13 KiB
| Tag | Date | DocType | Hierarchy | TimeStamp | Link | location | CollapseMetaTable | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
2025-03-23 | WebClipping | 2025-03-23 | https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-the-irish-pub-became-one-of-the-emerald-isles-greatest-exports-180986252/ | true |
Parent:: @News Read:: 🟥
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
^button-HowtheIrishPubBecameOneoftheEmeraldIslesGreatestExportsNSave
How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle's Greatest Exports
Alan Hynes grew up in Kinvara, a small Irish village in County Galway. It had one shop, a post office, a church and two pubs. When he’d go to the auction house with his father on the weekend, they’d stop into a few pubs on the 12-mile trip home. He moved to California’s Marin County in 1998 and today owns a concrete and excavation business. Seven of his nine brothers and sisters are also in the Golden State, but he says he has always felt something missing—that community cornerstone. So, at 51, he decided to open a pub.
The Burren House had its grand opening on March 7 on a main strip of downtown San Rafael, about 5,000 miles from Kinvara. It’s next to an Italian restaurant, and there’s a Walgreens across the parking lot behind the building, but to Hynes, it’s familiar.
“Where I grew up, the pub is just an intrinsic part of Irish life. If there’s a baptism, they’d have the party at the pub after. Funerals, too. Everything revolves around the pub,” he says. “I’ve always been used to a small countryside kind of place, so I was concerned it would be too audacious to try to open a pub somewhere else and the aesthetics would be over-the-top, it wouldn’t feel cozy and comfy, but then it started coming together.”
When Hynes talks of the pub “coming together,” he means the assembly of the component pieces—the mahogany bar and millwork for the backbar counters and shelving, leather stools and chairs, decorative floor tiling, mirrors and glasswork and knickknacks. Each element was designed and produced in Ireland, then sent over in a shipping container. The Liscannor stone in the entryway was sourced in the Burren region, the bar’s namesake. Noticeably absent are shamrock garlands, green tinsel and leprechaun-themed anything.
The Burren is one of the most recent projects of the Irish Pub Company, a Dublin-based design group that has created upwards of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Germany is its biggest European client, and Switzerland is a close second. In Russia, it has established three venues in Moscow, one in Sochi and one in Novosibirsk, in Siberia. The company’s handiwork is also found in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Japan, Nigeria and Mauritius, and at the New York-New York Hotel in Las Vegas. A project is currently underway in a new high-end shopping center in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. This year alone, the company has nine projects in various stages of completion, including in the Canary Islands and Hout Bay, a Cape Town suburb, as well as four under discussion.
But founder Mel McNally is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.
The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages.
“We recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub—in the scale, the architecture, the mix of details, the craftsmanship,” McNally says. “No two are the same, but they have an essence that we carry into projects we do now.”
That essence is anchored by the bar itself. “It’s the altar of service,” McNally says. All activity and movement revolves around it, like electrons orbiting around a nucleus. No matter where McNally visited, how big or small or old or accessible the pub was, the slab of mahogany was the gathering zone. As such, in every bar that his company creates, the bar is visible from anywhere in the pub. It’s nonnegotiable.
But the essence is not limited to those physical aspects. The space and décor contribute to the je ne sais quoi of Irish pubs. “To go to an Irish pub, you’re always welcomed in. You meet people, talk to people. That’s the reality,” McNally says. “Lots of people try, but they don’t get the essence.”
Developing, designing and building out a pub takes anywhere from four to nine months from initial conversation to grand opening and can run a client anywhere from $250,000 to over $1 million. First, the Irish Pub Company’s designers look at the layout plan to understand the size, capacity and flow of the space, as well as any restrictions that might be imposed by landmark associations if the building is listed on a historic registry.
The customizing starts by selecting the pub style. “Victorian” style is modeled on the classic Dublin spots, like the historic Long Hall Pub, where dark-stained woods, elaborate stained-glass partition panels and shiny brass accents abound. Snugs, small enclosed sitting booths traditionally occupied by women while their husbands caroused at the bar, are a staple. “Country” style, inspired by rural stone-built establishments, has paler woods and scuffed finishes that contribute a warm cottage-like feel. Ceramic jugs, crockery and cast-iron kettles might be scattered about the place. The décor of the “Celtic” style is imbued with symbolism and characters from ancient Gaelic folklore and mythology. “Shop” style nods to the old-world convention of rural pubs that double as the community general store. Shelves are lined with bric-a-brac like antique ceramic groceries.
From there, the details are selected—everything from the floor layout to bar design, including display cabinets, drink shelves, stained-glass panels, joinery and wood stains, alongside decorative lighting, glass, metal and woodwork. The Irish Pub Company’s Dublin office has slabs of wood with different finishes, books of fabric and leather swatches. Each detail of each piece of furniture—the footpad of a stool, the piping on a seat cushion, the upholstery of a bench—is a consideration. Up to 80 people could be involved in a single project in the company’s workshop outside Dublin, including carpenters, joiners, metalworkers, furniture-makers, upholsterers, glass artists and painters. In a way, you could compare it to cooking cacio e pepe in Milwaukee with pasta handmade in Rome and authentic pecorino Romano.
McNally’s daughter Anna McNally, who works in business development for the company, notes a design shift she’s seen since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Prior to Covid, we had more requests for a mixed-modern style, which takes some traditional elements and makes them modern with, say, a different kind of material,” she says. She showed a more contemporary style of stained-glass panel with crisp, clean angles instead of classic curved shapes or petal-like edges. “Pre-Covid, people wanted stone as the top of the bar and timber on the front. Now people are going back to hardwood bar tops and traditional leather on chairs. They’re looking more toward comfort and familiarity.”
Pub design is a societal-mood metric.
The business was kickstarted by a partnership with Guinness. In the mid-1990s, the Irish brewer was facing dwindling sales. The craft brewing scene was picking up momentum, especially in the United States. The import market was starting to feel the impact.
“We approached Guinness back then because we felt the concept had a value outside Ireland,” says McNally. The beer company connected him with its network of distributors, and he went on a roadshow across Europe with his team of designers. Orders started coming in, especially from around Germany (the first client was in Berlin) and Italy. In 1996, Fado, the first project in America, opened in Atlanta. (Four more locations have since opened throughout the U.S.) One year later, Darren Fagan moved to the city as a project manager and today runs the North American arm of the Irish Pub Company. He’s worked on about 80 bars throughout the U.S.—from Denver to Tulsa to Philadelphia to Palm Beach International Airport in Florida. After studying mechanical engineering, he worked as a draftsman in the R&D department at an Irish firm that designs fittings and installations for retail stores. His boss introduced him to McNally. The Guinness partnership had momentum. As Fagan explains it, by elevating the kinds of pubs where Guinness was sold, they could increase their sales. But it was the growth of craft breweries and their brewpubs that sparked the company’s marketing push.
“Craft brew bars are about the beer and exposing a brewer’s mastery. It’s like a celebrity chef’s restaurant: They produce phenomenal food, and there’s a time when everyone wants to eat that chef’s food, but it doesn’t mean the restaurant has a soul or a purpose beyond the food itself,” says Fagan. “Pubs are more than just the product, and they have the longevity to prove it. That longevity comes from the connection to the community.”
While a historic pub in an Irish coastal farming village might have its roots fixed in a community through generations of locals gathering to share stories and comfort around the bar, a newer establishment needs to tell a legitimate story of its own to appeal to people enough that they want to come back—not a tall tale from a marketer’s playbook.
“It isn’t just an aesthetic experience. A pub will develop its own character over time, but it has to have a soul rooted in a connection to the community, otherwise it’s easy to question the idea of authenticity,” says Fagan. “We start with the story, which is the core, or the soul.”
Some come easy, like Alan Hynes playing tribute to his childhood in Kinvara with nine brothers and sisters, but others take a bit of work, genealogical research and academic sleuthing. For siblings Tim and Jennifer Strickland, who opened Wexford in Savannah, Georgia, in August 2024, the discovery of a Savannah Morning News article about Irish immigrants in the city led them to Howard Keeley, director of the Center for Irish Research and Teaching at Georgia Southern University, who shared his research about the trade and immigration connections between County Wexford, on the southeastern Irish coast, and Savannah. The Irish history of the port city goes back to the 1730s, when Irish immigrants arrived as settlers after Georgia became a colony and came in greater numbers to work as building boomed. Immigration grew in the mid-19th century, largely spurred by the potato famine. Imagery of the Dunbrody ship, which carried immigrants from Wexford to Savannah at that time, figures into the décor. The 32 names on a wall are an homage to the first women who participated in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in the 1930s. An area of the pub is reserved for the Center for Irish Research and Teaching to curate displays of artifacts, like old sheet music brought to Savannah on ships, leading some locals to refer to Wexford as the first Irish museum in Savannah.
“A pub needs to not just connect with the local community, but be a hub of the community, and in modern times, a lot of that has gotten diluted,” says Fagan. “Otherwise, it’s just a pub in a box.”
Hynes says he’s already seeing how Burren House can become a gathering place for the locals.
“Around Marin, there are brewpubs that are open in the afternoon and all different bars where people go at night, but there aren’t a lot where you’ll see families coming in the afternoon with newborn babies, and then old grandmothers up at the bar after dinner. We’re already seeing all that,” says Hynes. “People feel comfortable sitting here. Everyone gets the same treatment. Pubs are a great equalizer.”
Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
Filed Under: Architecture, Business, Food, Ireland
$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))