Wes Anderson Designed The Café Of Your Dreams

This is not a drill: Wes Anderson has designed a café. It’s in Italy, and it’s opening May 9, so strap on your Margot Tenenbaum wig, borrow your grandma’s old fur coat, and get on a plane right now, because we all owe it to ourselves to bask in the quirky retro-kitsch bar of our dreams. Anderson has brought his trademark aesthetic to Bar Luce, housed inside Fondazione Prada, the fashion house’s new “cultural complex” in Milan. In addition to our favorite new bar, the complex is home to art galleries and an “Accademia dei Bambini,” designed for children.

The bar offers patrons an Anderson-ian mix of ornate Italian architecture and 1950s and '60s pop culture. The Fondazione Prada’s new cultural center is housed in a converted distillery dating from the early 20th century. Anderson’s bar retains many elements of the original building, such as arched ceilings that recall the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a large shopping mall built in the 1860s and 70s. Other aspects of the bar are more recognizably “Wes Anderson-y,” including mid-century design elements like Formica furniture, vinyl seating, and veneered wood wall paneling. According to bar’s website, Anderson was inspired by Italian films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). The bar also features a jukebox and pinball machines, one of which is Steve Zissou-themed.

On the Bar Luce website, Anderson says of the space,

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.

This isn’t the first time that Anderson has collaborated with Prada: He has also directed commercials for the company, and worked with them on his 2013 short film, Castello Cavalcanti , which features Jason Schwartzman (because of course it does).

If anybody else is joining me on my this instant trip to Italy, I hear flights are cheaper if we buy at a group rate! See ya there.

Image: Focus Features