Prague bar Wine List celebrates its past via 'layered' interiors

Layers of history are peeled back at Prague’s Wine List, showing how the bar has evolved over the centuries like the chapters of a book.

The Prague wine bar occupies the ground floor and cellar of a historic building in the city’s trendy Karlín neighbourhood – a space that has changed functions at least four times. With each role change, the architecture has been adapted leading to a collage of styles and interventions. For the space’s latest iteration as a wine bar, architecture practice Collarch has embraced these quirks when crafting their own ‘layer’.

Says the practice: ‘We preserve the well-crafted historical elements such as the original vaulted brick ceilings and we keep some suitable technical solutions from later periods – for example, the building’s ventilation system.’

A patinated grey-white scheme unifies these older elements with new interventions, including epoxy floors with a pink-hued border, and solid oak built-ins and cabinetry – recurrent in tables and handrails.

If the ground floor is a ‘day bar’, complete with brass elements and an open-flow layout, then the cellar space is a sophisticated nightspot where brickwork is the star of the show. Later modifications have been stripped out to expose the intricate vaulting and rugged white stone masonry, maximising the volume of the space in the process. Blonde oak and black steel dominate on this level while screed concrete floors complete the look.

Prague 8 – Karlín, Czech Republic