These Bars and Restaurants Feel Like You’re in Someone’s Living Room

The same ostrich has been popping up in my Instagram feed over and over lately. It’s a taxidermied beast that holds court in what I initially thought was someone’s house in Europe:

The bird I’ve been seeing in so many birthday social media stories, however, isn’t from an apartment in the Marais quarter of Paris; its residence is New York City’s Brass restaurant and Tusk Bar, which opened two years ago inside Manhattan’s Evelyn Hotel, and is designed to make you feel like you’re entering the opulent home of, say, a European art collector with great taste and, I imagine, an enviable 1stDibs wishlist. The space was designed by Islyn Studio, which says it’s “a love letter to the Parisian apartments of the 1920s.” As the studio’s founder and creative director Ashley Wilkins tells me, “We imagined it as a kind of French salon, an intimate antechamber and natural prelude to dinner at Brass. During our research, we came across the story of a Parisian apartment discovered untouched after decades, its rooms sealed in time until the passing of Madame de Florian at [age] 91.”

There are plush gold settees and ottomans, and parlor palms huddled over an oval coffee table and carpeted floors. Red curtains blur the divide between the oyster bar and the restaurant, helmed by chefs Jeremiah Stone and Fabián Von Hauske Valtierra of Contra and Wildair fame. It’s the kind of environment, the Studio says, where “the air hums with an unhurried energy.”

As with purse hooks and not horrible chairs, a restaurant that feels like a living room is never a requirement for me, but it’s always a plus. Something happens to me in spaces designed with this level of conviviality: when seated on one of their spacious sofas, my shoulders relax, my appetite grows, and, even if I’m dining solo, I feel less like a diner on a timer and more like a cozy person breaking bread with other cozy people.

The years following COVID lockdowns has led to more and more bars and restaurants with this “home”-inspired design ethos, from the aspirational, like The Tusk Bar, to more casual, tchotchke-inflected spaces. During peak social distancing, many of us took a long, hard look at ourselves in those DIY foam mirrors and discovered a new appreciation for both community (RIP Zoom happy hours) and comfort (ah, the soft life of the WFH glory days). Folks turned inward, quite literally, to the creative catharsis of decorating their own houses; sofas got deeper, “performance velvet” achieved immense popularity, and Pinterest boards popped off with shag rug conversation pits. As restaurant doors reopened, the lounge that felt like a retro house party had potent appeal. Carousel in Bushwick opened in January 2024 with ’70s-style conversation pits that encouraged intermingling; Pearl Box, which opened the same year as Brass and Tusk, became an instant SoHo darling thanks to its retro-attic-like ceiling, red carpeting, and gummy candy-filled crystal dishes. These were places that felt like stepping into an Architectural Digest house tour — like entering a home we wished was our own (or, at least, that of a friend who included us on their invite list).

In 2026, after a decade-plus of white-walled millennial minimalism, diners are increasingly gravitating toward a more personal aesthetic perspective. At Honeysuckle in Philadelphia (Cybille St. Aude-Tate and Omar Tate’s second coming of their restaurant Honeysuckle Provisions), the restaurant has a “free-flowing” living room feel with “comfy cognac-colored couches coaxing people to chill and chat,” as Eater reported last year. Then there’s Schmuck, from co-owners and bartenders Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy, which opened in NYC’s East Village in January 2025 with a self-described living room space and curl-up-in-me Togo sofas.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, you can find Kissaten Corazon, with its mismatched armchairs and “Grandpa’s study” vibe, and chef Miles Thompson’s Baby Bistro, which serves its seasonal cuisine in a cozy Craftsman house (to critical acclaim). In San Francisco, chef Paul Toxqui’s Left Door (opened in 2023) embraces the appeal of being tucked inside the second floor of a Marina district Victorian house (the sumptuous living room begs for Hercule Poirot to mansplain a murder there). Finally, and perhaps in the most literal take on the trend, there was the dramatic rise and fall of Upstairs in spring of 2025, an Oakland cafe that was, indeed, located in an apartment upstairs from Snail Bar — until it was shut down for being a little too homey (the space didn’t have the proper commercial permits).

On the heels of a year filled with third-space discourse, restaurateurs and customers clearly yearn for the level of intimacy and personality that the living-room-as-restaurant masters; it either taps in to our own, lived nostalgic experiences, or those that feel escapist, as is the case with Brass and Tusk. The desire for this immersiveness only seems to be growing in 2026. The goal, Wilkins tells me, is for “Spaces like this [to] shape the experience […] before a word is spoken or a drink is poured. They place guests inside a story, where atmosphere, texture, and light quietly guide how the evening feels and is remembered.”

There really is no place like home — all the better if the home comes with a great cocktail menu.