Wes Anderson’s Bar Luce is a Trendy Must-Stop Café in Milan

Wes Anderson is the ultimate filmmaker and many creative people and I will hear no other opinions on the matter. He’s my one and only, and I will worship him forever for creating The Royal Tenenbaums and giving Bill Murray so many opportunities to be himself.

Anderson creates dreamworlds in both story and set and he completely encapsulates the viewers’ brain space. He puts what’s in his head into the world and then lets people be a part of it.

So when I started reading about Bar Luce, the cafe that Wes Anderson designed and implemented at the new Fondazione Prada, I knew I was meant to be there, drinking tea and writing in my notebook.

When my Mom asked if I wanted to tag along on a work trip to Milan, I said yes, partly because of Italy, partly because of Bar Luce. And it was exactly as I knew it would be: the retro-futuristic cafe of my dreams, all pink and purple and lime green chairs.

The croissants were miniature, the cakes were frosted and topped with maraschino cherries, and the bar sparkled in the sun. It felt like a film set, but one that existed in the real world– a super stylized version of an ideal cafe.

If you read about Bar Luce, you’ll see that it was inspired by the classic cafes of Milan, by the architecture of the city, and by other work that Anderson has done with Prada. Still, I preferred to spend my time in it imagining what my story would look like if it was set there.

Who the characters would be, what they would be doing. And then I told my Mom, as she waited for me to take a million photographs and philosophize about the importance of cake stands, that I had found a new look for my bedroom.