Hendrick’s Lviv

YOD Group uses the underground location of Hendrick’s Lviv to play tricks on the eye with the effect of light and shades that imitate windows as well as the illusion of depth using backlight and contrast silhouettes.

Firm
  • area / size 947 sqft
  • Year 2020
  • Location Lviv, Ukraine,
  • You can not enter this bar from the street, it is located in the basement under the True Burger restaurant. It repeats the speak-easy concept of the Hendrick’s bar in Kyiv whose interior we created in 2017.

    The venue in Lviv has four halls that are connected consistently. Lamps are all connected with a complex system of metal pipes and they permeate the space like veins inside a body. It would be more precise to say there is one big lamp which is almost 14 meters long. It begins above the bar counter, goes across halls, passes through halls in walls and branches wherever illumination is needed.

    The main surfaces in the bar area are light plaster and steel. We created the graphical pattern on the steel wall panels and the basis of the bar counter by a welded seam which became a decorative element.

    The idea of the interior is to make bar visitors forget temporarily about their gadgets and find themselves in a good-old world before digital. Nowadays It is hard to imagine that not so long ago everything around was analog – meetings, communication, and even entertainment. We recreated this concept in some miraculous devices that create some optical effects and make shades dance on walls. We used as a basis the praxinoscope – a device which was created by the French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud in 1877.

    The praxinoscope uses such characteristics of our vision as persistence. Most of us used to experiment with it in childhood by drawing something in the notebook and then shifting its pages quickly. It seemed that drawings were moving. This very idea formed the basis of the first optical devices which forewent animation.

    We put in Hendrick’s Lviv four praxinoscope variations. One is placed in the smoking room, two are installed on visitor’s tables, and the last one is hidden. You can see how it works by looking through a peephole in the wall. You have to twirl a handle to make a cartoon movie. Several hundred years ago a praxinoscope was a spectacular and cutting-edge technical device, and now it seems exotic too.

    Design: YOD Group
    Design Team: Volodimyr Nepiyvoda, Dmytro Bonesko, Anastasiya Pokatilo, Mykolay Dotsenko
    Photography: Andrii Shustykevych