Bar Magritte,
Hotel Amigo, Brussels
Bar Magritte is the showpiece of Rocco Forte’s Hotel Amigo in Brussels, a full build bar in patinated brass, oak and granite. In 2024, TIME named it one of the World’s Greatest Places.
Client
Rocco Forte Hotels
Location
Brussels
Our scope
Full build
Completed
Autumn 2023
Interior design
DO Design
In partnership with
Salvatore Calabrese
Photography
Courtesy of Rocco Forte Hotels
The brief
Hotel Amigo stands a few steps from the Grand Place, in the heart of Brussels. As part of our ongoing partnership with Rocco Forte Hotels, we were asked to create a new bar for the renovation of its ground floor, a bar that would mark the 125th anniversary of the birth of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. It would become the only bar in the world dedicated to the artist.
The hotel wanted a true showstopper at the centre of the room. DO Design had a beautiful vision for it, and our task was to bring that vision to life without compromising how hard the bar would need to work in service.
A six month collaboration
Bar Magritte was developed over six months in close collaboration with Olga Polizzi of Rocco Forte Hotels, Sarah Daniels of DO Design, Cantilever designer Gary Crawford and Salvatore Calabrese.
Bringing the people who shape a bar’s look and the people who shape its service into the same conversation from the outset is what allowed a piece this sculptural to perform as well as it does. Each decision about form was tested against the way the bar would be worked, and each operational choice was resolved within the design.
The room around it is an homage in its own right. Adam Ellis enlarged Magritte’s 1922 work Femmes into a wallpaper that wraps the whole space, with green velvet banquettes, art deco inspired stained glass and chairs in soft pink and blue, so the brass bar stands at the centre of something close to a painting.
Designing the workstation
The underbar was designed with Salvatore from the very beginning, built around his signature Calabrese Sinks™, bespoke refrigerated drawer units and a dropped service rail.
Together they give the bar team a layout made for speed at the busiest point of the night, with everything needed for a drink held within easy reach. Salvatore’s menu moves between His Works, cocktails drawn from the paintings, and His World, classics from the decades Magritte lived through, so the station had to handle careful, layered serves and a quick run of classics with equal ease. Behind the bar, a pantry supports the service, keeping stock and preparation away from the guest.
The brass clad bar front and patinated top, with the gantry beyond
Bar Magritte on the ground floor of Hotel Amigo, Brussels
Behind the bar at Bar Magritte
The bar team at Bar Magritte
The five metre island bar is clad in individual patinated brass rods, finished with a fully welded patinated brass top and dimpling detailed across every end face. It is a piece of metalwork that rewards a closer look, and the kind of finish that only comes from designing and making a bar as one.
Opposite, an 8.3 metre back bar of low level oak cabinetry with inset fluted glass sits beneath granite counters, framed by an antique brass display gantry with integrated lighting and sandblasted glass shelving. The bar opened in October 2023 and quickly became one of the places in Brussels not to miss, and a year later TIME named Bar Magritte one of the World’s Greatest Places.
“This project has been one of my favourites that I’ve worked on.”
Lydia Forte, Director of Food & Beverage, Rocco Forte Hotels