Tup Tup Palace , Newcastle

Newcastle

Tup Tup Palace

venues, September 2008, COMMENTS

Tup Tup Palace on Newcastle’s Diamond strip sits on a pot of gold. The high end ‘restobar’ and club is one of a few venues in the UK selected to stock two limited edition 1995 Dom Perignon bottles that are encased in white gold and worth £10,000. “It’s totally over the top, but it’s a great showpiece,” says one of the directors James Jukes. He goes on to relate how one London customer, who paid for a white pearlescent lambourgini to sit outside the club on New Year’s Eve, put down a £2,000 deposit in cash for one of the bottles, but never claimed it.

This is one of many interesting features of the club that has a bizarre story behind it. “The reason we called it Tup Tup Palace was because we wanted it to be over the top, so people felt like they were in a story book,” adds James.

But there are other jewels in Tup Tup’s crown, other than the ones you can see. The secret of the venue’s success as an exclusive high end destination is that it’s not your predictable carbon copy of a London style bar, nor is it stuffy or pretentious. What really shines through is the creativity that has gone into producing the venue and the attitude of its three operators - James Jukes, Matt Smyth and Nigel Holliday. The personable nature and fun-loving northern humour of the three friends sits well with the people of Newcastle, and although the venue operates a £1,000 per year membership system, it still retains a friendly front.

The career of the three partners began at university in Leeds putting on student nights; James and Matt launched R&B and hip hop night LoveDough in 2000, (which now holds a regular slot at Es Paradis in Ibiza) at the same time that Nigel ran cheesy student night Tequila at Warehouse (which is Leeds’ longest running student night). It was when Nigel was working as deputy manager at Ikon for Luminar Leisure that he saw a gap in the market for a sophisticated R&B session, remembered LoveDough from Leeds, and got in touch with James and Matt to invite them to fill the Thursday night slot at Ikon. James was working in the Gulf at that time, but Matt took up the offer and LoveDough at Ikon took off, hosting DJs from Kiss and Radio One. James continues: “When I was in the Middle East I was in contact with Matt and he said things had gone beserk in Newcastle and Luminar wanted us to launch LoveDough at Majestik in Leeds, so I came back to do that in 2003. The blueprint that we had created for LoveDough seemed to be riding on the crest of a wave in the way the club scene was going.”

LoveDough spread to other cities in the UK and the three friends were inspired to create Cheeky Parties, an events company for student and mainstream nights, which at its peek covered 15 weekly nights in Newcastle at different venues. Although it gave them experience in coming up with creative ideas to fill lower end clubs on otherwise quiet nights, they became tired of taking home just the profits from the door, and the next natural step was to build their own, higher end venue.

Nigel was working at Sea nightclub on the Quayside for Ultimate Leisure (now Premium Bars & Restaurants) when the Tup Tup site came under his and chief executive Mark Jones’ radar. But when Ultimate Leisure became preoccupied with the Living Room acquisition, Nigel took the opportunity to take it on board. He says: “It was an under-performing site, but it was in a good location.” James says: “When we put our idea together, we had background in all different types of things; I’d worked in the Middle East, and we’d all been to a variety of venues, so we thought we’d put some real creativity and imagination into it.”

To this aim, James travelled to Dubai to source authentic Indian and Far Eastern furniture to create something that “was not necessarily Middle Eastern, but an amalgamation of all the best bits”. The result is a highly individual venue that is a hybrid of cultures and a rich tapestry of exotic furnishings. NIGHT’s tour begins by ascending a staircase to a long and striking corridor that combines mahogany wood structures, bold red patterned wallpaper and an exposed brick curved ceiling, all turned into a kaleidoscope of colour by a variety of architectural lighting. Explains Nigel: “We want to give the venue the feel of a palace, so that you go down long corridors and through different doors, and you don’t quite expect what’s going to be in there.” A door off the long corridor leads to the Loja room (another ‘pot of gold’ at venue, since it remained undiscovered by the partners until after they’d bought it, and was found as a roof terrace tipping ground covered with pigeons). The space is now half enclosed by a new wall and glass roof to create an airy daytime dining area, which turns into an ambient bar in the evenings. “We watch people walk into the Loja room upstairs and they can’t understand where they are,” says Nigel. “But that’s the mystique we want to create.” A design team from Blueprint shaped the concept for Tup Tup based on the style of products that James had brought back from Dubai. An unusual blend of natural and manmade materials, from exposed brick, plants and flowers to ornate gilded mirrors and ivory, patterned upholstery; the Loja is an intriguing environment.

Downstairs the experience is completely different, a dimly lit nightclub opens with a lengthy bar featuring real flueless fires embedded at the top of the back bar. A small dancefloor is surrounded by a raised, cosy seating area with red and brown hues, which is a structure that can double up as a stage for live events. Round the corner a bar is lowered a few feet into the ground, again heightening the disorientation that charactises the experience of Tup Tup Palace. Opposite this bar is a bookable VIP booth, again lowered into the floor and surrounded by a spiral staircase that circles up around it towards an extravagant overhanging chandelier and up to the back of the Loja room. James says: “The chandelier is very obviously Arabian, but other bits of the bars, like the wooden carvings, are Polynesian or Far Eastern, so it’s very much a sort of fantasy venue, with a whole mystique to it.” The VIP booth, which has already been used by Ricky Hatton and Cheryl Cole , is partially screened off from the main VIP bar, which is again separated from the main dancefloor by MCI’s waterfall feature. This special effect can be turned on or off depending on how much privacy is required for the VIP bar.

The partners have further development plans for Tup Tup, hoping to eventually have a 5*, one bedroom, luxury hotel suite to accommodate DJs or parties, as well as a bigger kitchen, and more indoor/outdoor areas. As they lead NIGHT round the rest of the venue’s undeveloped rooms and long corridors it becomes clear how the maze-like interior will lend itself to a true Alice in Wonderland experience in the future. “We’d like to do another Tup Tup, but we’d have to find a building with character, that’s also hundreds of years old, with lots of quirky features,” says James. We’ll have to wait and see if they can strike gold again.

Words: Rachel Esson

Images: Jim Ellam

From: September 2008 Issue

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