24 London

24 interior shot

SOHO

24 LONDON

VENUES, DECEMBER 2006, COMMENTS

Any fan of the old Attica venue at 24 Kingley Street will be startled by its transformation. The Soho favourite has been turned into a near photo-negative of itself, with the black walls and dark intimate booths replaced by a series of brilliant white seating areas - arranged around blocky white champagne buckets and cordoned off with creamy white voile. The L shape layout of the venue has been untouched, with the long bar running along the length of the venue, but the dark intimacy that made it a popular haunt for Soho’s elite has been transformed. Rather than an exercise in extreme minimalism, the white washed interior is in fact a functional necessity: it is one half of one of the most innovative interior design projects London has seen.

Conceived by Julian Taylor Design Associates in conjunction with marketing technology specialists Beta Minds Ltd, the white walls of the club are specially created screens onto which are displayed interactive, motion-sensitive scenes. These custom animations - a sea of coloured balls, an interstellar landscape, fish in a tank - react to movement, so that with a mere waive of the hand, a punter could throw a burning flame across the room, bounce a few hundred balls, or scare some fish away. The idea is that the club is a completely immersive, dynamic and infinitely customisable environment.

The technology behind the new venue, which has been renamed 24, originates from Beta Mind’s involvement with retail marketing, where they have used their system of projectors and infra-red scanners at various high-profile product launches. In 24, five Epson EMP-6100 projectors are linked to five DragonFly tracking cameras and fifteen infra-red sensors - arranged strategically around the venue. The responsiveness and sophistication of the on-screen interactions is potentially limitless - depending on how much budget there is for content development, while a remote control software applications enable bar managers to control the entire system from any computer with access to a wireless network.

The video screens are complimented by strips of LED down-lighting, which change colour sympathetically to the content of the screen. The intention is to create an aborbing ambience, recalling the technology used in the Philips Ambilight range of widescreen monitors.

To bring Taylor’s idea to life, Into Lighting, who design and install bespoke lighting solutions to the architectural, retail and leisure market, have specified and programmed a sophisticated DMX universe to allow the DJ to create an infinite number of LED scenes.

“The idea at 24 was to compliment the interactive content with a pre-programmed package that would allow the LEDs to be colour matched with whatever is on the screen,” explains Into MD Darren Orrow. “The system also allows an untrained operator to change between static LED scenes for the early evening ambience, or rapid colour change for the club. We have programmed a DMX control system which allows the bar staff or DJ to alter the LED colour mode as needed. Julian Taylor and Into have created a club whose colour scheme can be different every night or every second. There are two very important factors required to create a good LED lighting scheme: creative lighting design and experienced installers.”

Exhibiting both these qualities in abundance, installers Dovestar Electrical were appointed to carry out the installation work, fitting 924 modules of RGB LEDs around the walls of the club, and a series of Studio Due Shark 150C moving heads over the dancefloor area. Dovestar also installed the DJ station - a focal point booth situated on the corner of the bar - combining two Technics SL1200s and two Pioneer CDJ 1000 MKIIIs, controlled from an Allen & Heath Xone:62 mixer. A series of customised and active Meyer speakers have been spaced around the venue, supplying most of the audio.

The attention is drawn, however, to the walls of the club. With a background in retail marketing, Beta Minds are capacble of creating pitch perfect psycho-candy, and offer the kind of personalised, interactive marketing opportunities that brand owners and promoters dream about. Consequently, Selfridges in London are just one high-street chain that was quick to buy a large in-shop version of the kit.

Where other operators might be shy of using retail marketing technology in their venue, the operators of 24 approve of such a strategy. Run by Chris Calarco and Gavin Howth of consultancy and management group Company Bar, the operation of 24 is split evenly between in house club nights over the weekend, and corporate events, press launches and after show parties for the rest of the week. “Corporate entertainment is a big part of what we do,” explains Chris. “If your venue has one look and one atmosphere then you can only capture a fraction of your potential market. While we have our own nights on at the weekend, the majority of our takings are from corporate bookings. The great thing about our interactive screens is that the content can be customised to suit the needs of any client party”.

And they have attracted some fairly showbiz gigs, stretching the capability of the Beta Mind’s system. For one party - the after show of the premier of the Borat movie - actors and press spent a few hours playing with the interactive posters that filled the screens. Each poster could be wiped away to reveal another below. For another - a fashion party hosted by Julian Macdonald - gardens of pink roses would flower at the waive of a hand. Other nights have involved Tiscali press launches, the Secret Policeman’s Ball Amnesty fundraiser’s after show and the opening of the Fast Food Nation documentary.

However, the club’s appeal is not only technological, and with several years experience of bar consultancy, Howth and Calarco are savvy enough to know when to draw a line under the impressive gadgetry. While Julian Taylor’s seating arrangements offers comfort, elegance and a flattering environment, the management are keen to give visitors, who have to meet admittedly tight entrance criteria, the royal treatment.

“We lay it on,” says Chris. “You have to really. “We’ve got an incredible USP here with the video wall, and this has been necessary because all the bars around this end of London are pretty competitive. But we wanted to add some depth to that experience. We believe in razor sharp customer care: table service, great cocktails and great service. We encourage bar staff to remember the orders of repeat customers, and we like to open a few bottles of champagne here and there. In a club of 300 people we try to make sure everyone is happy and try to introduce people around. You can’t value going that little bit further high enough.”

Despite the emphasis on the customer, technology will feature in the second phase of Julian Taylor’s development of the venue. This will involve the use of Beta Mind’s I-Bar system, another new interactive toy that can produce astonishingly good-looking results. Using arrays of interior projectors and infrared motion detectors, embedded within the bar frame, the I-Bar system causes a bright halo of light to appear beneath anything that is put on the bartop, while stems of light will appear between two or more objects placed on the bar. On a busy night, the bar looks like a cats-cradle of bright blobs and strands of light, with results that will grab the attention of many a designer, and may come to be the design highlight of 2007.

For now however, Calarco and Howth have a unique venue that may well prove to be prototypical of a new breed of immersive, technologically enhanced interior design schemes.

Words: Leo Batchelor
Images: Jim Ellam

From: December 2006 Issue

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