The luxury of tipping a glass without minding your back

2025.5.06

“It’s easy to settle here, isn’t it.”

Every time someone says that, something in me is quietly glad.
That settledness isn’t an accident.
It’s the thing I held onto above all else when I built this room.

This place used to be a pharmacy.
The layout was wrong for food and drink, and the plumbing and kitchen were the opposite of what I’d pictured.
The fit-out would cost money, and by any measure it wasn’t efficient.
I was drawn to it anyway.

I’ve never been able to bear having someone behind me.
If I feel eyes at my back, or sense someone there,
my thinking scatters and something uneasy sets in.

There was room behind the counter for about six more seats.
But people being in that space was, for me, a real strain.
So I got rid of all of it.

I hoped it might turn into something my guests would feel too — that vague sense of being able to settle here.

So I made the counter long,
and in the places where I could have squeezed in another seat,
I deliberately left empty space.

That space is now shelving, holding a great many whiskies.
Rather than making seats for people to sit in,
I quietly gave the space over to the whisky and rum — the ones this room is really for.

Those shelves don’t announce names or information.
They simply stand there, and in standing there, become part of the air.

Even when you’ve come with someone,
even when the conversation breaks off for a while,
the distance is set so that silence doesn’t turn awkward.

An arrangement where you can stay connected without facing each other.
Enough space that even side by side, time alone is allowed.

If the room that came out of this arrangement
softens something in the people who come here, even a little,
that may be the thing that makes me happiest of all.

Where the chairs and tables go
might look like a small matter when you’re building a bar.
For me it was the design that decided how a person could be in this place at all.

What I wanted this room to be, back then, is still here in it, quietly.

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