Customs Bureau - Séptimo Cocktail Bar

A HIDDEN HOUR

HOSPITALITY PROJECTS

Customs Bureau's brief for Séptimo Cocktail Bar was to build a room that felt like a discovery rather than a destination, tucked on the seventh floor of the Four Seasons Hotel Brickell Miami and reached only after leaving the hotel's bright, promenade-like lobby behind.

Founding Principal Shida Salehi and her team took the pre prohibition golden age of mixology as their starting point, then filtered it through the glamour of an intimate 1970s cocktail lounge, aiming for something that reads as retro without ever tipping into pastiche.

The transition is the whole point. Where the lobby stays open and light, Séptimo closes in deliberately. Curtains in aubergine velvet run floor to ceiling around the seating, absorbing sound and light in equal measure, and low pooled lamplight from mushroom shaped table lamps replaces anything overhead.

Curved banquettes upholstered in deep plum velvet sit low against the drapery, dressed with cushions in a graphic cream and burgundy weave that nods to the era's suiting fabrics without labouring the reference. Barrel chairs in a rust bouclé and dining chairs upholstered in a blue check, their legs turned in warm wood, sit around cocktail tables topped in dark veined stone with polished brass bases that catch the low light.

At the bar itself, the material language turns sleeker. A run of backlit glass block forms the base of the counter, glowing amber from within, topped by the same dark stone used on the cocktail tables. Satin chrome bar stools with channel stitched burgundy seats and rolled bolster backrests line the length of it, echoing the padded banquette seating rather than breaking from it. fractured houndstooth ties the whole floor together, dark enough to hold the room's low light without disappearing into it.

Behind the bar, illuminated circular discs stack in vertical columns either side of the shelving, standing in for the woofers of a vintage speaker stack, while the shelves themselves hold spirit bottles alongside stacked vinyl records, a detail that keeps the room's soundtrack visible as well as audible. A patterned carpet in a fractured houndstooth ties the whole floor together, dark enough to hold the room's low light without disappearing into it.

Palms and banana leaf planting soften the harder chrome and stone surfaces throughout, giving the room the sense of a space that has been lived in and gathered rather than installed all at once. Every surface, from the tactile upholstery to the backlit glass, was chosen to support a specific kind of evening: pre or post dinner drinks, an intimate late afternoon aperitif, conversation that has somewhere quiet to happen. Live performances and DJs run through the space from Wednesday to Saturday, though the design holds its intimacy regardless of how full the room gets.

Séptimo never tries to announce itself to the city beyond its windows. It simply offers Brickell a room to disappear into, close enough to the Four Seasons to feel like an extension of it, distant enough in mood to feel entirely its own.