.svg)
.svg)
*this article first appeared on boothby.com.au February 2026: full article here
It is many a bartender’s dream to open their own bar one day. Not everyone gets to do it. But there is a small group of experienced bartenders out there for whom opening a bar is a more regular occurrence. It might not be a bar of their own, but for folks like Bobby Carey from Studio Ryecroft, opening bars is their job.
Bobby — who spent a number of years bartending in Sydney (Earl’s Juke Joint in Newtown was his last post in town) — moved to Singapore to join Proof Creative, the consulting and advisory arm of Proof & Company, where he worked as a creative director, responsible for developing and executing new bar concepts for a range of clients across the globe.
After that business faced multiple liquidations, Bobby found himself forging a new direction. While he may not be opening his own bar (it is better to do that with other people’s money, anyway), he does have his own business, Studio Ryecroft, which he has co-founded in Singapore with colleague (and fellow ex-Proof & Company employee) Tom Hogan. Here, he talks about setting up the business, their first client, and how to make a good bar better.
BOOTHBY: What is the big idea behind Studio Ryecroft?
BOBBY CAREY: It’s something that has been in the works for a long time. Since leaving Australia, I’ve been more in front of a bar than behind a bar, designing them and creating it and lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best bars and properties globally. I’ve been working pretty much from America to New Zealand over the last couple of years — the only continents we haven’t done is the two Arctics and South America.
And with the ending of my previous role, it was always something I thought about doing, setting up my own thing. The name, Studio Ryecroft comes from my grandfather — he built the first ever cocktail bar in my hometown in the 50s in Ireland, he was this serial entrepreneur; retired when he was 38, opened a bar, opened a pub, and was the first person to import tin foil and toilet paper into Ireland. I don’t know what we were using beforehand.
Growing up, I would go to his house and he would host and he would have parties; his house was named Ryecroft.
I also grew up on a building site as a child, as free child labour for my father. So I really understand seeing plans, and what the vision can look like just from a site walkthrough in an empty space.
Bars are our bread and butter, but we’re doing a couple of restaurant spaces, and lifestyle spaces as well.
BOOTHBY: What is Studio Ryecroft working on at the moment?
BOBBY: The first project we signed was here in Singapore, which is a legacy project. It’s a 140 year old building, which is 80 years old older than Singapore. It’s a national monument. It’s the highest level you can get architecturally that you can’t fuck up.
BOOTHBY: Which always adds complexity to a project.
BOBBY: If you think Australian planning is tough, it’s even harder over here. It was a family home. It was turned into the first station master’s house, was a traditional Chinese medicine place, has been a university. It’s been all these cool places. It’s called the House of Tan Yeok Nee. It’s a crazy, beautiful build.
That’s going to be this huge showcase for what we can do. It’s going to be an 80-seater bar split across three sections of the house, a huge, weird Y-shaped bar we’re putting in, something I’ve never seen before.
And I’m also developing a platform we’re using, which is called the Studio Ryecroft Standards. We always found that it was really tough to benchmark a project just by itself. So what we have developed is a 380 point system where we go in and benchmark properties across each of these points and give scores out of 10, and then give it a fully rounded score percentage. The benefit of that is that we can go to an independent bar and we can give it a benchmark score against the city it’s in, the country it’s in, or if it’s in a brand, against its family brand, or against benchmark 50 Best Bars that we have independently gone through ourselves.
BOOTHBY: Based on your experience, what fixes can you put in place to improve a bar’s quality? Are there low hanging fruit fixes?
BOBBY: There are. To me it’s music and lighting, two of most important things in the space. Don’t put a Sonos in — it’s gonna drop out. Spend a tiny bit more and put a wired system in, it’s going to save you so much money in the long run.
One other thing. I studied film, when I first moved to Australia. At the same time I was working in cocktail bars. It’s the exact same: your lighting is so important, your menu is your script, bartenders are your lead actors. When you’re sitting in a bar, you should have this perfect view of a space.
There’s always a shit seat in a venue, no matter what. So sit in every seat in your venue at different points of the day, at different times, and make sure that seat is taken into consideration; change the room around it as much as you can, so that every guest feels like they’re in the centre seat in the IMAX.
