Bar Julius captured industry attention when it entered Sydney’s hospitality scene a year ago, hoovering up numerous local and international accolades for its design, culminating with its win in the IDEA Colour category in November 2025.

Located at the entryway of The EVE Hotel Sydney and part of the broader Surry Hills Village precinct, Bar Julius looks almost psychedelic. Through a glossy red entrance is a joyous, kaleidoscopic peek into bistros past, without straying far from contemporary Sydney.

The venue’s designer, SJB, took architectural cues from Café Australia, a historical Melbourne café designed by Walter Burley Griffin with a dramatic vaulted ceiling. Meanwhile, colour cues came from Grace Cossington Smith’s 1936 painting The Lacquer Room, which depicts the old art deco David Jones department store café in Sydney. 

A double-arched ceiling is the hero of Bar Julius, anchored by a formal timber dado. Bearing the multicoloured artwork Still Life by local artist Louise Olsen, the backlit Barrisol ceiling “dances above the dado”, according to SJB.

“It is a project that’s so much about colour,” says senior associate and co-lead of SJB Sydney’s interiors team, Victoria Judge. “It’s not just about an array of colour; it’s about the way the colours affect the experience.”

For Judge, colour is something of a “lifetime work”. She has spent countless hours thinking about how colours interact, how they impact people emotionally and intellectually, and how to get colours to say “exactly the right amount of what I want to say – but not too much”.

“I totally love colour, ask anyone,” she says. And anyone who attended the IDEA gala in Sydney on 28 November could answer that question. Judge attended wearing a polychromatic print gown and signature round spectacles in blue/grey. Standing beside her co-workers – architectural designer Holly Julian and senior associate Charlotte Wilson, who led the design of The EVE (highly commended in the Colour category) – they covered nearly every colour of the rainbow and its spin-off shades.

It was ironic, then, that they didn’t realise they were up for the IDEA Colour award, sponsored by Designer Rugs. “We simply weren’t expecting it,” says Judge, who was unaware SJB had entered Bar Julius into the Colour category, alongside Hospitality (in which the project was highly commended).

Judge says it was an honour that Bar Julius was recognised specifically for its use of colour, both on a personal level and because colour was “very, very considered” in this project.

Discovering the design concept 

While not specified in the client’s brief, ideas about colour were present from the very beginning of the design process.

Judge recalls: “One of the directors in the office, Adam [Haddow] said, ‘I think the ceiling should be like this’ (and he just gave us the most elementary sketch) ‘and we’re going to have an artwork on it. We’ll find the right one.’ And that was it. From that moment on it was about the ceiling and the artwork as much as everything else.” 

Generally, SJB is interested in both the art of the interior and supporting local artisans. As much as Bar Julius’ ceiling provided a canvas of opportunity for Olsen, it serves as a “beautiful, fun thing in its own right”.

Judge says, “I think that is a very Sydney idea, just to provide something because it’s fun.”

Despite overt design references to classic bistros, Judge says the comfortable mood of the space makes the all-day bar feel like it’s in its right place. The design bears “no agenda” other than to provide happiness to patrons, whether they’re hotel guests or just in the area.

“It’s not an alienating design. It’s very familiar and that was deliberate,” she says. “We wanted people to… feel like it was a space that anyone could use. But also, at the same time, to just be full of joy.” 

How colour works at Bar Julius

The Lacquer Room inspiration entered the design team’s discussions early and pivoted the colour direction. “It’s just this beautiful, warm, golden-toned space with these bright, bright red chairs,” explains Judge. She wanted to explore similarly surprising hues unexpected in a single palette.

Broadly, there are three levels of colour at work in Bar Julius. Rich timber layered with Rosso Ceppo and Tiberio marble together provide the “main colouration”. The two-toned timber floors and veneers on the wall are made from Australian ironbark and jarrah, helping to root Bar Julius in place. 

On the next level, the artwork ‘supports’ the overall warm woody tones. It supplies those surprising pops of colour the designers were chasing.

Then, operating at a third level, are the accents of dull blues. “Deliberately, they’re kept very dull so that they are the accent colours and they’re not competing with the primary colouration,” says Judge. You can find them on the high bar stools, tabletops and the highly reduced denim blue trims on the corners of the large columns. “It’s such a subtle shade, but it’s just the right amount of blue to lift that wood up a little.”

Judge cites the trims as one of her favourite colour moments in Bar Julius. Another? The mustard yellow doors to the deep ocean turquoise blue bathroom. “We took a requirement for luminance contrast… and we just thought ‘how can we have fun?’” she says.

One small flourish – the round blue and red door handles at the entryway – perhaps encapsulate the overall colour intent at Bar Julius.

“The way [the blues] offset the red is what’s beautiful about them and that’s what I’ve spent my life trying to explore: how does one colour affect another, in an intellectual sense as well as an emotional sense?” says Judge. “And you need both because each one makes the other better. If you took those away, it would somehow be missing something.”

Colour is just one (very key) element of the interior design that comes together to make Bar Julius memorable, energetic and, now, award-winning. For Judge, the project has been career-defining – a rare opportunity for her to work on a hospitality project, enhanced by the fact that the client was on board “from day one”. 

“The initial concept drawings are literally what was built and that just simply doesn’t happen,” she says. “That’s so rare.”

IDEA 2026 early bird entries open Monday 2 March 2026.