Slade Architecture

Slade Architecture designed the Barbie Café and B-Bar on the sixth floor of the Barbie Flagship store in Shanghai, China as an immersive dining experience intended to expand on the overall Barbie Flagship store experience.

Mattel worked with Shanghai-based celebrity chef-restaurateur David Laris to conceive a place where European glamour meets classic American diner- expressing Barbie’s international credentials and her American/Californian heritage.

 

By day the Barbie Café provides perfect place for a tasty lunch or an enchanting dinner.  The sexy B Bar, a sculptural black bar under a hanging mobile of Barbie icon cut-outs rocks until 2am, serving an alluring menu of creative cocktails –BarbieTinis and Malibu Barbies – to real-life glamour girls and their attendant Kens.

To accommodate the different ages and atmospheres, Slade chose a simple and striking palette: black lacquer, white accents, pink upholstery and curtains. Slade designed the custom herringbone tile pattern on the floors and walls to recall the herringbone the herringbone swimsuit that Barbie first wore when she debuted at the New York Toy Fair in 1959.

Furniture was also designed by Slade Architecture and includes acrylic chairs printed with whimsical silhouette prints of iconic chairs: one Chinese antique, one European antique, one international modern.  These silhouette prints create a literal blend of the café references.  Table bases are flat cutout silhouettes of classic turned wood profiles continuing the play between two-dimensional flat silhouette and three-dimensional chair. This is a playful allusion to the Barbie Dreamhouse and other Barbie accessories which use flat graphics to represent realistic detail at toy scale.  Continuing the reference to the number one Barbie, Slade conceived the signature plate as a circular array of the world famous doll in her timeless black and white dress.