The 150-year-old Cedar Tavern bar in New York City once hosted luminaries such as Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix in Greenwich Village. Now that very same bar lives on at Eberly, South Austin’s new restaurant. When the Cedar Tavern closed in 2006, Eberly partners John Scott and Eddy Patterson bought the nearly 12-foot-tall and 40-foot-long mahogany bar, took some photographs of it, and transferred it in hundred of pieces to a storage unit back in Austin. Then, they set about finding an appropriate home for their haul, landing on a former 15,000-square-foot print shop on South Lamar Boulevard. ICON Design + Build worked with Clayton & Little Architects and interior designer Mickie Spencer to incorporate the Cedar Tavern Bar into a series of spaces including a dining room, coffee shop, and 4,000-square-foot rooftop patio. ICON’s Jonas Durfor, a master carpenter, reconstructed the bar. Reused materials permeate the space, whose prefabricated construction allowed for design interventions without compromising the original components—vintage cotton gin windows were interspersed throughout the interior spaces to allow light in, while the original building’s concrete floor tiles were reused in the patio. Despite a design inspired by an eclectic mix of art nouveau, Victorian, midcentury modern, and British greenhouses from the 1800s, the space is tied together with its color scheme: blues, greens, brass, and mahogany. Each room is coordinated to allow patrons to spend their entire day at the Eberly, from coffee in the study, to drinks on the bar or in the patio, to a meal in the dining room.

Eberly
615 South Lamar Boulevard
Austin, Texas
Tel: 512-916-9000
Architect: ICON Design + Build and Clayton & Little Architects