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ou wouldn’t know it to look at it, but designing Portland’s new Multnomah Whiskey Library—a glittering, luxurious jewel of a space—was an exercise in restraint. “We kept begging ‘please don’t polish that,’ and ‘please do nothing,’” says Kelly Ogden, director of the Portland-based firm Elk Collective, who was charged with turning a former auto-body shop into a bar—or, more specifically, “a spirits library with impressive walls of liquor.” To evoke an Old World aesthetic, while playing to the preexisting building’s strengths—soaring ceilings, exposed fir trusses, weathered brick walls—the designers used as many raw and patinated materials as possible, including rustic oak flooring and perfectly tarnished silver chandeliers from a London antiques shop. (The dealer wanted to clean them, but Ogden’s pleas prevailed). The project was an intensive collaboration between Ogden and owner Alan Davis, proprietor of the city’s beloved Produce Row Café, who contributed not only his own design vision but also dozens of hours of sourcing and shopping. To fulfill Davis’s concept of “a turn-of-the-20th-century library meets British gentlemen’s club,” the pair searched out fixtures, fittings, and furnishings across “We wanted the the globe. On one inspired visoverall look it to a London auction house, and feel to evoke Davis scooped up 10 appealwarmth, comfort, ingly weathered club chairs, three Chesterfield sofas, and and days of old— five rugs—furnishing the bulk but not from a of Multnomah in one fell swoop. cliché old-timey Davis and Ogden also turned perspective. I didn’t to some of their favorite local tradespeople to craft custom want the aesthetic pieces, including the brass-andto be so period that glass shelving by Ghilarducci it would seemed Studios that holds 1,700 bottles contrived.” —Alan Davis of liquor, and a pair of diamondtufted leather banquettes by InHouse PDX, a father-and-son team. Savoy Studios contributed Art Deco–inspired stainedglass skylights, and Rainier, Oregon–based ironsmith Berkely Tack created metal fireplace accessories. “Portland is a design-savvy and artist-oriented city, and the craftsmanship is on a really high level,” says Ogden, who has also worked on projects in Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. “Here, it’s easy to find people who have honed their talent.” Local artists created 17 portraits of whiskey icons over the ages, from Friar John Cor (inventor of Scotch whiskey in the late 1400s) to Johnny Walker. These pieces are new, but each looks vintage. “We didn’t want any elements to jump out, so even the pieces that we had custom made were finished to look warm and aged,” Davis says. Ogden and Davis’s attention to detail has resulted in a jaw-dropping space that rewards close inspection. The more you look—at the antiqued, hand-finished wood paneling, say, or the embossed leather bar top—the more you see. h
ABOVE: Framed portraits on the wall trace whiskey history. BELOW: A rolling library ladder lets bartenders easily access any of the 1,700 spirits on display.
GRAY ISSUE No. THIRTEEN
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