private Parlour Room, and an outdoor patio called the Monarch Terrace. Manica’s goal in designing these spaces was to create a social setting that reinvents the idea of a bar. A large part of that is the main room’s center bar, which lacks one main feature—the back bar. “The idea of pushing a bar up against a wall and having a big wall of liquor and that tried-and-true approach to bar design is something we wanted to rethink and reinvent,” says Manica. “I don’t
October 2017 barbizmag.com
Photos (left and far right): Aaron Leimkuehler.
By Ashley Bray