Sex in the Stacks: Play Cafe and Lounge in NYC - Remodelista
Julie had just arrived in New York last fall, and we were en route to the office when we ducked into a nice-looking coffee place. Photographs courtesy of the Museum of Sex The outside looks like a demure, well-designed cafe. The building dates back a century or so, and the project architect, Eric Mailaender of Resistance Design, recreated the original storefront using old tax record photos (and pleasing the landmarks commission). The Nice & Sweet Cafe lives up to its name. The counter is nicely detailed with a knife edge. “The idea was to create a stylish, straightforward cafe that would attract locals,” says Mailaender. Cross the border from the cafe into the library and you quickly realize this is no ordinary study area–it’s Play, the MoSex (as the Museum of Sex is known) lounge and bar. The lounge presents a series of intimate seating areas cleverly sectioned off by custom-built steel shelving detailed with plywood. Each set of stacks has its own mix of art and furniture, including comfy leather sofas and uncomfy piano benches purchased on Ebay and finished with black neoprene on top. The place has a distinctly night vibe even by day–note the woven steel benches and the shift in the paneled ceiling lighting from the cafe’s glass globes to inset red circles with half chrome bulbs. I turned to Mailaender for a translation and he explained: “We thought of the progression from the street towards the back of building as a striptease of sorts... ...starting off demure and respectful and then getting sexier. It’s a process of gaining intensity, gaining complexity in style, losing sobriety and some norms, until you reach a more ‘trippy’ and hotter experience at the bar.” Losing sobriety: situated at the far corner of the lounge, the carved mahogany bar originally stood in an old pub in the UK. One of the ways he did that was by bringing the ceiling soffit down to meet the shelving, so that it looks built in. The bar specializes in elaborate aphrodisiacs. The food, too, is intended to trigger the senses. To encourage shared seating, the leather banquettes opposite the bar are deliberately outsized (they hold eight). The bar’s neon night lights. There are two bathrooms at the far back simply labeled No. Their sinks are divided by layers of structural glass that offer a glancing view of the person at the basin on the other side.