NM3 turns a 55-square-metre Milan room into Bar Bardo

Milan studio NM3 has completed Bar Bardo, a 55-square-metre cocktail listening bar that takes its cues from Adolf Loos's American Bar in Vienna — a building finished in 1908 and roughly the size of a generous living room. The comparison ends about there, thankfully, because the designers say so themselves.

"The American Bar was more of an aspiration than a direct formal reference," studio co-founder Francesco Zorzi told Dezeen. "The ambition was never to recreate Loos's bar, nor Robert and Trix Haussmann's Kronenhalle in Zurich, which was another important reference for the project. Rather, we wanted to create a truly classic bar for Milan, with a very specific spatial and architectural character."

That's a long quote, but it earns its length. It's the whole design brief in two sentences.

What's inside?

Bar Bardo sits directly across the road from Bar Basso, the Milan institution, and occupies a single room plus a bathroom. Almost every element was custom-designed by NM3, the studio whose modernist stainless steel furniture has made it a Milan household name since its founding in 2020.

The material ledger reads like this:

• Polished rosewood panels cladding the walls and ceiling, which sharpen the acoustics as well as the mood of the small room.
• A stainless steel bar, quintessentially NM3, set at the centre, its surfaces bouncing reflections of globular 1950s pendant lights by Italian architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni.
• Red velvet built-in banquette seating around the perimeter, matched to crimson curtains and a run of bright red speakers serving a stainless steel DJ booth and metal shelving for vinyl records.

The Caccia Dominioni lamps are the only vintage pieces in the bar. NM3 swapped their original chains for longer black ones. Small intervention, real effect — the lighting now hangs at a height the 1950s apparently didn't anticipate.

How does a listening bar become a club?

By moving the furniture. Every interior element is movable except the bar and the banquettes, which keeps the conversion to a one-person job rather than a renovation.

"By simply removing the furniture, the cocktail bar can easily be transformed into a club," said Zorzi. "The flexibility of the space is therefore achieved through a simple architectural arrangement rather than complex spatial interventions."

The bathroom makes the loudest statement in the building: bright red 10-by-10-centimetre tiles running floor to ceiling, with utilitarian stainless steel for the toilet, sink and other fixtures, lit by pared-back sconces. It's the architectural equivalent of shouting indoors.

Where does this leave NM3?

Bar Bardo marks a softer register for a studio previously known for harder surfaces. NM3 designed what Dezeen called a "raw" interior for Milan's Galleria Montegani in 2025, followed by a similarly metal-heavy store for fashion brand Miss Sixty in the city that September. Rosewood and velvet are a departure; the bathroom's steel fixtures suggest the old habits die quietly, not hard.

The studio's trajectory — furniture, then galleries, then a bar across from Bar Basso — shows a firm building its city one small room at a time. The photography is by Piercarlo Quecchia. Whether Bar Bardo becomes as classic as its makers intend is a question only Milan's drinkers can answer, and they're famously unhurried.