| Upscale club/lounge
hybrid enlists the best in the business to create a tropical
retreat, smack in the heart of the city.
 
By Ryan Malkin
Photos by Oscar Gama
What do an attorney and a carpenter know about
nightclubs? Not much. But in the case of Gary Malhotra (law)
and Carlo Seneca (wood), they’re quick learners. After
hitting clubs for years, the two New Yorkers wanted a place
of their own; a venue that would be “the spot,”
not just another club. The result of their determination is
Quo, an 80’ x 100’ lot in Manhattan’s Chelsea
district transformed into an “urban tropical”
paradise.
If Quo was going to be the best, Malhotra
and Seneca knew they had to hire the best to create her. The
team they assembled is very who’s-who: Interior designer
Stephane Dupoux, two-time Club World Award winner for New
York’s Cielo and Miami’s Pearl; Joseph and Anthony
Lodi of Advanced Audio Technology, who create their own speakers
[see sidebar] and garnered a Club World Award nomination for
their audio design at New York’s Deep; and Kale LaCroux
of Robert Singer and Associates, the firm behind the lighting
of legendary nightclubs Tunnel and Studio 54.
Malhotra says that the trio was critical to Quo’s development,
for more than just its members’ obvious skills: It was
also clever marketing. “It’s important that your
brand comes out right from day one,” he says. “When
you hire the right people, people who understand their particular
task, your name spreads and trickles down.”
With their combo of smarts and clout, Dupoux, the Lodi’s,
and LaCroux gave Quo all it needed to become the city’s
most energized elite hangout.
“Urban Tropicalism”
Quo opened in late April 2004, but the planning started months
before, when Malhotra and Seneca first met with Dupoux. The
two saw a void in the New York market for a club/lounge hybrid,
and envisioned a venue with two distinct areas: a main club
room for vocal house, and a back lounge for hip-hop. In their
view, all New York clubs were cut from the same dull mold:
“Dark with furniture, and then you hire some promoters.”
They wanted Quo to be more like a Miami or Las Vegas space;
a club with a concept. Those were the basics. Now it was up
to the master.
In-demand designer Dupoux calls himself “a translator
of other people’s visions.” It was him who hatched
the “urban tropicalism” concept that became Quo’s
theme. The end result is a “very curvy, voluptuous space
with great circulation,” he says. “People can
see each other throughout. It’s like a sexy style of
public assembly.”
The main room features a circular stage in the center of the
room for fire-blowers, musicians, or dancers. Stones line
the entire length of the long wall, and LED lighting creates
the effect of water trickling down it. Opposite the entrance
is the bar, where geometric 70’s-style wood “chandeliers”
hang overhead.
Two of Quo’s four VIP rooms, including the main one,
are in the loungier back room; the other two are up front
and in open view, with a more liberal admission policy. The
main VIP is tented, with banquette seating for a more intimate
feel. But it still offers easy access to the entire club,
“to create energy,” says Dupoux.
Energy is the goal throughout Dupoux’s design, and results
from “accumulation of detail,” he says. “Different
heights create energy; the use of different materials creates
energy.” That’s why he staggered the height of
the chandeliers, and even some walls; and used fur and shiny
vinyl on furniture. “The unbalance [of those materials]
is almost shocking, and also creates energy,” he says.
To offset all that oomph, Dupoux made Quo curvy, which he
says fosters a relaxed vibe: “If you see something round
and something square, you feel more comfortable with the round.”
That’s why there’s not a sharp edge to be found
throughout the club.
Asymmetrical Sound
Once the design was complete, the sound and lighting were
the next obstacles to tackle. “Quo started as a very
simple install that became quite complex with the certain
requirements of the space,” said sound designer Joseph
Lodi, half of Advanced’s twin brother team (also in
the process of revamping local nightclub Spirit). The difficulty
level increased because of Dupoux’s relaxing curves:
Quo is not symmetrical. “It’s the most round,
non-parallel space I’ve worked in,” said Joe.
“If you hang one speaker on one side, you can’t
do the same thing on the other side. This happens to be very
good acoustically, but [makes it] very difficult to place
speaker cabinets.”
So the Lodi’s sonically designated the entire main room,
from the entrance to the bar at the opposite end, as the dancefloor.
To keep sound consistent across it, they custom built all
of the speakers, then “pulled them back at about 35
degrees to the main floor, and angled the center sections
housing the midranges and tweeters at about 18 degrees off
axis,” Joe explains. These sections are shaped like
V’s — angled both outward and downward for better
dispersion and coverage — and they use a quadruple horn
in an array to combat phasing and cancellation problems. “The
result is a true 120 degree dispersion pattern,” says
Joe.
Because of the room’s unique design, subwoofer placement
became an issue as well. The Lodi’s solved this one
by building the subs into a perfectly round platform at the
center of the dancefloor, effectively eliminating cancellation.
“When you face an 18-to-21-inch speaker producing a
bass wave, it has to travel 30 to 40 feet to fully do what
it has to,” says Joe. “When you walk that distance
in most clubs, you’re already at another woofer, and
that’s when you get cancellation.” In Quo, the
subwoofers sit in the middle and face outwards. Since they
were built specifically for the club, the six enclosures fit
like puzzle pieces, one into another.
The Lodi’s 40,000-watt system is powerful enough to
attract the world’s top DJs, but their well-equipped
DJ booth seals the deal. It includes 18-inch subwoofers built
into the lower half of the console, and two line array monitors.
According to Joe, the arrays offer wide dispersion horizontally,
but narrow the pattern vertically, so that “even if
the DJ goes to the left or right of the console’s center,
he still gets a full frequency.”
But the most unique aspect of Quo’s sound design is
that it’s future-proof. Because the Lodi’s were
there from the start, they were able to run wiring inside
the concrete floors before they were poured. Plus, they mounted
all floor and ceiling channels before any finished walls were
hung. So they won’t be breaking down any walls to run
wires for the eventual roof deck (planned for next summer).
Constant Color
Before heading over to Aspen, Colo.-based Robert Singer &
Associates, lighting designer Kale LaCroux worked on projects
everywhere from Disneyland and the Indian Motorcycle restaurant
chain to high-end residential homes. Quo is his first nightclub.
“The basis of Quo’s lighting design is change,
instead of a static feel,” LaCroux explained. “You
don’t want someone to come in night after night and
see the same thing. You want to offer something new to look
at each time, and even over the course of a single night.”
To accomplish this, he used the 16.7 million-color capacity
of Color Kinetics LED lighting.
The main lighting sources are housed inside Dupoux’s
custom-designed chandelier pieces. These are constructed of
a series of six-inch milky white Plexiglas tubes, built into
circular or square wooden rings. By placing runs of multiple
one-inch thick color kinetics iColor Coves in the tubes, “we
created a six-inch diameter of continuous light source for
a bigger effect,” said Lacroux.
He applied the same concept behind the main bar, but in the
form of Cove-embedded wood “arcs” mounted flush
to the wall. “That’s actually a compilation of
25 six-foot tubes, each with five feet of Coves in it,”
says LaCroux. “The arcs follow the curve of the wall,
and the tubes run vertically within the arcs.”
LaCroux programmed the Coves to display static colors during
early evening and late night hours. He also created a chasing
rainbow effect that cycles through all of the colors slowly
over an hour, in addition to the requisite Saturday Night
Fever flashiness on the dancefloor when the time is right.
The rest of the system consists of a smattering of intelligent
lights (on the dancefloor), projectors, and linear rope lighting
under banquettes and stairs.
According to Lacroux, the Quo project was unique because of
its preset vision. “I’ve never seen anything work
as fluidly as this, as far as lighting tying into a space
and not being an afterthought,” he said. “It’s
really the ultimate fusion.”
Nice, But Don’t Try To Visit…
Malhotra and Seneca aren’t casting their club’s
perfectly rendered pearls unto just anyone. Their philosophy
is to keep Quo’s door very tight for as long as they
can. “You can’t let the door go quickly,”
said Malhotra. “The main way to keep a club good is
to keep the door as long as possible, and still not be offensive.”
In the pair’s thinking, if entrance got too easy, Quo
would be in danger of getting “old.” But they
hope that people who were initially rejected will still be
curious after the A-list is over it, and try again. If the
Quo name is established as cool, they say, people will want
to see what was so special about it.” That way, according
to their calculations, the club can still be hot and profitable
for another couple of years. But the two know that getting
to the point of sustained success isn’t easy: “It’s
more of a marathon than a sprint,” says Seneca.
Quo
511 West 28th Street
New York, NY
www.quonyc.com
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