At Bar Blondie, a new wine bar and restaurant in northwest London’s Queen’s Park, the wine list and the interior by Nottingham-based studio Macaulay Sinclair turn out to share the same small cast of imagined creatives. Sommelier Alexandra Price and Silver Tree Restaurants founder Elliot Milne have organized their cellar around four muses, among them Sergio Leone and Ray Eames, while the room they commissioned is conceived as a mid-century modern artist’s living room layered with nods to Leone’s films. What is poured and where it is poured end up reading as two chapters of one fiction.
A mews of former stables gives that fiction its walls. Bar Blondie in Queen’s Park occupies a row of converted early 20th-century horse stables at 19–21 Lonsdale Road, the former site of Milk Beach, the café and wine bar Milne opened on the same street in 2018. The 45-cover room now spills its tables onto the road outside, set up to recall the neighborhood wine bars of Italy and southern France, and a building once made to house horses holds a domestic interior assembled around characters rather than a single owner.
Designed as a living room, the interior is the work of Macaulay Sinclair, a practice specializing in hospitality interior design whose clients include Hawksmoor and Dishoom. The studio framed Bar Blondie as a mid-century modern artist’s living room, drawing on the creative heritage of Queen’s Park and on the building itself. “The space centres around a mid-century narrative and our design philosophy focuses on creating the charming and intriguing atmosphere of a creative’s living room,” Christina Bentley, interior designer at Macaulay Sinclair, said in a statement.
A home built by accumulation is what the palette suggests. Bespoke joinery sits alongside found pieces and thoughtfully chosen finishes, the kind of mix a living room gathers over years rather than receives in a single delivery. Acoustics and warm lighting were carefully considered alongside them, and the artwork follows the same domestic logic: the collection was assembled in partnership with Ryan Stanier, founder of The Art Office and The Other Art Fair, and hung the way a host would hang work at home.
Sergio Leone, twice over, runs through the project. In the room, the Italian director’s spaghetti western aesthetic appears only as a set of subtle nods layered over the mid-century scheme, kept light enough that the space remains a living room rather than a themed saloon. On the wine list, Leone returns as The Director, the section given to iconic estates and expressive cuvées. It is the clearest point where cellar and interior share a character.
Four muses, 200 bins structure the cellar. Price, named among the Top 100 Sommeliers UK 2025 and Harper’s Top 50 Sommeliers 2025, built the 200-bin wine list to bridge classic Old World estates and new-generation independent producers, dividing it into the imagined personal collections of four figures. Alongside The Director sits The Architect, a nod to Ray Eames focused on precision and structure, and The Writer, after Joan Didion, devoted to soulful, terroir-driven wines. The Eames section is where the list touches the room most directly: it names a designer from the same mid-century register Macaulay Sinclair used to furnish the space.
A sommelier trained in art history, Price came to wine by way of the art world. She earned a History of Art degree at Manchester University and moved to London to work in the city’s auction houses before wine redirected her, leading to roles at Annabel’s, Bar Crispin, the Ham Restaurant Group and, most recently, Michelin-starred plant-based restaurant Plates London. For newcomers to her lists, she said, “expect something expressive and a little eccentric; a list that balances creativity with a respect for tradition, built with intention rather than convention.”
The kitchen pairs two regions the way the list pairs its muses. Head chef Alastair Walling, formerly of Albers, Noble Rot Mayfair and Maset, brings a background in southern French cooking, while executive chef Alexander Busca of Milk Beach brings his Italian heritage. Handmade fresh pasta anchors the opening menu, from agnolotti del plin with slow-cooked lamb genovese and provolone to pasta pistou, and the grill sends out a Provençal-inspired monkfish tail with mussels and samphire alongside a 500 g (1.1 lbs) ex-dairy Txuleta rib-eye.
A calendar for the household extends the living-room idea beyond the plate. Throughout the year, Bar Blondie will host DJs, live music, poetry, guest speaker evenings, wine tastings and chess nights, a program meant to surface emerging creative talent from the neighborhood. Music and conversation carry as much weight as the menu, a model closer to Supaform Studio’s EJE listening bar in Belgrade than to a conventional dining room. Between east and west London is where the founders place the project. Price has noted that good wine bars thin out as one moves west across the city, and Milne sees Lonsdale Road’s mix of restaurants, breweries, designers and co-working spaces as the right ground for a new wine bar in west London. “It’s the perfect place to bridge the gap between East London wine bar energy, and West London sophistication and comfort,” Milne said, a reference to the east side’s bar scene, where venues such as Yod Group’s Flipdog cocktail bar in Shoreditch set the tone.
The Actor, the fourth muse, is the only one without a name. Where the other sections borrow from Leone, Eames and Didion, this one pays homage to emerging talent and is filled with energetic, low-intervention producers. In a list written for a household of imagined creatives, one seat is left for someone who has not yet been cast.