
Torch & Crown Brewery, 161 Sixth Avenue
Clients: Mr. John Dantzler & Mr. Joe Correla
New York City, NY | 2019
If you do it once you are considered good at it. If you do it twice you're an expert. This will be our 8th brewery/distillery and perhaps we can claim title to being the Go To firm for this type of work. This one overcame the inherent difficulty of combining the industrial process of the production of beer simultaneously with the diametrically opposed act of drinking and enjoying beer. Adding a full service kitchen to produce top end cuisine coupled and one can begin to see the logistical and design hurdles one had to overcome at every stage of this project. [and ones like it.] This brewery’s full integration of brewing and service as well as the sheer scale of the proposed project sets it apart from other recent newcomers.
Our clients’ wishes were to create spaces that would diverge from now ubiquitous very masculine dark woods and uncomfortable slab seating. While riffing on some of the staples of the genre are still found throughout the space, it is intended to be a study in juxtaposing opposites allowing each element to have their moment when placed against its’ visual and tactile opposite. Thus light and dark wood paneling stands out when placed near the blackened steel bar. The warm upholstered banquettes and thick slab wood table tops compliment the wall of Ivy which surrounds the upper portion of the room. Even the Bright Tanks themselves, the industrial objects centered on the main floor, are intentionally placed as both a source of the beverage in the clients hands and objects of mechanical fetishism providing a foil for the blackened steel and stained wood of the bar rails that surround them. The event space focuses on the brew house and is allowed to dominate the room. Clean white tiled bathrooms provide a textural counterpoint, and a spot of welcome color, to the vocabulary developed elsewhere. The exterior beer garden space becomes a repeated microcosm of the vocabulary seen within.















