Shelter

When it came to launching his own cocktail and dining venture, Calgary designer Nick Suche took a very unusual approach to Shelter. Instead of building his concept around a food and bar menu, Nick wanted to deliver an experience – Calgary’s very own bunker style cocktail bar.

“It’s a stylized shelter, in the simplest terms,” Nick says. “No one actually wants to go drink in a bunker. That’s not any fun. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken a lot of elements that would traditionally be in a shelter – such as concrete walls, sandbags and supplies – and we’ve combined them with some military style elements as well as a lot of glamorous or more upscale elements from hotel bars." Inspired by his travels abroad in the U.S. and Europe, Nick opened Shelter on July 27, 2017 in the intimate 42-capacity space on 1st Street right beside Hotel Arts. The space fuses décor elements from Eastern European grunge bars with ritzy hotel bar design to create a strikingly chic watering hole for Calgarians seeking shelter.