Walking into the Atomic Bar and Lounge feels in many ways like you're walking into your parents living room - that is, if your parents were cool in the 1960s.

Rachael Roberts and Feizal Valli are going through the last of the red tape to open their bar at 2113 1st Avenue N.

The bar's furniture is nearly all in, the signature drinks designed. They're waiting on their health inspection and a few other last-minute details, and hope to open late January or early February. It'll start with drinks, but will eventually add appetizers to the menu.

'Like a home'

The Atomic is a mid-century modern bar that borrows its aesthetics from post-World War II to the 1960s.

There are wood-paneled walls, flat screen TVs hidden in hollowed out 60s tube TVs, an Andy Warhol-style mural on the wall, and a giant image of Birmingham native and civil rights activist Angela Davis on a wall you have to pass through to get to part of the bar. The owners drove to Detroit to buy the booths from a steakhouse that opened in 1965 that recently closed.

The space is also decorated by touches of home: one wall is decorated with 1960s photographs of the owners' relatives. A mantel is filled with trophies from the sports Roberts and her brother played as children. A small portrait decorates the wall behind the bar - an impressionist painting of the owners that was a wedding gift.

"Really, it's supposed to feel like a home," Valli said.

Valli and Roberts are both formerly of The Collins Bar, and Valli designed the 'Periodic Table of Birmingham' behind the bar.

"We loved what we were doing at the Collins, but it wasn't ours," Roberts said.

Valli loved the Periodic Table concept, but his new bar couldn't be a repeat. Atomic's love letter to Birmingham comes in the form of a recreation of the front cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the iconic 1967 album from the Beatles featuring the band standing with a few dozen life-sized cardboard cutouts of famous people. Atomic's band features Birmingham celebrities ranging from Highlands Bar & Grill Executive Chef Frank Stitt, to EWTN founder Mother Angelica, to Alabama Media Group columnist John Archibald.

Costumes, Sex Panthers and temporary tattoos

One thing that a home is not, and what Valli and Roberts don't want Atomic to be: full of itself.

There are plenty of bars that take themselves too seriously, Valli said. They wanted Atomic to be comfortable and unique.

Take the signature drink: four variations on the "Sex Panther," a play on the old fashioned, but as Valli describes it, "more aggressive." Included in the cost of the cocktail: a panther temporary tattoo.

The couple doesn't take themselves too seriously. They got married dressed as Elvis and Priscilla Presley and are costume enthusiasts; she got him a panda costume for Christmas, only to find out he had already ordered one for himself.

So at some point they thought: What if the Atomic had a costume menu?

Customers can choose from about a dozen costumes to wear while they're at the bar, ranging from a shark to Princess Leia to a chicken (It's free, but you do have to leave your credit card with the bar while until you return the costume in one piece).

"When you come into a bar by yourself, it's kind of hard to meet people, but I think if you're wearing a chicken costume, you'll meet a lot of people," Valli said. "We've traveled extensively, and I've never seen a bar with a costume menu."

'The long game'

Valli and Roberts' business is beginning in the same place their love story did: downtown Birmingham.

Valli moved to Birmingham about 11 years ago after Hurricane Katrina forced him to leave New Orleans. He moved into Phoenix Building Lofts on Second Avenue North.

Valli bought a house which was, in hindsight, a mistake. He hated being so far away from downtown, even though downtown Birmingham wasn't nearly as cool as it is today, and moved back shortly after into a new apartment that wasn't quite as good as his old one. His unit had been rented to someone new.

Valli had taken a job at the Collins, where he met Roberts, a Trussville native working there as a waitress. He walked her home one night after they closed up. What a coincidence that she lived where Valli used to live - the Phoenix Building.

As he walked her up, Valli told her he even used to live on her same floor. Then, he told her shocked, she now lived in his former unit.

"I just thought he was flirting with me," Roberts said.

She only thought that until the next day, when she got a piece of junk mail for Valli, who hadn't lived there in years. She'd never gotten a piece of his mail before. She brought it to Collins. The pair started dating. When his lease expired, he moved in to his old unit with Roberts.

The pair got married by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas earlier this year. They announced they were opening a new bar downtown. The next day, they left for their honeymoon.

"I was playing the long game," Valli said.