In the fall of 2025, we turned a vacant 131-year-old South Bend garage into a pop-up bar in collaboration with Permit Pending and Vested Interest. We called it BABYBAR—a small, temporary bar that doubled as a love letter to tight, intimate hospitality: the kind of room where you don’t need much more than a few seats, a short drink list, and an excuse to brush shoulders and get a little more honest than you meant to.
For two Fridays, people entered through a half-open, unassuming garage off Tutt Street. Inside, we built a bar from scratch: lighting, signage, seating, curated drinks, and a soundtrack that made the whole place feel like a secret you’d only just been let in on. I handled the concept, visual identity, bar build-out, and the feeling of the room once people were inside.
The city allowed only beer and wine, which turned the drinks into another constraint to play with. We leaned into spritzes, highballs, and booze-forward mixed drinks using vermouths and amari, proving that you don’t need a full back bar to make a night feel generous.
I’m drawn to projects like this because they borrow from installation, hospitality, and performance all at once. A storage space becomes an ordinary garage; add a table and shelving and it becomes a room; drag in cases of booze, glassware, and an old couch and suddenly that room becomes a bar. Finally, you add people, and it becomes an experience.
BABYBAR gathered together so many impulses I’d been following for years: hospitality, collaboration, transformation, and the pleasure of designing an experience people could physically step into. More than anything, it proved that we could build an experience from the ground up, invite people into it, and watch it become something bigger the moment they arrived.
View the BABYBAR creative direction case study →
