Heineken unveiled their premium, design-focused lounge bar at London Design Festival last week, the latest chapter of its open innovation journey. The ‘Pop-up City Lounge’ is the second edition in the brand’s ‘Open Design Exploration’ series and was created by twenty young designers from across the globe, crafted in response to suggestions of what the ultimate lounge bar should be from tens of thousands of consumers, who shared inspirational images on Instagram. After finding that the Instagram moment of a night out is capturing the excitement of the drinks arriving, Heineken has created theatrical serving rituals, and invites the consumer to mix and match ingredients to their taste - offering a brand new experience worthy of sharing online.
Heineken's design-focused lounge bar invites guests to mix and match their own drinks
Hidden behind the industrial, corrugated iron shell of two forty-foot shipping containers, the ‘Pop-Up City Lounge’ is an intriguing space full of cutting-edge design features created to optimise the nightlife experience. The lounge is a product of the brand’s commitment to exploring social design, a concept that premieres this week in London before embarking on a tour of global nightlife hotspots.
Heineken invites guests to mix and match ingredients to their taste, waitresses deliver exclusive blended ‘hoptails’, such as the ‘London Lush’ and ‘Beerito’, and serve bottles of beer in exclusive trays constructed from ice, and with a simple flick of a switch the staff would deliver more drinks.
Heineken - The Pop-up City Lounge
The Brazilian graphic design mentor Andre Coelho created the lounge’s signature graphic pattern that threads all the elements of the space together, from the interior architecture to the angular accents in futuristic outfits worn by lounge bar staff. Roland Bird, the product design mentor, had a leading role in translating the graphic pattern into 3D shapes to form trays, openers and skimmers that have a progressive Heineken signature.
Nightlife lovers and conversation cocoons is at the core of The Heineken Lounge.
Mark van Iterson, Heineken’s Global Head of Design, comments, "Our research found that most nightlife lovers are excited by the unexpected when it comes to lounge bars, and at Heineken we always want to surprise. Design enables us to explore the unexpected and make the most memorable experiences." The Mexican interior designer Victor Hugo Jimenez created intricate ‘conversation cocoons’ which are at the core of The Lounge. The cocoons are built in various sizes to accommodate small or larger groups, always providing a feeling of exclusivity to their occupants. Key to their design is the perfect balance of intimacy and openness. Smaller cocoons feature reclined seats to encourage close conversation, whilst the larger areas have more upright chairs so that bigger groups can talk all together, but all the while visitors can sense what is happening around them at The Lounge.
