The team behind Spoke Wine Bar in Somerville, Massachusetts, has a new “bigger baby sister.” Liars, helmed by Paul Butler, brings the unexpected to comfort and bistro fare: squirt guns top cocktails, the vichyssoise integrates almonds, cauliflower, and butter-basted shrimp, and elk is served in lettuce cups. The slightly askew menu is reflected in the space’s design, where SAPID STUDIO structures the interior into matching and divergent halves.
The restaurant and bar take up two former retail spaces in a 1910 brick building. The studio, an architecture and interiors office based in Switzerland, combined the units. Both feature similar footprints, defined by a slightly unusual geometry due to the building’s off-kilter north–south walls.
The studio preserves the main elements of the building: brick walls, pressed tin ceiling, and central steel column. The halves are united in similar color palettes rooted in the same brown, ensuring each side reads as “twins”—but playful departures ensure they’re not fully identical.
A custom perforated zigzag metal screen, rising up from a tiled wall, visually splits the interior in half. On one side, it forms the backdrop and bottle display for the wrap-around bar. On the other side, it acts as the backdrop to cantilevered banquettes. Here steel tabletops are paired with seating of exposed wood grain, stained a custom blue. The same millwork is used to divide the booth seating into four quadrants.
The chef’s background in graphic design informs the project’s punchier moments. More custom stains, this time in yellow, take cues from Risograph printing and brighten the bar-side of the space. Yellow-painted boxes over brick walls frame lighting by Charlotte Perriand. They hover over seating, featuring bright blue chairs.
A custom three-tiered curtain fabricated by Erik Bruce Studio wraps around the main windows. Its dimensions follow the existing traces of the previous projects left on the exposed brick walls. Subtly yet playfully, SAPID STUDIO merges the history of the space with Liars’s quirky concept.
