| Bringing the party
“home”.
By Kerri Mason
Photos by Simon Hare Photography
In an ideal world, peace would be a given,
ice cream would be nutritious, and everyone would have a well-moneyed,
party-loving friend-of-a-friend with killer digs smack in
the heart of the nation’s hottest city. But even under
such conditions, you’d need a time machine to get the
experience that Miami Beach’s Mansion delivers its patrons
and event clients each week: Old world elegance, palatial
sprawl, and an atmosphere that only aristocrats of yesteryear
could call “homey.”
Nonetheless, the idea behind Opium Group’s latest and
greatest acquisition was born from The Living Room, a 5,000-square-foot
lounge in downtown Miami that came and went within a year.
That space was meant to “embrace the feeling of being
in one’s home,” according to Opium Group design
director Mark Lehmkuhl. He and his team envisioned Mansion
to do the same – albeit in a 40,000-square-foot space,
centrally located on noisy cruise-way Washington Avenue.
Cinematic Scope
Drawing inspiration from hotels worldwide, and “giant
houses in upstate New York,” Lehmkuhl enlisted the additional
vision of local talent Francois Frossard, of Francois Frossard
Design. “They came to me and said they wanted to create
a mansion, and doing that was the easiest part,” said
Frossard, who counts Opium property Privé among his
credits. “You can create one room in one style, and
then change it up a bit in the next one.”
Frossard’s eventual design took the already grand building
– which hadn’t been substantially renovated for
years, despite changing hands countless times – and
returned it to its French theater roots. The result is splendor
on par with the nightclubs of Rimini, Italy that pass for
villas, rather than the keep-it-simple-stupid design ethic
of most large U.S. venues.
The enchantment begins, fittingly, at the front door. “For
the entryway, we wanted to create something where you first
walk in, before you start getting involved in the life of
the space,” said Frossard. The resulting foyer has a
Sunset Boulevard-style staircase winding up the right side;
a huge, dangling chandelier; and three Plexiglas archways
blooming with LED light (color kinetics icove fixtures installed
by Mansion tech Ian Elbrand). These provide access to three
separate areas: The hip-hop lounge, awash in Gucci and Prada
hues; the library-inspired The Ivy, so named for the pattern
that repeats on its bars and tabletops; and the 50-feet-tall
main room.
Each is a study in functional splendor, but the latter is
where Mansion’s entire team gets to shine; where the
concept, design, and extensive lighting, sound, and video
elements merge to create a time-traveling techno-manor.
The Grand Tour
Following the mansion metaphor, the main room is the ballroom,
or maybe the drawing room, complete with waitresses in French
maid outfits. But its most inspired feature is the dancefloor,
split in two by a VIP area smack in its middle. “We’re
not big club people; we didn’t want a big dancefloor,”
explains Lehmkuhl. “We didn’t want the type of
venue where you feel like you’re forced to dance.”
Instead, VIPs can amble through the squared-off spread of
red and purple chaises and ornate gold tables encased in plastic
(custom designed and built by Frossard, like almost all of
the club’s furniture), or ascend short stairs and pass
through decorative archways to The Ivy. The upper level, accessible
by the foyer’s grand staircase, is the supposed boudoir,
complete with waitresses clad in lingerie.
Not coincidentally, this is where the techs also do their
work. “I commandeered a booth,” confessed Todd
Small, Mansion’s lighting designer and installer. “The
laser guy is next to me, and the video guy’s in front
of us. We take up two VIP tables. They love us.”
Small, a 10-year industry vet who had a “lightjockey@”
email address long before the phrase was a glimmer in Martin
Professional’s eye, was charged with sorting through
the fixtures the new owners inherited from the previous ones,
buying a few new pieces, and making them all work together.
His limited purchases included eight Coemar iSpot 150s, “my
favorite light, because it’s really really bright, and
fast.” These anchor the main room’s system, and
surround a 36-inch mirror ball at the center of the articulating
truss. His show also includes eight Elation Professional Vision
575 scanners (“the white is pure as opposed to yellowish,
and they’re punchy”), and six High End Systems
Trackspots (“I’m excited about how good they look
in the room”), in addition to other Martin and High
End intelligent lights and strobes. Small also spec-ed a full
Chauvet system for the hip-hop room, including Legend 150R
moving heads and Trackscan 250R scanners: One of their benefits,
he says, is that “the gobo wheels and color wheels match.”
In addition to being the main system’s parent, Small
is also its guardian, designing and running the light show
on all of Mansion’s club nights. “I like to open
it up bright and let people see the accents of the room, and
then go dark, smoky, and a little more mysterious,”
he says. “Then I’ll pop the different accents
throughout the night, like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where
all that stuff is.’”
Walking The Grid
But before he could employ any such flourishes, Small had
to get the lights in the air. The main room installation itself
was “a bear,” he says, and not without its hazards:
“It’s a room within a building, so it’s
all metal mesh and lathe – you could compare it to paper
mache, just a lot stronger. But when you’re in the roof,
you have to navigate to different parts by going around that
stuff, which is laid out on a grid. So you can walk the grid,
as long as you don’t step on the mesh.”
Also negotiating the strange corners of “the grid”
was Pro Sound’s crack team of riggers, under the direction
of Terry McNeil, the namesake and division head of the company’s
new TMc division, dedicated to nightclubs. McNeil –
known throughout the beach as “the festival guy,”
for his impressive audio design work on the Ultra Beachfest’s
multiple stages – and his men did the dirty work of
the audio install, executing a plan designed jointly by Phazon’s
Phil Smith and Sound Investment’s Dan Agne. The collaboration,
while unusual, was mutually beneficial: “Everyone was
bidding on it; I was bidding on it separate from Phazon,”
said Agne. “But then Phil and I walked through the project
and decided to do it together. It worked out to be better
for Mansion, Sound Investment, and Phazon.”
As with the lighting, the audio system was an exercise in
using what was there, and adding conservatively. Agne reports
that the main room’s system consists of eight EAW Avalon
DC1s and four “old school” Berthas, left over
from the club’s previous incarnations. The hip-hop room
benefited most from the new gear, in the form of Funktion-One
Resolution 2 full range three-ways, added to pre-existing
sub-bass.
Easy Grandeur
The uniformity of the sound system’s output –warm
and manageable in every area of the club – was inherent
to Lehmkuhl’s overall theme: comfort. “When we
walk into a space, we want the sound to be uniform throughout;
the same volume everywhere,” he said. “We don’t
want it to be too loud: Not background, but a nice warm sound.
You can dance anywhere in the sound. It’s not like crobar,
or Level before it; we like it to feel like home.”
That goal spills over from the club’s overall concept,
to its sound system, to the spatial arrangement of its furniture.
And in Miami, believe it or not, that’s a big deal.
“The other venues are cramming people into tables. They
put three or four tables in a 10-foot area, just to make as
much money as possible,” sighs Lehmkuhl. “We have
the space, so we give people their own area to sit. You get
your own couch, your own table. And the table isn’t
going to be 24”x 24”; it’s going to be more
like two feet by three feet, a nice big area. It’s like
being in your living room, where you have a couch and a big
coffee table in front of it.”
So while the world’s still in tumult, Rocky Road’s
still the enemy, and most friends-of-friends have beach houses
at best, Mansion’s weaving a fully-realized, affluent
fantasy for its patrons each weekend, and its bevy of corporate
sponsors and event planners each week [see sidebar]. That
creation of a self-contained, elegant little world is a feat
unmatched in American nightclubs thus far.
–additional reporting by Lizz Gibbons
Mansion
1235 Washington Avenue
Miami Beach, Florida
www.mansionmiami.com
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