Goodbye Horses Pub by Leopold Banchini Architects: A Contemporary Homage to Craft and Heritage

Located in the heart of De Beauvoir Town, United Kingdom, Goodbye Horses Pub by Leopold Banchini Architects offers a striking reinterpretation of traditional craft within a contemporary urban setting. This residential neighborhood pub merges local cultural identity with global design sensibilities, creating a warm, eclectic interior that celebrates natural materials, bespoke craftsmanship, and cross-cultural influences.

Bridging Craft Movements Across Cultures

The design reflects an insightful dialogue between the Japanese Mingei Folk Art movement and the English Arts and Crafts movement, both of which emerged during periods of rapid industrialization. While William Morris’s philosophy criticized wage labor and mass production, the Japanese movement emphasized preserving a unique local identity. Over time, these traditions influenced modernist designers like Charlotte Perriand, creating a legacy of thoughtful, human-centered design that transcends borders.

Goodbye Horses Pub translates this historical and cultural resonance into a modern context, considering contemporary global capitalism and the way our digital, stateless visuals—think Instagram feeds—now define cultural identity. The pub’s interiors respond to this context with a sensitive mix of heritage references, material honesty, and playful modernity.

Craftsmanship at the Core

At the heart of the pub is a 10-meter-long timber bar, designed unusually low to serve multiple functions as a counter, kitchen bench, and dining table. Crafted entirely from a single century-old oak tree, the bar showcases the wood’s natural veins, cracks, and bark. Surrounding bespoke furniture—including stools and lighting—combines solid oak, Japanese hemp fiber paper, hand-cast Italian glass, volcanic stone, and oxidized brass, blending rustic vernacular traditions with refined international craft. The result is an eclectic aesthetic where Japanese wabi-sabi, Italian grotesque, and English medieval revival converge effortlessly.

Materiality and Local Know-How

The pub’s interior highlights traditional building techniques and materials. Limewashed walls, hand-textured lime plaster ceilings, and beaten earth floors—made from a blend of soil, straw, and clay coated with natural linseed oil—evoke the warmth of early countryside pubs. Reclaimed Yorkstone slabs provide durability for high-traffic areas and garden spaces, while large hessian curtains, hand-painted by artist Lucy Stein, filter light through evocative, folklore-inspired motifs. These installations echo historic stained glass while creating a distinctly contemporary atmosphere.

All photographs are works of  Rory Gardiner