YOD Group has installed FlipDog in Shoreditch’s Imperial Hall not by reading East London’s bar aesthetic back to itself, but by importing a fully formed Ukrainian creative vision — street artist, lighting studio, material logic — into one of the world’s most imitated neighborhoods. The two-floor venue occupies a ground-floor drinkery and an 80-seat basement within an early 20th-century building, combining textured foil walls, steel, leather, and commissioned surrealist artwork into a space that operates as both cocktail bar and cultural proposition. FlipDog doesn’t position itself against London’s bar scene — it simply declines to engage with it on its terms.
The ground floor establishes its position quietly. Twelve seats face large arched windows that give passersby a framed view into the mixology laboratory — a deliberate inversion of bar opacity, trading the hidden interior for studied visibility. Silver-toned walls finished in textured foil reflect the street light; minimalist steel arches frame the entrance to the lab while warm leather upholstery on the bar counter and seating introduces a retro-futuristic register without resolving it into a period reference.
Above the bar counter, a thin directional beam of light activates the moment a freshly prepared cocktail is placed on a marked spot — illuminating the drink from above with a precision that reads as theatrical but functions as a genuine lighting solution. The system was designed by Expolight, a Ukrainian commercial lighting company with an extensive collaborative history with YOD Group. It is, in its way, a detail that could pass unnoticed if it didn’t work, and that rewards the guest who pays attention.
The basement operates on an entirely different register. Eighty guests descend into a space where semi-darkness is structural — not a mood choice but the foundational condition through which all other material decisions are read. Saturated colour, cobalt blue, yellow and red tones, the cold sheen of metal, and the natural warmth of wood and leather build an atmosphere that is dense without being heavy.
The first object to arrest the eye is a custom circular sink encasing a cylindrical glass flask suspended in transparent glycerine, within which sits a metal loggerhead — a heating tool used by 18th-century bartenders to prepare hot drinks. It reads as a museum exhibit, and it is meant to: the piece compresses centuries of mixology culture into a single transparent volume, making bar history visible as object rather than atmosphere. The gridded metal surfaces of the bar counter and tables extend this historical reference — both formally derived from the spill stop, the recessed section of a traditional bar counter designed to catch condensation and excess liquid.
The focal point of the basement is a series of sofa niches upholstered in an exclusive fabric print by WAONE, a member of the Kyiv-based street art duo Interesni Kazki, known internationally for large-scale murals and for storefront installations created for Hermès. WAONE’s pattern carries his signature surrealist aesthetic — a layered register of philosophical, scientific, and mythological imagery — applied here at the scale of an architectural envelope. The commission brings a practice rooted in public muralism into direct contact with the private intimacy of upholstered seating.
Oak wall panels on the lower floor introduce an op-art effect: their pattern appears to dissolve at the edges of perception, producing a sense of spatial instability that reinforces the surrealist program without relying on digital or theatrical artifice. A flock finish — a velvet-like coating — covers the bar counter façade and sections of the walls, adding tactile weight to surfaces that, in most comparable venues, remain visually smooth and physically inert. These are material choices that register on the body before they register as design decisions.
The Ukrainian identity running through FlipDog is structural, not incidental. YOD Group, WAONE, and Expolight represent three distinct Ukrainian creative practices operating in concert within a single London venue — a studio known for hospitality interiors across Eastern Europe, a street artist with an international exhibition record, and a lighting company with decades of commercial experience. “For us, it was important to create a space that would win over London’s demanding audience not by imitating the city’s top bars, but by setting its own standard and offering a unique aesthetic. The cocktails mixed at FlipDog are art. Together with WAONE’s pattern and our interior design, they represent a contemporary Ukrainian vision that feels both understandable and compelling to the world,” says Dmytro Bonesco, co-owner and art director of YOD Group.
FlipDog’s most specific claim is not about mixology or surrealism but about cultural legibility: that a vision formed in Kyiv, applied with full formal confidence to a Shoreditch basement, doesn’t need to translate itself into local terms to be understood. The glycerine loggerhead, the WAONE upholstery, the flock-coated counter — none of these elements defer to the neighborhood. That refusal is the design.
FlipDog by YOD Group | Location: Imperial Hall, Shoreditch, London — Key materials: textured foil, steel, leather, oak panels, flock finish, glycerine