the trust room bank reborn as speakeasy
The Trust Room Historic preservation and speakeasy design bring a century-old Old Town bank back to life
The Eastern Trust Bank anchored Main Street in Old Town for close to a century before the lumber economy went and downtown went with it. Ervin Architecture restored the building and its neighbor as part of a broader push to bring the street back — 2,000 square feet returned to use as a speakeasy wine bar. Stripping decades of alteration uncovered the Neoclassical work underneath: ceiling moldings and dentals, column capitals, window trim, palladium windows, original plaster and brick.
What the bank left behind became the program. The walk-in vault is now a temperature-controlled wine cuvée, fitted in custom reclaimed mahogany. Stone tile from the teller entry desk stayed where it was, inlaid and sealed into the floor. A concealed door connects the room to the restaurant next door.
Against that, a contemporary layer — marble wall tile, brass, crystal chandeliers, velvet, geometric wallpaper, glass tile. A full Tobin Ellis bar and a wood-fired kitchen. A plant wall at the street windows, improving the air inside and reading green against whitewashed brick to anyone walking past. A new entry vestibule made the building accessible, which a century-old bank was never going to be on its own.
Location
Old Town, Maine
STYLE
Contemporary
Services
Residential Design & Engineering
CATEGORY
Commercial
Restaurants + Bars
Nightclubs
Performance Venues
PROJECT SIZE
2500 FT² / 230 M²
Cocktail Bar Design in Former Eastern Trust Bank
Reviving Old Town’s Main Street
The Trust Room is a visionary restoration and redevelopment project led by Ervin Architecture, in the heart of Old Town, Maine. With a rich history of boom and bust, Old Town’s Main Street, once bustling with regional businesses, had fallen into decline. However, thanks to the efforts of forward-thinking local business owners and citizens, a revival of the downtown area was underway. Ervin Architecture was entrusted with the task of redeveloping two buildings, including the iconic Eastern Trust Bank building, to continue the restoration and bring new life to Main Street.
A Speakeasy Inside a Neoclassical Bank
The transformation of the Eastern Trust Bank building into The Trust Room is a celebration of Old Town’s heritage and a convergence of history and contemporary design. Embracing the concept of a speakeasy with a modern twist, Ervin Architecture unearthed the building’s original character, restoring elements such as Palladian windows, plasterwork and brickwork. The design revolves around creating a unique and vibrant ambiance, with bright colors and matte finishes setting the stage for the interplay of natural light through large street-level windows. Careful consideration was given to accommodating essential programmatic elements, seamlessly incorporating a new entry vestibule, handicap access, a secret speakeasy door, a full Tobin Ellis bar, and more.
Designing Around a Daily Lunch Buffet
Rasa runs a lunch buffet seven days a week from eleven to two, and that puts a requirement on the plan that most restaurants never have. The buffet needs its own footprint, its own power and its own place in the room — close enough to the kitchen to be restocked without crossing the dining room, far enough from the entry that the line doesn’t back into the door, and positioned so guests can circle it in one direction. Then the same room has to become a full-service dining room at four o’clock without looking like it has a buffet parked in the middle of it.
The Vault
An opportunity to convert a historic walk-in vault into a temperature-controlled wine cellar with custom reclaimed mahogany cabinetry added to the allure of the space. The Trust Room stands as a testament to the successful revival of Main Street and a splendid blend of history, culture and contemporary flair.
Restoring What Was Already There
The building carries close to a century of neoclassical detail, and the adaptive reuse worked to the building rather than over it. Ceiling moldings, dentils, column capitals and window trim were restored rather than replaced. The original stone tile from the bank’s teller entry desk was salvaged and worked back into the new floor. Around that restored fabric the room was given a different register entirely — marble wall tile, brass, crystal chandeliers, velvet upholstery, glass tile, geometric wallpapers and whitewashed brick — so the old detail reads as the structure of the room and the new material reads as the furnishing of it.
Getting a Bar Into a Hundred-Year-Old Bank
A bank lobby is not a bar, and the conversion had to satisfy current code inside a facade that could not change. A new entry vestibule was added along with ramped accessible entry and accessible bathrooms. A wood-fired kitchen was brought into a building never built to hold one. A concealed speakeasy door connects the room to the adjacent restaurant, and a living plant wall faces the street-level windows. The bar itself is a prefabricated Tobin Ellis unit, specified because bar workflow decides how fast a room can serve and how many people it can hold at once.
