Rob Gutman

Rob Gutman

controlling interest

Rob Gutman

features, january 2008 , COMMENTS

Korova Corporation’s Rob Gutmann is a well travelled operator whose ship recently returned to Liverpool’s Albert Docks for his latest quirky venture, Circo. Rachel Esson delves into the corners of his imagination to discover a variety of concepts behind his designs.

Rob Gutman’s eyes sparkle as he begins to talk about the nightmarish, pseudo-circus interior that surrounds us. Looking up at the venue from our disproportionately large booth, it is as if he is sitting inside the eye of his own wild imagination. Animated clowns, festoon lighting and life-size horses wearing lampshades as hats are some of the features that add a subtle surrealism to Circo. The quirky décor in the operator’s latest venture is testament to his creative abilities, being the sole designer on the project, and evidence of his drive to break into a new niche with an original place to socialise.

Circo is the biggest venue to date in Liverpool-based Korova Corporation’s empire, which began with the Lyceum café bar and includes the iconic Korova Bar, Babycream, Alma de Cuba, and more recently pan-asian restaurant/bar Geisha, and a third edition to the Negresco bars. At 17,000 sq foot, Circo looms majestically over the water at the city’s famous Albert Docks, where Korova first made a name for itself by founding Blue Bar & Grill, Baby Blue and Pan American club. Rob sold this collection of operations in 2005 after he received an offer for them that he couldn’t refuse and took the advice of a financial philosopher to ‘never miss an opportunity’. Rob has always regarded this tourist hotspot as his spiritual home and was keen to return.

He cites the new nearby development, The Arena and the Capital of Culture year as the main reasons for returning to the company’s homeland. “It will be such a big thing for this city and in particular this part of the city. Having traded the docks and understanding how to trade it, I think it would be crazy not to get another unit here. The Albert Dock crowd is always more varied than anywhere; it’s kind of the headquarters of Liverpool’s tourist scene, if there’s a big event on, like a football match or a festival or a big business thing going on, then people do flock to the Albert Dock.”

In this regard, he says, the target market is kind of a mixed bag, as you get everybody from all different walks of life visiting the area. “The staple crowd is still the same as we’ve looked at for our other venues; it’s hopefully people who appreciate what I’m trying to do. Maybe they’re a bit more style conscious than most,” he continues. “Mainly the crowd is me; I always think ‘well where do I want to go next because I’m bored of drinking here’, and there can’t be that many people who are different to me. So me and my friends and family sit around thinking about what should come next, so there you go – market research!” Rob’s drive to discover the next best thing has been with him from an early age. “I was entrepreneurial and spent my early 20s in the property business but it was a tough market back then, and I wanted to pursue something else where I could be my own boss.”

Circo opened in November last year as the eighth of Korova Corporation’s Liverpool venues. But Rob says the city’s crowd is getting harder to please due to its spate of recent developments. “It’s catching Manchester up at long last. I’d say Manchester is still a more wealthy, affluent city than Liverpool, but it’s coming up on the rails and it is getting harder to please.” Circo will no doubt offer the Liverpool crowd an environment they have never experienced before. The bar/restaurant/club fills the vast space of the former Britannia Pavilion warehouse. Stripped back to its original York stone floors, brick work and archways, the venue combines a cultural history with modern and design and quirky features.
Whilst Geisha was still under construction, main contractor Padwork and audio installers B & S Sound also got stuck into Rob’s next venue. This time GM Electrical were brought on board to handle the lighting installation. There was no existing structure to the building, apart from the shell of the former grain warehouse. It hadn’t been a bar or restaurant, but had been a series of shop units and offices. The unit’s history means it is a heavily listed building and thus the brickwork is exactly as it was.

The bar is split into two spaces; at the front a comfortable bar area with booth seating and low ceilings, at the back an airy space ideal for lunchtime snacks, flooded with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows that look over the quayside. To the right of this space is the huge dining area with a traditional, long dining table set for a banquet. Upstairs features more secluded seating and a private room fit for functions of all kinds, including karaoke. Providing sound for the entire venue is a Tannoy speaker system; the main cabinets were the DI Series (DI6) and The V Series (V8, VS15BP, and VS10BP). Tannoy’s Nick Bellis said: “The DI series were mainly used in the restaurant and lounge areas, so they could blend in with the surroundings and give full range background / foreground sound. The V Series was specified in the bar areas. I also specified our TDX1 system controllers, for all the system EQ, crossovers, and limiting.”

Diners in the restaurant are immediately greeted by two life-size black horses, adorning lampshades on their heads. Above the table is a huge black netting, similar to the trapeze nets found at circuses. Rob comments: “Because the main dining room was a big empty room, it felt like a big hall and it needed a big banquet table. For the scale of the room I thought the table should match the dimensions of the room, almost like a medieval dinner party. It’s an architectural statement, but to subtly lower the height of the room I put this trapeze thing across it.” Pink curtains suspended from either side of the black netting reference a candy colour scheme that is present throughout the venue, creating an ironic contrast between child nightmares and the innocence of childhood. The circus theme extends further to the animated circus scenes painted on the walls and the sinister looking clown face on the wall at the end of the long table, whose eyes rotate and light up.

Rob drew the rather unusual relationships between clowns and bars after visiting The Clown Bar in Paris, next to the Cirque D’Hiver (winter circus). Unlike Rob’s impressionist design, The Clown Bar was a drinking hole for real-life clowns for many a years. “Old clowns used to go there for a hundred odd years and drown their sorrows,” Rob explains. “I think they still go there now. It’s not a theme bar in any way. So Circo is a mixture of that and me wanting to do something theatrical.” Back on UK soil, Rob began to romanticise about the circus and formulate ideas for Circo. “I closed my eyes and started thinking about impressions. The circus is more a dream sequence rather than being literal.” These impressions are substituted in reality with the mannequin horses, a stuffed boar’s head, the green sweeping staircase lined with brass poles and the black bars imitative of circus cages used during Victorian freak shows.

Signs and Designs have created signs behind each bar that are made with festoon lighting and spell words like ‘Roll Up!’ and ‘Eccentrico!’ “The theme of having lots of small bulbs is something you’ll see outside theatres with festoon lighting. It’s all heavily impressionistic, my brother said it’s like a surrealist exhibition in a way and I was glad to see somebody got it!” he said.
But, he says, whether people get it or not is not that important, as long as the idea is something you can “anchor design onto”. Rob is a self-professed designer and creates all the furniture himself, with comfort as a main contributor to his designs. “I’m passionate about furniture and think it’s got to work socially. It’s got to be comfortable and it’s got to make me feel cosy want to be in the space.” Although not a trained architect, Stuart Paul deciphered his drawing to bring his furniture ideas to life. Dawn Vale also worked to Rob’s designs to manufacture the red bars.

Most of the graphic work was done by Burn, who work on all of Korova’s projects. As you enter the bar, one of the features that strikes you is the wall of LCD moving picture frames, each with its own candy-coloured clown or psychedelic movie. “I wanted this kind of candy cane festival of colour. I wanted to make this room quite monochrome, it’s quite grey, and then have certain colour shocks in it,” explains Rob. “The red bar was one thing then I wanted it to look like a sweet shop. Some of the imagery we’re playing with is like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; with a nightmarish. It’s all colourful and safe and then you see this horrible cackling face.”

Even the venue’s smell revokes memories of childhood; wafts of popcorn and sweets come from a popcorn machine and a jelly bean dispenser. The menu is based on a great menu that Rob experienced at The 21 Club in New York and he describes the food offering as a “fine dining take on a steak restaurant”

When NIGHT ironically suggested Circo could link up with the circus when it comes to town, he replied: “Someone else suggested that but it’s not really the point because we’re slightly taking the piss. We’re kind of saying: ‘Isn’t the circus a bit odd?’ Without sounding too pretentious about it, Circo is a view of what 19th century entertainment was made of: freak shows, circuses, burlesque, theatres and bourdevillan concepts.

When we decided to present circus brick-a-brack, we were quite keen that none of it ever looked cutesy, there was a point when we thought we’d hate it to be mistaken for a circus theme place that kids would want to come to. It’s meant to be a very adult place and be a bit creepy. It didn’t turn out as horrific as I had in my mind but if we had done it that way I think it would have been a little bit too scary.”

Words: Rachel Esson

From: January 2008

Subscribe to NIGHT magazine