TrendThe “Bemelmans Effect” Takes OverThe Nines, Cloud Club, and other debuts to the Manhattan scene use craft to channel New York City’s golden age for a new generation

By Samuel Medina

April 6, 2022

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The Nines is one in a recent spate of New York City bars to embrace unabashedly luxe interiors.Photo: Liz Clayman

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The first thing one notices about the Nines, a revivalist piano bar in Manhattan’s NoHo district, is how many things there are to notice. Leopard print applied unreservedly. A mysterious red that suffuses walls and drapes. The ballast of the continuous bar, with its glowing inventory of liquid intoxicants, and the coruscating light of Murano chandeliers. The low, gilded ceiling. Mirrors. Velvety plush banquettes and antique armchairs and, at the back of the crowded dining room, a baby grand piano, whose dulcet tones dissipate in a din of chatter.

The sum of the decor, as restaurateur Jon Neidich has explained, is “upscale and elegant, yet still fun, sexy, romantic, and transportive.” Reviewing this litany selectively, we might feel compelled to ask, transportive to what place and to what time?

A serpentining bar and velvet-topped stools at the Nines.

Photo: Liz Clayman

For the Nines, the latest in a spate of New York hospitality spaces aspiring to classic status, the abiding reference is Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. “We did a survey of possible touch points,” says Amy Butchko. Her interiors firm, the Springs Collective, headed up the Nines design. “We looked at any gathering place that has withstood the test of time and, in some senses, only increased in popularity in the age of Instagram. Bemelmans came up again and again.”

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Before COVID, the 75-year-old Bemelmans was a charming neighborhood haunt, with live piano music, competent cocktails, and a sweet backstory. (Its lilting, faintly zoological murals were done by its namesake, Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the Madeline children’s books.) But as the New York Post and other media outlets have reported, in recent months the clientele has skewed younger. Apparently, Gen Z’ers maladjusted to lockdowns are attracted, ironically or not, to the place’s tender mise-en-scène.

Other establishments suffered worse indignities. The pandemic gutted the city’s restaurant industry in its first two years, temporarily driving millions from work. Many restaurant and bar owners, like those of Chumley’s—a beloved 1922 Greenwich Village bar—and 21 Club, the 90-year-old Midtown institution, simply chucked it in.

Those left standing shined brighter than they had in decades. Butchko singles out the Russian Tea Room, which dates to the 1920s and whose red booths are a more likely inspiration for the Nines’ burnished palette. (The color is largely absent at Bemelmans but for the Ferrari red blazers worn by bar attendants.) Her team also gathered impressions of non-New York locales, including André Balazs’s mannered, but welcoming, Chiltern Firehouse in London.

Temple Bar, a well-appointed bar on Lafayette Street in New York City, shuttered in 2017 after a nearly 30-year run. Last fall it reopened, offering a menu that includes blue negronis and caviar service. The mahogany-wrapped interior by Melissa Bowers features green velvet drapes, leather banquettes, and an Adolf Loos hoop lamp.

Photo: Don Freeman

Spots like the revived Temple Bar, which shares a city block with the Nines, and the Pebble Bar at Rockefeller Center pull from a similar pool of influences. Each in their own way syncretizes the stylings of English gentleman’s clubs and confidential Manhattan speakeasies. The Prohibition Era in particular has enjoyed a long afterlife in interior design, which it invokes through exposed light fixtures, dark woods and upholstery, and brassy finishes consonant with liquor-ish tans and ambers. In cocktail programs, this has translated to subtly doctored classics, minimalist garnishes, and obtrusively large blocks of ice.

Leather wraparound booths and petite table lamps lend Pebble Bar, a new watering hole at Rockefeller Center, a distinct throwback vibe.

Photo: Nicole Franzen

The heyday of the speakeasy coincided with the rise of Art Deco, of which the Chrysler Building remains the paradigmatic example. The Cloud Club will soon open on the tower’s 61st floor, in the same space that was once home to a men’s lunch club of the same name. “To me,” says AD100 designer Ken Fulk, “[the venue] is nostalgic for a more optimistic chapter in New York’s history. But I also don’t want to overly romanticize it.”

When Fulk first sized up the site, nothing remained of the original bizarro-Deco environs, leaving him to find inspiration elsewhere: 30,000 feet in the air. While he was on a flight, he took in a vista of cumulus clouds that jumpstarted his vision for the space. Later, he found precedents within the Chrysler Building itself. “Every single elevator tells a different story,” he says. “They’re all hand carved. Could you imagine doing that today?”

Fulk can. All the furnishings in the new Cloud Club, including a backlit pink-glass bar by Sogni Di Cristallo and floor-to-ceiling features by Lamberts and Bendheim, are custom. For Fulk, the analogue-bespoke nature of the space reflects something of our collective desires. At a time when “the entire world is at our fingertips,” he suggests, we are all seeking reassurance in the ghostly imprint of the craftsperson. “There’s been a big recognition of their efforts. How could there not be?”

In the case of the Nines, the handworn wins out. The space’s fluted plaster walls were “meant to look imperfect, as if they had been painted and repainted over the course of 100-plus years,” Butchko says. It’s a quality impossible to capture in photographs. But pull up by the bar and rub the rosy, pink cloth napkin between your fingers while you’re waiting for your drink to be prepared. Look around, and take it all in.