CONTINENTAL
CONTINENTAL
“We’re going to build the swankiest club in town!”
Just across the Potomac River at the Virginia end of Key Bridge, we found the old Petibon’s Sports Bar closed and looking for a new tenant. We through we could slavage most of the kitchen and bathrooms, yet as e peeled back the onion, we realized that we had build it from the ground up. I loved the name Continental and its connection to one of the sexiest cars of the 60’s. Travis Smith took the design to a new level, channeling the era of glamorous airlines and cocktail culture. I struggled with some of his colors, purple felt on the tables, lime green, light blue and purple on the walls, but he kept pushing me and wow, was he exactly right. Again.
Travis loved colorful, vintage spaghetti lamps from the 50’ and 60’s, so we started hunting for them. This was the early days of internet shopping and we found dozens of these globes on Ebay, but as we purchased them for $20-$30 dollars apiece, other sellers took note and the prices skyrocketed. We had moved the market! The lights gave us a warm glow and showed the thousands of passing cars that something very cool lay within.
Of the many people who poured their energies into building Continental, Scott Kardell went above and beyond. Scott is a modern day artisan, a guy who is as handy with a hammer as he is with a chemistry book. The bar we built years before at CarPool was an automotive themed collage, covered with Ultraglo, a two part epoxy, that proved tougher than any bar-top we had tried. I dreamed up the idea of using glitter on the bar at Continental, and Scott went to work experimenting, testing, and ultimately creating a bar that has lasted over 20 years, and still looks fabulous. Scott’s other superpower is his sense of humor, always ready to make us all smile. Here he waits for the response from my son Julian, our official job site inspector.
