The famous Austrian author Peter Altenberg once described the Loos Bar as:

"… a new “Bar” in Vienna, a tiny but magnificent one.

Black and white auroral marble on the outside, grey greenish marble and red coral wood on the inside. The ceiling is paneled with white and grey marble plates, the wall above the door is made from transparent beautifully drawn onyx plates that are softly lit from the back. It all looks ridiculously rich, but not overloaded, just like the precious natural materials themselves. Everything is masterly arranged and classy looking as you can see in the wall-embedded clock.

The cleverly installed mirrors give the impression that this room is 4 times bigger as it actually is. Only gentlemen are allowed in here, but as an American friend once put it:

“A men only policy would be unthinkable in America, but no real Lady would come here anyway.“

was an Austrian architect, architecture critic, cultural publicist and is

considered one of the founding fathers of modern architecture.

In 1893 Loos traveled to the USA, where he scraped by working as a manual laborer. Only in the final year of his stay did he manage to find work as a furniture designer and architect. Before he ultimately settled in Vienna in 1896, he stopped off in London and outfitted himself with a modern, elegant and pricey new wardrobe.

Adolf Loos was a proponent of modernist objectives in both architecture and design, following the principle “form follows function”. He was opposed to ornamentation and an excess of artistic design in everyday life. Instead, he argued for the use of only the finest materials.

“I never drink wine in a bar, for wine is a purely physical pleasure and does nothing to stimulate the imagination. To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of a martini. To be frank, given the primordial role played in my life by the dry martini I think I really ought to give it at least a page. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception.

It’s inconceivable to drink without smoking, for if alcohol is queen, then tobacco is certainly her consort.

I should take this moment to assure that I’m not an alcoholic. Of course, I’ve occasionally managed to drink myself into oblivion, but most of the time it’s a kind of ritual for me, one that produces a high rather like that induced by a mild drug, a high that helps me live and work. If you were to ask if I’d ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I’d have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead.”