Home / London / Cocktail Bars / A Bar with Shapes for a Name, Hackney · $$$ · No. 14 on our 50 best cocktail bars in the world
Remy Savage's Hackney bar takes its cue from the Bauhaus, and it applies that school's most famous principle, form follows function, right down to the drinks. The room is a study in primary colours and clean geometry, and the menu applies design-school rigour to cocktails, stripping each build to its essential idea. It is one of the most intellectually ambitious bars in London and a fixture on the World's 50 Best Bars, yet it never lets the concept get in the way of a good night. We rank it fourteenth in the world.
The name, and the Bauhaus idea
The bar's actual name is not words at all but three Bauhaus shapes: a yellow triangle, a red square and a blue circle, a reference to the colour-and-form theory taught at the school. Everyone simply calls it "Shapes." The whole venue is modelled on the Bauhaus, the German art school founded in 1919 that sought to unify art, craft and technology, and its governing idea, that form should follow function, shapes every decision here. Savage has framed the bar's animating question as, "how can we manifest beauty at scale?" In practice that means fruits and herbs are turned into distillates for consistency, cocktails are pre-batched and individually bottled for speed and repeatability, and the menu is kept deliberately short. Drinks arrive with large geometric ice and precise, molecular garnishes. Nothing is decorative for its own sake; everything has a job.
Remy Savage
The bar is the work of Remy Savage, a French bartender who began his career while studying philosophy, a background that clearly informs his concept-driven approach to menus. He made his name as head bartender at Little Red Door in Paris, celebrated for its conceptual menus, then moved to London to lead the bar at the Artesian at the Langham. His talent has been widely recognised: he won Bombay Sapphire's World's Most Imaginative Bartender award in 2014 and was named International Bartender of the Year at the 2022 Spirited Awards during his time at Shapes. He opened the bar with co-founders Paul Lougrat, a colleague from the Artesian, and Maria Kontorravdis. Together they built something that feels less like a themed bar than a fully realised design philosophy you can drink inside.
The room
Shapes sits on Kingsland Road, in the Hackney stretch that runs up from Shoreditch toward Dalston, and it opened in May 2021. It seats around sixty across a dual-room ground floor and a downstairs bar, and the design is pure Bauhaus discipline: reddish-brown mahogany surfaces and furniture, chrome, and functional touches like fold-away high tables with coat hooks that fasten to the wall to clear the floor for dancing. Even the lighting is a reference, modelled on the lamp in Walter Gropius's office. Writers have noted the faint air of a science lab about the place, especially in the back room and downstairs, which is entirely in keeping with a bar that treats cocktail-making as a design and engineering problem.
The drinks
The menu is a short list of pre-bottled house cocktails, each engineered for consistency through distillation, clarification, fat-washing, carbonation and batching. The best-documented signature is the Kazimir, a vodka, peach-yogurt and absinthe blanche serve named after the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, whose 1918 "White on White" is the conceptual reference; it is the subject of a dedicated feature in Punch. Other house drinks reported over time include an approachable Tom Collins-style number and drinks built around single ideas like a heatless distilled habanero for aroma without burn. The point is always the same: an idea, expressed as cleanly as possible in a glass. Despite the high-concept framing, the drinks are approachable, balanced and genuinely delicious, and they are priced to be a neighbourhood pleasure rather than a special-occasion splurge.
A fast rise
The industry noticed quickly. Shapes debuted on the extended list of The World's 50 Best Bars at No. 77 in 2021, its first year, then vaulted into the top 50 at No. 37 in 2022 and reached a peak of No. 35 in 2023. It has since moved back onto the 51-100 list, at No. 61 in 2024 and No. 73 in 2025, but its influence on the conversation about design-led bartending has far outlasted any single placement. For a bar barely a few years old, built on an idea most people would have called too clever by half, that is a remarkable trajectory.
How to visit
Shapes takes bookings for the early evening and switches to walk-ins only later in the night, when it takes on the energy of a party rather than a tasting room. It is, at heart, a neighbourhood bar: unpretentious, affordable and fun, in deliberate contrast to the seriousness of its concept. Hours run into the small hours, so it is worth checking current times, but the spirit of the place is best caught by arriving with an open mind and letting the short, strange, brilliant menu lead you. Come for the idea; stay because it is a genuinely good night out.
East London has plenty of good bars, but this is the one doing something no one else is. Explore the rest through our London cocktail-bar guide and the wider London bar guide.
Why it's number fourteen
Shapes earns its place as proof that a strong idea, fully committed to, can make a bar feel genuinely new. Plenty of rooms borrow a theme; very few build an entire philosophy of drinking and then deliver on it in the glass, night after night, without losing their sense of fun. Savage took the Bauhaus at its word, form following function, and produced a bar where the concept and the cocktails reinforce rather than fight each other. That originality, executed with real warmth, is why it sits at number fourteen and why it remains one of the most talked-about bars in London.
What to order
- 01
The Kazimir
Vodka, peach yogurt and absinthe blanche, named for the painter Kazimir Malevich: the anchor signature.
- 02
Whatever's shortest on the menu
The pre-bottled house list is small and considered; trust it.
- 03
An approachable house Collins
A crowd-pleasing, long, refreshing option when you want something easy.
- 04
Ask about the distillates
The house-made distilled ingredients are where the cleverness lives.
