The best rooftop bar. Ever.

This may feel like it has a tenuous link to food and wine but bear with us! And it definitely aligns with our values – using recycled food and drink packaging to create something beautiful for someone we love.

When our god-daughter informed us (after a recent dollhouse ‘renovation’) that she needed tables and chairs for the rooftop restaurant – above the disco room we’d created – Brandon obliged. Well, that’s how it started, but the fact that it was never quite ready to hand over reveals it may have turned into a personal craft project.

Those who know Brandon well, will know his Champagne-cork furniture, so some of that headed her way. But then one night he picked up the cardboard cover from a slab of dark chocolate we’d cracked open and started studying the right-angled edges.

What followed was a chair prototype, working with the perpendicular folds, then a ladder-backed Shaker chair, and then a chair-and-table set. And to test accurate chair-to-table heights, my childhood printer’s tray miniatures were called in.

After that Brandon put his mind to bar stools. And then he tried his hand at bookshelves. Naturally the bookshelves needed books, so he spent evenings delicately stitching books of Lilliput proportions while watching reruns of Total Recall. First using a stapler on the spine to punch holes and then removing the staple and using a needle and thread to stitch the book.

A discarded box from a bottle of whisky, gifted to Brandon for speaking at a recent conference, was dismantled. And the next morning there was a pop-up bar. Most recently I walked into the study to find him dipping the tiny tops of every single bottle into different colour paint to simulate the wax-dipped tops on the bottles of wine that speak to his current tastes.

Ultimately Brandon built a room for each of us to inhabit, a refuge for when life asks a lot of us. There’s a library for my books, where I can read or listen to music, complete with headphone side table (see the opening image top left). And a place for him to savour fine wines, meet friends, and talk about (as he always puts it): ‘life, the universe, and everything’.

How appropriate it is to be creating a bar for our young god-daughter and her Sylvanian Families rabbits is questionable, so we reframed it as The Chocolate Bar with many, many bottles of different varieties and vintages of drinking chocolate – and the addition of mugs instead of tumblers or wine glasses.

Then Brandon set about labelling the bottles, cutting out minute sections of illustrated paper and tiny single words like ‘cocoa’ and ‘noir’ (see the last bottle bottom right and the middle bottle on the top shelf in the image above). I do think Brandon may have missed his calling as a dollhouse furniture maker.

These two rooms feel symbolic in terms of where life has led us right now. There are demands being made that mean our energies have been called away from the kitchen. For now it feels necessary to take a pause and meet those demands so we may return ready to inspire you. We so appreciate your support and thank you in advance for your grace and understanding.

Supertasters will be taking a three-month hiatus. Paid subscriptions will be paused during that time.