BABY BAR: A Pop-Up Bar Concept
October 2025 | Vested Interest | South Bend, IN
In the fall of 2025, we turned a vacant 131-year-old South Bend garage into a one-night pop-up bar, in collaboration with Permit Pending and Vested Interest. We called it BABY BAR – a small, temporary bar that doubled as a love letter to tight, intimate hospitality: the kind of room where you don’t need much more than a few seats, a short drink list, and an excuse to brush shoulders and get a little more honest than you meant to. The namesake defined the scale and the mood: small, close, a little bit reckless, and instinctively romantic.
For one Friday in October, people entered through a half-open, unassuming garage off Tutt Street. Inside, we built a bar from scratch: lighting, signage, seating, curated drinks, and a soundtrack that made the whole place feel like a secret you’d only just been let in on. I handled the concept, visual identity, and bar build-out, from the name and graphics to the feeling of the room once people were inside. Due to city-sanctioned liquor limitations, we only had beer and wine to work with, which turned the drinks into another constraint to play with. We leaned into it by creating spritzes, highballs, and booze-forward mixed drinks using vermouths and amari, proving that you don’t need a full back bar to make a night feel generous.
I’m drawn to projects like this because they borrow from installation, hospitality, and performance all at once. As a disciple of Yi-Fu Tuan’s thinking around space and place, I’m fascinated with how quickly a room can change identity: a storage space, once gutted, becomes an ordinary garage; add a table and some shelving and it becomes a room; drag in a few cases of booze, glassware, and an old couch and suddenly that room becomes a bar. Finally, you add people, and it becomes an experience.
The guest is as integral to the final sum as the cash register or the wine fridge; without them, the bar is simply a backdrop. Once you move through that space, you become complicit in the stage and the social experiment. Who shows up? How long do they stay? What does it take for a raw space to feel like somewhere you want to linger?
BABY BAR took place two days before my 30th birthday, and although it functioned as a party, it was quietly a gift to myself. It gathered together so many impulses I’d been following for years: hospitality, collaboration, transformation, the pleasure of designing an experience people could physically step into. It felt like the culmination of things I’d been moving toward over the last decade, knowingly or not. More than anything, it proved that we could build an experience from the ground up, invite people into it, and watch it become something bigger the moment they arrived.
