A Permanent Sunset Crowns Plutarco’s Myo Hand Roll Bar in Madrid.

Golden hour never ends at Myo. In a corner of Madrid’s Chamberí, Plutarco have engineered a permanent sunset—a warm, backlit glow that crowns the bar and refuses to fade, no matter the hour outside. It sets the tone for a space where the bar isn’t merely furniture; it’s the main event.

That was the brief Plutarco set themselves. The bar “had to be the true star of the show,” the studio says, so it sits raised on an oak platform, finished in green-stained wood the deep shade of nori seaweed. A stainless steel counter caps the upper section, where integrated spotlights frame each hand roll as it lands—a neat piece of theatre that lights the food like a still life.

Alan Prekop Turns a Bratislava Heritage Space Into an Imagined Italian Terrace.

This restaurant in Bratislava doesn't try to look Italian—it tries to feel Italian. Alan Prekop's concept inverts the spatial logic of the interior entirely, transforming the dining room into an imagined terrace in the narrow streets of a historic Italian city.

Above it all, that sunset: a continuous gradient achieved with backlit fabrics in warm ambers and ochres. Everything surrounding the bar is left deliberately raw—exposed piping, more stainless steel—to sharpen the contrast, then pulled together by a softening wash of dark green. The steel does the clever work, catching the warm light and turning “a seemingly cold material into an explosion of warm colours” once the lights come on.

Myo trades as a Day & Night hand roll bar—temaki rolled and eaten by hand at the counter, the Japanese format folded neatly into Madrid’s chatty bar culture—and the interiors move with it, bright and brisk at lunch, moodier and more secretive after dark. A metal shelving unit doubles as a room divider, steering arrivals towards the entrance and bathroom while quietly shifting character under the light, courtesy of an artwork by Fuensanta Sobejano. A wooden frame and translucent yellow glass screen the kitchen like a shadow stage, hinting at the action behind without revealing it—Plutarco’s notion of “seeing without being seen.”

The palette came straight from the menu: the dark green of seaweed, the orange-red of salmon and tuna, the blue of white fish, all carried through to Irene Girona’s graphic identity.

It’s a familiar move for a studio that treats colour as a building material, and whose appetite for food spaces stretches from a 13-square-metre creperie to this. Founded by Ana Arana and Enrique Ventosa, Plutarco take their name from the Greek biographer with a gift for a good story—fitting, for a practice that never lets a space simply sit there.

Proof, again, that Plutarco know exactly when to turn up the heat.

Plutarco Archives.

See more projects by Plutarco published on Yellowtrace.

[Images courtesy of Plutarco. Photography by Pablo Zamora.]