Dead Tarantulas and Antler Chandeliers: Five Venues That Design for Dread

A Shanghai bar whose partition wall contains 42 preserved Thai Black tarantulas tops a new Dezeen lookbook rounding up five hospitality venues with unsettling decor, published ahead of Halloween.

The roundup, part of Dezeen's ongoing lookbooks series, spans a London pub, a Copenhagen brewery, a Valencia nightclub and a temporary Roman bar. Faux body parts, dead insects and slaughterhouse machinery all feature. Previous instalments in the series covered billiard tables, wooden staircases and "bookmaxxed" interiors (homes lined floor-to-ceiling with books).

Where can you drink with 1,000 dead insects?

At J Boroski in Shanghai, local studio Atelier XY honoured the owner's interest in entomology with more than 1,000 preserved specimens. A wooden grid across the back wall and ceiling holds thousands of beetles in individual recesses, while a glass-brick wall displaying the 42 tarantulas partitions the space. Pull-out drawers containing further taxidermied creatures (animals preserved and mounted) double as slim side tables. The drawers are furniture. The furniture is also a morgue.

What does the inside of an oven feel like?

Spanish firm Clap Studio answered that question literally at Oven, a Valencia nightclub. Red lighting, stainless steel, glowing ceiling grids and charred-looking alpi wood cladding (a composite veneer made of layered wood fibres) combine to recreate the sensation of being baked. The studio calls the result immersive. Fair enough.

Which bar was both church and tomb?

Bar Far in Rome, by artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page, is the collection's strangest entry. Human legs support tables, disembodied hands hold candlesticks and torsos emerge from the walls of its cave-like interior. The space operated on a temporary basis in early 2026. Installation curator Vittoria Bonifati described it as "at once church and tomb, prophecy and ruin, heaven and hell". That's seven nouns for one bar. On this evidence, it earned them.

Where does a nine-metre table meet deer antlers?

At The Audley in London's Mayfair, architecture studio Laplace designed The Scottish Room on the pub's third floor. Dark wood panelling and tartan-upholstered chairs set the tone, and the space departs from the building's otherwise playful interior. Its centrepiece: a sprawling chandelier built from deer antlers, suspended above a nine-metre-long oaken table. Highland kitsch, executed at scale.

Can a slaughterhouse become a brewery?

In Copenhagen's Meatpacking District, Pihlmann Architects converted a former butchery into the lofty ÅBEN brewery, using translucent curtains to partition the interior. The studio kept the abattoir's original system of hanging rails, machinery once used to suspend up to 980 animal carcasses. The rails now hang above beer drinkers rather than meat. Whether that counts as recycling or haunting is left to the visitor.

All five projects remain documented in Dezeen's archive, and the lookbook series continues — a reliable signal that hospitality clients increasingly want interiors guests remember, and perhaps occasionally regret.