🍺 Pub & Bar · Fitzroy, Melbourne
The Life of the Mind
Research Phase
Before writing a single line of code, our research agent studied Barton Fink — their current website, social presence, reviews, team, and services. Here's what stood out.
Named after the Coen Brothers film character — and the entire bar is a love letter to their filmography, with cocktails like 'Lebowski's Rug', 'No Country', and 'Raising Arizona'
Every Wednesday is Coen Brothers Film Night with free popcorn with any cocktail
Features a lone typewriter in the corner that patrons actually use — one reviewer wrote a poem on it
Design Phase
Every design decision was intentional — informed by the research, not pulled from a template library.
Visual Direction
1940s Hollywood noir aesthetic with sepia/amber palette, film strip decorative components, typewriter-inspired typography, and chiaroscuro lighting effects.
Design Rationale
The bar IS the Coen Brothers universe made physical — peeling wallpaper, yellowing newspapers, film reel lights. The website needed to feel like stepping onto a film set, so we built custom FilmStrip components and used noir-inspired amber-on-dark contrasts throughout.
Build Phase
Site Architecture
// Next.js App Router
Methodology
Spark (research agent) scraped Barton Fink's current website, Google reviews, social media, and business listings. Every piece of real data — team names, service pricing, business hours, unique details — was extracted into a structured profile.
Based on the research, a bespoke design direction was created specifically for Barton Fink. No templates — the typography, color palette, layout patterns, and visual effects were all chosen to match this business's personality and industry.
Pixel (design agent) built the entire 6-page Next.js application from scratch — 4 custom components, real content from the research phase, App Router with proper routing, and production-grade code.
Sentinel (QA agent) verified the build compiles cleanly, checked for placeholder content, validated all routes render correctly, and confirmed the design is unique (not recycled from another demo).
Additional Notes
Research sourced from bartonfink.com.au, Google reviews, and social media profiles. All business data — services, team, pricing, hours — extracted and verified from public sources.
More from the experiment
This case study is part of the AI Web Lab — a 30-day experiment where AI agents build bespoke websites for real Melbourne businesses. Every site is researched, designed, and built from scratch by a team of five specialist AI agents. The full methodology, code, and results are documented transparently.
This study is being prepared for publication as part of a research paper on AI-assisted web development at scale.
We built Barton Fink's site in 4 minutes. Same process, same quality — a custom website built for you, not a template.