Atlas Bar

With its beautifully foreboding art deco exterior, Singapore’s Parkview Square office building has earned the nicknames “Gotham” and “Batman building” among locals. But one step inside its lobby will reveal a warm, ornate space filled with red carpets, leather booths, and a giant golden tower.

The 26-foot tall tower is actually a gin library containing 1,300 varieties from all over the world. The library is part of Atlas, a bar that opened inside Parkview in 2017. Visitors and workers (the building is home to various organizations, including the embassies for Mongolia, Austria, and the United Arab Emirates) can sip gins from regions as far-ranging as Bolivia, Belgium, and Japan, and dating back as far as 1910. Doubling down on its Gilded Age vibe, the bar’s cocktail menu revolves heavily around gin and champagne.  

Prior to Atlas, the space served as a wine bar with an unusual twist: The bartender, dressed as a fairy, would “fly” via a wire mechanism to retrieve bottles in the tower. While the days of soaring servers are long gone, the experience of sipping a martini or French 75 in this elegant space is no less grandiose.