Epicenter
Dispensary’s new lounge is a throwback to s.F.’s past.
With its dark woodwork, plush leather booths and handsome custom bars, the new lounge at the Barbary Coast Dispensary could be a high-end watering hole from any of San Francisco’s golden eras. If it wasn’t for the Michiko Thompson-designed cannabis leaves shining green in the stained glass over the counters and the ultra-modern VapeXhale vaporizers on the tabletops, you might not guess that this lounge is meant for inhaling rather than imbibing.
“We really wanted to commit to the look,” says Barbary Coast Dispensary executive director Jesse Henry. “We wanted it to be classic, like the Barbary Coast era, but to also feel timeless.”
The Barbary Coast Dispensary, which opened in 2013, has been working on its lounge expansion for the past year. The new hash bar and combustibles (smoking) lounge opened March 6, in time for 420, the unofficial cannabis holiday celebrated every April 20, and joins a handful of other dispensary lounges where patients can legally toke up in public in San Francisco. The overall ethos of the design (done in-house, with construction by builder Rich Huckstepp) is in keeping with the Barbary Coast brand, which is named for the old San Francisco red-light district and trail where almost any vice could be indulged.
For Barbary Coast general manager Nate Haas, it was important that the space also feel connected to the city and neighborhood around it.
“Being San Francisco natives with generations of family history here, it didn’t seem like it would fit to put an Apple Store on the Barbary Coast,” jokes Haas about bucking the stark, minimalist designs of other dispensaries and lounges. “At some places, you don’t have any sense of San Francisco when you walk in the doors; you could be anywhere. It doesn’t mesh.”
But the Barbary Coast lounge isn’t just about affectionate looks into the past. Both the dab bar and the tabletops feature the latest in cannabis technology.
“Our dab bar is the first-ever full quartz dab bar in San Francisco,” concentrate specialist and lounge manager Kitt Hall says of the bar’s water-filled hash pipes, called “dab rigs.”
“Quartz glass is the industry standard for dabbing,” Hall says. “The old standard was titanium, which takes longer to heat up and it doesn’t have a great taste. Quartz glass is all natural, it takes less time to heat up, and also it preserves those terpenes, those amazing flavors of cannabis concentrate that you can enjoy at a temperature with an e-nail.”
Conveniently, there’s no open flame needed for heating up the dab rig; the rig stays a consistent temperature so patients can use it as they please.
But first-time users, fear not: “We’re always happy to assist people in their dabs. We make frequent rounds in the lounge,” Hall says.
So far, the staff reports that the new lounge clientele has been as diverse as the dispensary patients.
“It’s nice to have a place with a tech guy in one of the booths, then across the way is an older lady reading a book,” Haas says. “You get the counterculture of the ’60s meeting the hipster culture of today. I could see people taking power dab meetings here. It’s very San Francisco.”