An 18-seat cocktail bar tucked into Chelsea is turning heads for building its entire interior out of Swiss office shelving. VV's Cocktail Room, created by restaurateur Josh Greenspan with furniture company USM, wraps nearly every surface in Steel Blue USM Haller modular shelving, transforming a storage system best known for closets and workstations into the architectural bones of a Manhattan bar.
VV's is located in Chelsea and contains just 18 seats, according to Dezeen. Visitors pass through a glass-block wall partition to enter the space, where navy blue USM panels form the surrounding walls and wrap behind the bar itself, jutting out into functional shelving. Dezeen reports that the USM Haller System serves as the architectural framework of the space rather than simply being inserted as furniture.
Greenspan worked directly with USM's director of architectural development, Ian Mutschelkanus, to pull off the design, per the same outlet's reporting. A dark walnut wood was used for the bar top and tables, paired with burgundy-upholstered seating and banquette seating built by Greenspan's father, Michael Greenspan, covered in a similar hue. A wavy pendant light by New York lighting studio Studio Kawabi hangs overhead, adding a softer counterpoint to the shelving's hard lines.
A Design Rooted in Tokyo and Hong Kong
The bar's look draws on the futuristic aesthetic between the 1960s and 1990s of Tokyo and Hong Kong, as described by Dezeen. That retro-futurist sensibility, filtered through steel-toned modular shelving and dark walnut, gives the small room an outsized visual identity rarely seen in a space this tight. It's a deliberate departure from treating USM's shelving as mere storage, instead using it the way a building might use structural steel.
This isn't the first time USM's modular system has crossed over from furniture into full interior architecture. A Coperni retail space in Paris previously used USM panels for its walls, per Dezeen's reporting, and a separate Dezeen report on that project describes how Coperni collaborated with USM Haller on its first-ever boutique, a shop-in-shop at Printemps Haussmann, reinterpreting the brand's cubic storage systems as tables, walls and display areas. According to USM's own account, Coperni went on to build pop-up stores entirely from the modular Haller system in cities including Paris, London, Hainan, Shanghai, Seoul and New York, with the shelving serving as both wall structure and product display.
An Omakase Cocktail Program With James Beard Pedigree
Behind the bar, the drinks menu borrows a format more associated with sushi counters than cocktail lounges. Greenspan partnered with James Beard Award-winning bartender Neal Bodenheimer and longtime friend Vincent Favela for the omakase cocktail program, Dezeen reports. Bodenheimer's bar-world credentials run deep: he opened the New Orleans craft cocktail bar Cure in 2009, and the James Beard Foundation named it the nation's outstanding bar program in 2018, according to Imbibe Magazine.
The food side of the operation stays in the family. Greenspan's mother, five-time James Beard Award winner Dorie Greenspan, created VV's bar snack menu, per Dezeen's reporting on the opening. The omakase-style cocktail format VV's has adopted fits a broader moment for tasting-menu-driven drink programs in the city; Eater NY reported that a separate cocktail-omakase concept from the teams behind Katana Kitten and Superbueno was slated to open on the Lower East Side in March, featuring cocktails from Tokyo Bar Libre.
Part of a Wider Wave of New York Bar Openings
VV's arrives alongside a handful of other recently completed New York bars. Dezeen notes that Odd Ball by House Under Magic and a second Brooklyn location for concept shop and wine bar Million Goods have also recently opened in the city, suggesting a busy season for ambitious bar design across the five boroughs. Together, the projects point to designers and owners increasingly treating bar interiors as architectural statements rather than backdrops.
For now, VV's stands out for its sheer commitment to a single material system — turning what is normally relegated to back offices and garages into the defining feature of a cocktail room. Whether that steel-blue, shelving-wrapped look becomes a lasting template for small-format bars or stays a one-off experiment, it has already given Chelsea a distinctly different kind of night out.
