Arcade Bar in Midtown Reno
A two-tenant arcade bar and kitchen layout for tenant improvement
Architecture
Midtown Reno, NV
-
2021
Press Start is a Reno arcade bar. When its original South Virginia Street building sold during COVID closure and the bar was forced out, the community stepped in to keep it alive. The owner found a new home at 600 S. Center Street in Midtown and asked Copenhaver Architecture to make the building work for a reboot.
The space had been a dance studio. The building held three or four tenant spaces, existing restrooms and the utility problems that come with older construction in that part of town. The owner's plan was a barcade with a food partner next door, two businesses operating under one roof with their own identities but a shared back of house.
Our role was the architecture behind the experience: layout, permitting, health and building code coordination and the technical documents that let a bar, a kitchen and an entertainment use coexist in one older building. Working with the owner, a specialist bar designer and the building's ownership group, we produced the plan that still shapes how the space runs today.
Everything about this project started with the existing building. The dance studio had mirrors on every surface, which is why this ended up being the last project we measured entirely by hand. Our scanner does not tolerate mirrors, so we walked the whole building with a tape measure and sheets of handwritten dimensions before a single line was drawn.
Utilities were the hardest part of the job. Older buildings in this part of Reno tend to have sewer conditions that need real attention, and this one was no exception. Trash and service access had to be coordinated with the neighboring property, which shared ownership and a trash enclosure with this one.
The bigger design problem was the two-tenant model. The owner wanted the arcade bar and the food tenant to share the building's existing restrooms. That sounds simple until you account for two businesses with different operating hours and different crowds. How do you secure one restroom bank between two tenants so each can lock up independently without stranding the other's customers? Layer onto that the health code requirements for a kitchen, a bar and an entertainment venue, each with its own rules, and the permit set gets complicated fast.
We organized the plan around the relationships that mattered most: the bar, the restrooms and the kitchen. The existing restrooms stayed where they were and became a shared core, with access and security detailed so that either tenant could operate on its own schedule. A pass-through service window connected the food tenant's kitchen directly to the arcade floor, so guests could order without leaving the bar and the food operator could serve both rooms from one line.
The kitchen itself is the part of this project we are most proud of. It is a compact quick service layout, closer to a Chipotle model than a fast food line, built to turn out custom food in a very small footprint. We had worked through similar problems on a salad bar concept in The Basement and a plug-and-play juice bar for a college campus, and that experience carried over here.
The bar was a collaboration. Cabaret Design Group took our floor plans and developed the wet bar and back bar with their own renderings. We folded their drawings back into the permit documents so the city saw one coordinated set. That generalist and specialist model, where we hold the overall plan and bring in a focused expert for one piece of it, is something we do often on hospitality work.
Material choices were about durability and cleanability, not luxury. An arcade bar takes heavy wear on every surface, and the finishes had to be easy to sanitize and hard to damage. Utilitarian doors, exposed back-of-house elements and simple, tough materials kept the budget in check and the space honest. We also preserved a room at the front of the building for operational flexibility.
Credit where it is due: the interior character came from the owner. The patio, the acid-washed concrete floors and the textured feature wall were his calls, and we advised as those ideas came in. The murals by Ardy Richmond showed up one day during construction and were the best thing that happened to the space. They turned a well-organized room into a place with a personality.
