At CannaRoomz, the original brick vaulting of a Prague basement is left to run the show, and every material added around it has to answer to its rhythm rather than compete with it. Designed by Prague-based studio BekArch and completed in 2025, the 56.65-square-metre bar occupies the first basement level of a residential building on Sokolovská Street, in the city’s Karlín district. Reached through a street-level shop, it trades daylight for depth, and raw structure for atmosphere.
The original vaulting is the defining feature of the space, meticulously exposed and preserved rather than concealed behind a new ceiling. The massive brick arches set the rhythm of the entire layout, breaking what could have been one long room into a sequence of naturally intimate bays within this Prague basement bar.
Technical infrastructure does double duty throughout: exposed ventilation ducts thread beneath the vaults, repurposed as support structures for climbing plants that trail along the brickwork rather than being boxed away out of sight. It turns a necessity into a design decision, and gives the greenery somewhere to hold on.
A single fluid space unfolds beneath the arches, naturally divided into a bar area and a main dining lounge. The bar counter anchors the entrance as the room’s visual centerpiece, its facade clad in vertical, glossy green tiles finished with a deliberately rustic texture.
Integrated lighting does the work of finishing the counter. An LED strip tucked beneath its edge casts light across the uneven glossy green tile surface, producing reflections that give the facade depth it wouldn’t have under flat illumination. Above it, a custom structure intertwined with ivy and frosted globe pendants adds a second, softer layer of glow.
Towards the back of the room, the mood shifts. The wall beneath the largest arch is dominated by striking green-and-white marble cladding — a material language that recalls the burgundy marble bar counter at Sagoma Studio’s Bar Rito in Milan, where stone is similarly used to mark a shift in register within a single room.
That marble surface transitions directly into custom booth seating upholstered in deep, vertically channeled emerald velvet, smoothing the shift from stone to fabric without either material announcing itself over the other.
Concrete, brick, velvet and flora meet across the space without any one material dominating the others — a combination that gives BekArch‘s basement conversion a tactile range rarely found below street level, and one shared by other recent basement and industrial-leaning bars, including Supaform Studio’s Eje in Belgrade, where Yugoslav brutalism is treated with a similarly restrained hand.
The vaults get the final word even after the room fills for the night: as the LED strip catches the tile and the pendant globes dim into a softer glow, it’s still the brick arches overhead that decide how far the light is allowed to travel before the next one interrupts it.
CannaRoomz by BekArch | Location: Sokolovská Street, Karlín, Prague, Czech Republic — Year: 2025 — Key materials: brick vaulting, green-and-white marble, emerald velvet, glossy green tile