Philadelphia inspires interior design of Sugarhouse

    When SugarHouse Casino opens to the public along the Delaware River in Philadelphia this week it will be the first of its kind in the city.

    The lights inside the SugarHouse Casino.

    When SugarHouse Casino opens to the public along the Delaware River in Philadelphia this week it will be the first of its kind in the city. The gaming hall will have slots and table games.

    Sugarhouse visitors who think the place looks just like its counterparts in other cities, should look up…or down, says interior designer Floss Barber, whose team designed the space, which includes a ceiling full of exposed ducts and wires and a few triangular panels.

    “This ceiling is almost origami. It’s not connected to the walls. So when you do that you get a sense of float – it’s a floating ceiling. If you think about sugar, you’ve got raw sugar and you’ve got refined sugar, so the origami is the refined aspect, the other is the raw aspect. So it’s sort of honest to the site.”

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    Barber, who lives in Powelton Village, points to squares on the carpet.

    “Which are set on a diagonal which offset the ceiling in terms of the origami and the grid. We also thought about if you look at the overall plan…Philadelphia’s a city of neighborhoods or pockets so there’s a series of pockets of space within this casino that you could play in. You might say that’s my favorite area, or that’s my favorite area.”

    While gamblers eagerly await the opening, activists from Casino-Free Philadelphia say they won’t give up. As SugarHouse opens its doors, the group plans to present its own plan for the riverfront without Sugarhouse and launch its campaign to shut down the casino.

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