A night-club bar needs brilliant light and comfortable, glamorous materials to give its clientele the luxurious setting they expect. A new bar in Romania features a high-quality polymer based bar which is translucent and seamless. Combined with clever design, this imbues the bar with a feeling of warm luxury.

The bar area of this project was composed of a high-tech plastic by Hi-macs. This variant is called Lucent, for its translucent qualities. This material is used with embedded RBG lighting to create a constantly changing light show for patrons.

The material is an acrylic base that is heavy and slid enough that the manufacturer refers to it as a ‘stone’. The thermoformable properties of this acrylic allow for gentle moulding of the counter’s four corners. When the lights are off, the solid impression is stronger, giving the bar a monolithic look, as though it has been shaped from a single piece. The joints are seamless: sheets of the material are glued and then sanded down to make a smooth surface. The architect, Robert Marin, conceived the bar as a functional object. The metallic structure supporting the bar is perceived as a shadow across the translucent cover.

The lights are chosen to suit the material, of which a white shade (‘Opal’) was selected. This gives maximum lighting flexibility, and was also chosen as it hinted at the ice cube trademark of the sponsor, Finlandia Vodka.

The siding of the bar (below the lit-up top) is made of trusty MDF which is coated in a water-based matte paint with a low environmental impact but high resistance to the inevitable hard knocks that a bar receives. Wood was used for the rounded surfaces of the bar, vacuum formed and painted with the same topcoat.

The dynamic looking ceiling is made from an elastic pre-stressed membrane with a fibre optic system enabling variable, synchronised lighting effects. Here’s another great lighting system for bars we recently wrote about.