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Wes Anderson designed a cafe in a Milan art gallery

Wes Anderson designed a cafe in a Milan art gallery

Bar-Luce-page

Wes Anderson’s meticulous attention to design and detail in all his films, in which each frame looks like a carefully fine-tuned diorama full of colors and careful staging, has made for a plethora of charming fantasy worlds, but very few in our real world. Now however, Anderson has created a project in which he has designed a cafe/bar for a new art gallery opening this month in Milan.

Bar Luce, designed by Anderson, is located inside the Fondazione Prada in Milan, a new art gallery space commissioned by the fashion designer Prada. According to Conde Nast Traveler, who visited the cafe this week, the space is complete with “retro formica chairs in bright pastel colors, jukeboxes”, and perhaps best of all, “Steve Zissou-themed pinball machines.”

According to the Fondazione Prada’s website, Anderson retained some of the original building’s architecture, including an arched ceiling once part of a distillery dating back to the 1910s. But the complete design is meant to recreate the atmosphere of a Milanese cafe and pays homage to ’50s and ’60s Italian pop culture, including references to Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan.

“There is no ideal angle for this space,” Anderson said via the site’s website. “It is for real life, and ought to have numerous good spots for eating, drinking, talking, reading, etc. While I do think it would make a pretty good movie set, I think it would be an even better place to write a movie. I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in.”

Anderson first started working on this project back in January when THR first reported it, but is now open for business along with the rest of the gallery. Anderson also took inspiration from a previous short film he did for Prada, Castello Cavalcanti starring Jason Schwartzman. Watch that film below: