Co-founders Beckaly Franks and Ezra Star and bar manager J Frank explore the history of aged spirits at the timeless and spaceless ARTIFACT Bar
“How do you create a one-of-a-kind bar?” asked Beckaly Franks and Ezra Star to their trusted partner Michael Larkin as they were masterminding a new bar in Hong Kong.
The mixologist Franks-Star power couple are the names behind The Pontiac, Call Me AL, and Mostly Harmless. For their fifth collaborative project, a vision took hold to create a bar space unparalleled in the city and a true rarity for the world’s drinking landscape.
A contact at Hongkong Land, the property developer dominating downtown’s Central district with its chic facades, connected Michael, Beckaly, and Ezra with architect Nelson Chow to explore building a drinking haunt hidden inside the chic BaseHall 02 food hall.
After founding a dive bar, disco house, neighbourhood eatery, and omakase drinkery, Beckaly and Ezra looked to a former past and distant future to create a truly timeless bar, ARTIFACT.
What’s in a name? Everything, according to the couple. “We came up with the outline for the bar concept in 20 minutes,” recalls Ezra. “[Beckaly and I] are obsessive over Scottish terroir, limestone soils, and the White Cliffs of Dover.”
“We were inspired by the meeting of the soil and water, how the two interact, and where wood plays in the interaction. What are these cultural elements that work together in this cultural anthropology of space? What are these elements that we see as a physicality? These physical tokens of soil, water, and food come together as physical artifacts.”
The name was found. The concept? Easy, Beckaly states: explore the storied history of aged spirits, raw alcohol matured in wood, with nutrients, minerals, and acids infusing liquor from the natural terroir.
The concept of ARTIFACT and a bar programme of exploring aged spirits were central to bringing the past to an idealist and timeless future, boosted by the otherworldly interior of the space.
Nelson Chow, architect of retro-funky bar Foxglove and speakeasy-style Please Don’t Tell, delivered his expertise, designing a surreal and brutalist space. He crafts a spaceship-like bar existing in a timeless vacuum straddling both the past and future.
In the design of ARTIFACT, Nelson brings together motifs of sci-fi spaceships, brutalist architecture, and underground water cisterns. You enter by pressing a white button fixed onto a bulging wall, with portals opening to blue ocean scenes. A sliding door ushers you through a hall of geometric perking squares, before opening up to a glowing bar counter and undulating walls housing crevices with tables.
“Ezra’s far more of a sci-fi nerd than I am, but we’re both nerds,” Beckaly shares. “The texture and material of [ARTIFACT] is not tethered to anything physically. We’re underground in our space, so we can start to play with what we call the narrative of time and space.”
The space is windowless and lacks any time-telling apparatus. The curved walls are dressed in beige, and the oaky brown drapes match the hand-painted colour of the floor, bar counter, and wall edges.
Architects and designers specifically come to ARTIFACT to snap shots of the futuristic chairs, and influencers and cocktail enthusiasts plaster pictures of themselves sat tableside on Instagram – the bar is a dizzy dream of futuristic design.
“What makes ARTIFACT indefinable is that you don’t know where you are. There is a sense of escapism when you’re in the space, because you can be anywhere. The feeling is that you are somewhere without being anywhere distinct,” says Ezra.
Paired with the ethereal bar space is ARTIFACT’s drink menu, a two-part exploration of classic house cocktails and five drinks powered by one aged spirit selected every quarter.
Their bar programme is tuned to explore the focus on the stories, history, culture, and terroir of producers [of whisky, wine, gin, vodka, brandy, rum, and vodka]. “We work with aged spirits because we are talking about evidence of the journey, these tokens of time,” says Beckaly.
“If you were exiting a spaceship on a foreign planet and you pick some things up, these are the artifacts of where you’ve been,” Ezra adds.
Each of the five cocktails tells the story of the spirit’s creation and the ageing process that it goes through. ARTIFACT bar manager J Frank is uniquely fond of the storytelling element of the bar programme.
“Our aged spirit of choice [in winter 2024] is Citadelle Reserve, a highly sustainable French aged gin that aids in our study,” J says. The Cognac-based distillery received a royal grant in 1775 to produce genièvre (juniper) gin. Previously, in late 2023, the bar explored Colombian Dictador rum with its rich caramel and vanilla notes.
“ARTIFACT allows us to talk about the art of hospitality and alcohol. The distillers we work with are artists, and [our cocktails] are all expressions of their work. When it comes to making the menu, we dissect this spirit and select something to share.”
The physical menu of ARTIFACT paints a literal colourful picture of aged spirits and their regal history within the enduring bar. Majestic golden swathes of paint highlight the electric cocktails made by head bartender Nish and the bar team.
“We’re free of time at ARTIFACT, free to go back and forward and engage with multiple parts of the timeline. The design of our drinks [on our menu] transforms into drawings from the renaissance period. In our spaceship, we’re taking these ideas into the future and mixing the past with the present as we fly through.”
Like Beckaly and Ezra’s other venues, hospitality is key, and J effortlessly manages the vibe. Standing in front of the bar counter, which seats seven guests beyond the six tables that house a comfortable 40 more, J offers a private interaction close to the action, equipping guests with life jackets to dive deeper into the past in the spaceship.
“ARTIFACT is a secret to hold for many in Hong Kong who are eager to take your friend to the corner of an empty food court at night and press a random button to see the future.”
Beckaly returns to the point of true hospitality as the underlying trademark of ARTIFACT. “We’re here to take care of people. What we put inside of the bar is always about the guest and our interaction with the guest. When you have a space that is a piece of art, you fight against the grain of what people’s perception of this space is.”
“When you’re in here, nothing else exists. We return back to people’s projection, pulling from sources of memory or things that they’ve seen to elucidate what the bar is. We’re sending the subterranean space odyssey of ARTIFACT through a wormhole to pop out the other side and see what happens.”
If you’re in the mood to explore another world, head to ARTIFACT Bar at BaseHall 02 today. Good luck finding it!
