London’s swankier nightlife has often mistaken more for better. One thinks of the faux patina, acres of backlit onyx, the over-upholstered banquettes, the interiors that reek of moodboards. Dive, which has quietly opened in a basement off Chiltern Street in Marylebone, is a riposte against all of it.
Velvet underground: Dive, London
Its owner, Antoine Le Dirat-Giacometti, is a French DJ whose decades behind the decks have made him, in architect Ariel André’s words, ‘a vibe setter – someone who provides mood, rhythm and tone’. Dive is the spatial extension of that persona and was cannily designed by André’s Paris studio, Golem. On the face of it, the bar is an unlikely commission for an architect whose current projects include a building for the Diriyah Biennale Foundation in Saudi Arabia and curatorial architecture for the Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan, but the brief was more about atmosphere as architecture than scale.
For what the owner and architect inherited was, by carrying ‘the feeling of having been abandoned after something abrupt and bad happened’. A perfect canvas, it transpires, for creating a soigné bar from scratch.
The creative brief crystallised early – ‘a concrete block in a velvet glove’, says André – and that tension is evident in every surface, precisely because the architect kept so much of it raw: an engineered rough cocoon wrapped in a tactile interior.
Architect Ariel André, of Parisian studio Golem, designed Dive as a ‘concrete block in a velvet glove’
A house record collection, built over 20 years by Dive’s DJ owner Antoine Le Dirat-Giacometti, is shelved within reach of the turntable
The bar reveals itself in warm, buttery light, glossy and reflective, convex mirrors catching your movement, bending the room back at you as you enter. Upholstery, padded walls and floor-to-ceiling carpet, developed and made in France, add a particular softness. The glossy surfaces are designed to take scratches from glasses and jewellery; the velvety walls to retain the imprint of bodies.
The shift between bar and lounge is made physical by a bespoke acoustic threshold – a one-of-a-kind sound shower developed by Berlin-based specialist Basil Martion – that condenses the atmosphere on crossing before releasing into the bass-driven lounge. Overhead, the concrete vaulted arches are bare – water from the 2025 fire at the neighbouring Chiltern Firehouse damaged the basement mid-construction, exposing the raw shell. André kept it.
The bespoke quart-de-lune tables embed their own social logic: their quarter-circle geometry seats couples side by side rather than face to face, dissolving what André calls ‘the interviewer-interviewee dynamic’ in favour of something more complicit. Each arch in the lounge has a distinct configuration; one becomes a ‘fun room’, a velvet-saturated chamber that migrates from daybed to dancefloor across the night. The non-gendered bathroom, meanwhile, gives over its central floor space to a banquette rather than basins, with a one-way mirror looking into the fun room – its conceit, André notes, borrowed from club backstages.
The bar, which is cocooned in swathes of velvet and carpet, serves cocktails that include the 10:58, a twist on an Old Fashioned, and Dive Hydrator, a non-alcoholic coconut water drink originally conceived for marathon runners
Music, too, is structural in a way that goes beyond playlist curation. Le Dirat-Giacometti assembled tracks alongside the blueprints, each assigned to a specific space – a song for the staircase, another for the pillows. The hydraulic DJ booth adjusts for seated or standing performance, or reconfigures for a live band; a record collection built over 20 years by Le Dirat- Giacometti is shelved within reach of the turntable.
At the bar, the 10:58 – a lethal reworking of the Old Fashioned and named for the running time of Prince’s song Purple Music – is reason enough to start up a tab. The Dive Hydrator, built from coconut water, lemongrass, ginger and Celtic salt, was originally conceived for marathon runners, but has since found currency with those who want a long night without alcohol. The bar snacks skew simply with the croque-monsieurs, sourced entirely from producers across France, already becoming, in André’s words, ‘the most addictive substance in the room’.
The bar’s moniker, Dive, actually came last. It only became evident to Le Dirat-Giacometti as the space began to take shape – the architecture generated its own word. You descend. The surface falls away.
Dive is located at 50-54 Blandford St, London W1U 7HX, United Kingdom