THE LEROY
Located in the former site of Fayetteville’s original bowling alley, The Leroy reimagines a dim, low-ceilinged basement on Dickson Street as an intimate yet expansive social environment, an upscale sports bar that honors its industrial past while embracing a contemporary design ethos.
The initial design strategy was rooted in subtraction: removing layers of interior build-out to expose the essential bones of the structure. Its original columns, load-bearing walls, and raw material surfaces that are typically covered in a build out are exposed, placing the historic construction on display. The design seeks not to overlay a new aesthetic, but to amplify the existing one. Concrete, brick, and steel are allowed to speak, forming the material and atmospheric palette of the space.
Two key interventions define the architectural experience: a perforated metal ceiling speckled with an array of pinpoint lights, and a pair of parallel glazed walls.
A lowered perforated mesh skims the ceiling, while also doubling above with a field of suspended pinpoint lights above the ceiling plane. While creating a sense of intimacy desired in the setting through the lowered plane, the illumination above also gives a sense of doubled space. This play of compression and release generates a spatial richness in spite of the limited ceiling height.
Similarly, the parallel glass walls operate in tension reflecting, refracting, and extending the space across itself. Their placement produces optical layering that continuously reshapes as one moves through the bar, creating an interplay between interior and exterior that is dynamic and unexpected.
Strategically positioned along Dickson Street, the entrance and exterior zone stretch toward the street to create a welcoming commons, creating an outdoor gesture that announces the project’s presence while transitioning visitors into its atmospheric interior. Rather than seal off from the city, The Leroy reaches outward, engaging the urban fabric with a porous and inviting threshold.
THE LEROY
YEAR 2024
FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS
Photos by King Lawrence
This is not a nostalgic renovation, but a reinterpretation. The Leroy transforms a once-forgotten basement into a contemporary urban gathering space: layered, luminous, and deeply rooted in its structural origins.