The Emerald Isle Exports Irish Pubs Around The Globe
- Editor OGN Daily
- 30 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upwards of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the world. It's all about recreating the vibe, the essence.
Some would say that it's one of Ireland's greatest exports. Germany is its biggest European client, and Switzerland is a close second. In Russia, there are five. The company’s handiwork is also found in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Japan, Nigeria and Mauritius, and at the New York-New York Hotel in Las Vegas. A project is currently underway in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
This year alone, the company has nine projects in various stages of completion, including in the Canary Islands and Cape Town. In fact, the company has designed one on every continent except Antarctica. From initial conversation to grand opening, it can cost a client anywhere from $250,000 to over $1 million.
Founder Mel McNally says each pub is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.
The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages.
“We recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub - in the scale, the architecture, the mix of details, the craftsmanship,” McNally says. “No two are the same, but they have an essence that we carry into projects we do now.”