Five uncanny venues where guests are treated to frightfully unique interiors

With spooky season in full swing and Halloween rapidly approaching, this lookbook rounds up five venues featuring unusual decor, including faux body parts, dead insects and slaughterhouse machinery. A London pub, a brewery in Copenhagen and a bar in Shanghai are among the selected projects. This is the latest in our lookbooks series, which provides visual inspiration from Dezeen’s archive. For more inspiration, see previous lookbooks featuring billiard tables, wooden staircases and bookmaxxed interiors. Photo courtesy of Schran Images and Hu Yanyun J Boroski, China, by Atelier XY The owner of this Shanghai bar is interested in insects – local studio Atelier XY honoured this through the addition of over 1,000 preserved specimens. A wooden grid covering the back wall and ceiling of the bar area features thousands of beetles housed in individual recesses, while a glass-brick wall containing 42 preserved Thai Black tarantulas acts as a partition. Pull-out drawers, containing yet more taxidermied creatures, double as slim side tables. Photo by Simone Marcoli Oven, Spain, by Clap Studio The atmosphere of being inside an oven was recreated in this Valencia nightclub by Spanish firm Clap Studio. Red lighting, stainless steel, glowing ceiling grids and burnt-looking alpi wood cladding come together to create a blisteringly immersive interior. Photo by Jasper Fry Bar Far, Italy, by Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page Human legs support tables, disembodied hands hold candlesticks and torsos emerge from walls in this unsettlingly cave-like bar by artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page. The space, which was open on a temporary basis during early 2026, was described as being “at once church and tomb, prophecy and ruin, heaven and hell” by installation curator Vittoria Bonifati. Photo by Simon Brown The Audley, UK, by Laplace Dark wood panelling and chairs upholstered in tartan set the mood for The Scottish Room, which inhabits the third floor of The Audley, a pub in London’s Mayfair neighbourhood. Designed by architecture studio Laplace, this room belies the rest of the comparatively playful interior, being dominated by a sprawling chandelier made from deer antlers hanging above a nine-metre-long oaken table. Photo by Hampus Berndtson ÅBEN, Denmark, by Pihlmann Architects A former butchery in Copenhagen’s Meatpacking District has been converted into a lofty brewery by local studio Pihlmann Architects, with an interior partitioned using translucent curtains. The studio elected to retain the original system of hanging rails, which the abattoir would have once used to suspend up to 980 animal carcasses. Read more