Times and trends stand still for no club, even if it holds court in an ornate building protected by the National Historic Registry, and especially when it has to fire on all cylinders for corporate, DJ and live events. So, after seven years, Atlanta’s well-known nightlife warhorse Eleven50 decided last July that it was time for a few changes.

Six months and more than a million dollars later, the club was not so much reopened but reborn as Opera, sporting a fully refurbished look, lighting system and sound design which appeared less renovation than reinvention. “Most people sort of think when a club closes, they’re gonna paint some walls and do a little bit of a facelift,” says chief financial officer Cliff Hoffman, who oversaw the renovation. “[But Opera] feels nothing like the old club. It’s actually an amazing transformation.”

Since its facelift, the club has been doing brisk business, hosting corporate clients like Coca-Cola and artists like Common. It parted ways with dance promoters Liquefied and has been slowly building up its own promotion wing, Crescent Moon Entertainment. It will bring in the big-name DJs who were Eleven50’s stock and trade, on Thursdays as well as the occasional Saturday, which is now reserved for R&B, hip-hop and Top 40. But the club is all still a grand production, similar to the building’s origins as an opera house in the early 20th century: hence the new name and brand identity.

Once Eleven50 closed in January, contractors started work on a full gut of its distinctive main room. The club’s designer, Terry Barbu, incorporated many of the building’s historic features into the main floor’s new look, elevating the dancefloor a foot and a half above the original, and adding a separate VIP check-in to the downstairs section where patrons enter. This area sports a lush hotel-ish lobby, and reflects the many added features VIPs can now enjoy, including an entirely new second floor which wraps around the whole club, complete with banquette seating; four Phantom Boxes that can sit up to eight people on tan cushions; two Royal Suites on each side of the DJ booth; and six VIP Opera Boxes to each side of the dancefloor.

The bar on the ground floor is now split into two separate bars on each side of the dancefloor, and VIPs in the three-tiered mezzanine balcony now have a private bar for themselves. In addition, the entire proscenium arch stage was reconstruct- ed, and a raised upper stage now contains the DJ booth. For corporate or live functions, the entire DJ booth - which also contains the control panels for lighting and video - can be raised 30 feet off the ground thanks to two half-ton motors, making way for whatever needs to go in its place. For further ambiance, a Kryogenifex system with nozzles was installed over the main floor to chill out the space, and pump up the party, at particularly hectic times in the night.

Better, Faster, More
Aside from the interior design, the most dramatic change to the club is its bold new lighting system. “We used to have just one arch truss that went along the edge of our proscenium all the way up and back around,” says Opera lighting tech David Obert. “Our lighting rig used to consist of about 10 [High End Systems] Technobeams, six Coemar ProSpot LX [moving heads] and a few Elation [Professional] Stage Color [par cans]. There wasn’t a whole lot.”

To add greater versatility to the existing package, Opera turned to Active Production & Design (activelighting.com) to implement a more deeply layered approach to dancefloor and onstage illumination. Frank Kendall, who oversaw the entire lighting installation for Active, placed the preexisting Technobeams and 12 new High End x.Spots on a 20-foot circular truss fixed onto the center of the ceiling, with several other trusses radiating from its circumference. The old Stage Colors point at the proscenium stage, while four Martin Professional Atomic strobes are evenly split between the main floor trusses, and those hanging just over the DJ booth on the stage.

Plus, Kendall, who occasionally serves as LJ, swapped out the club’s old controller for a Wholehog 1000, to accommodate the added complexity of the new lighting design. “They go from a corporate event to a dance party in the blink of an eye,” he says. ”One of the nice things about having a Hog is the multiple pages. You’re in corporate mode on this page, tap it twice, go back up to page one and you can be in dance mode in four seconds.”

Opera sports a fully refurbished look and lighting system.

Hang The DJs
Also thrown into the main room mix are additional video options. Two large video projectors behind the DJ booth cast pre-recorded video onto a five-foot screen, and the Opera Boxes are supplied with satellite-enabled Olevia plasmas. Smaller projectors in the club’s gallery shine logos onto tables. But the club chooses not to over-rely on video. “You have to be careful with video in the nightclub environment. It tends to be distracting,” according to Hoffman. “Oftentimes the [VJs] will come, and people end up watching the videos, and that’s not really [what we want]. You want that to be an element of the evening, but not what people are focused on.”

Sound designer Reign chose to merely rearrange the club’s existing matrix of speakers, sound processors and amplifiers. Eight Mackie PA-180SW subs are located under the proscenium stage, while Mackie PA-152 high-output 15-inch speakers are arranged in clusters on pillars right next to the DJ booth and along the tops of the mezzanine. In-wall RGB Communications MC-616 supply the sound for the Opera Boxes and the VIP areas on the second floor.

A major problem with the previous system was the amount of speaker-damaging mistakes made by visiting DJs. So, Reign applied three layers of compression and limiting to the signal on its way to the speakers. Sound from the club’s outside patio - a considerably scaled-back system, dominated by JBL speakers - can be routed into the main room vis-ŕ-vis an Extron Matrix Switcher, as well. Spaces were allotted in both the sound as well as the lighting systems for additional equipment when the time comes and, in some cases, it already has: Reign recently added EAW VR21 two-ways for fill. But the sound tech is pleased with the final product. “If [the system’s] run properly with the right person standing behind the decks who understands sound, people can walk into this room and really make it sound good,” he says. Reign says that Hoffman’s done “a phenomenal job” on the revamp. “When you walk into it, the feeling of class and sophistication, sexiness and style, just overwhelms you. It’s got beautiful wood accents all over the place, arches, columns, a lot of little details that make it a sophisticated facility for people to just enjoy.”

www.operaatlanta.com

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