Claude's Club at Chotto Matte

Brief

Claude's Club is a private dining and listening room in the basement beneath the Chotto Matte restaurant in Soho, hosting late night members events. Forty covers seated. One hundred and twenty when the room is dancing.

Superfutures designed it as the Garden of Eden. Sculptural seating, deep colour, wall murals, precise lighting. The loudspeakers were not to be concealed within that scheme. They were to belong to it, specified as sculptural ornaments inside the garden rather than equipment installed in a restaurant.

We were appointed at RIBA Stage 2, before the ceiling strategy and finishes were fixed. That timing is the reason the rest of this was solvable.

Constraint

The room sits directly under a working restaurant. Anything that moves air in the basement arrives in the floor above as structure-borne energy, and the frequencies this room exists for are precisely the frequencies that travel best through a concrete slab.

It also has two jobs. Forty people eating and listening, and 120 people dancing, on one system, in one room, with no change to what the room looks like in between.

The ceiling made both harder. Exposed concrete soffit, low headroom, no void to route through and no conventional fixing surface. The slab that would normally carry the system was also the floor the diners upstairs were sitting on.

Design response

We isolated at the source rather than treating the restaurant afterwards. Bass units were placed at the rear of the room, on the floor plate furthest from the dining room above, with acoustic absorption set beneath each cabinet to decouple it from the structure. The position was chosen so the isolation cost nothing in output. Moving a subwoofer to protect a room upstairs is only a solution if the room downstairs still works at 120 people, and it does.

Suspension was resolved by going through the problem rather than around it. Metal rods were driven through the exposed concrete, brackets fixed to the rods, each hang carrying a safety chain. Load is taken by the slab itself.

The loudspeakers in this room are meant to be seen. The engineering holding them there is not. Nothing is surface mounted, nothing is boxed in, and no part of the fixing reads from the floor, so what remains visible is the object rather than the installation.

Integration

Rod positions were set against the lighting layout and the mural scheme rather than dropped in afterwards, which is only possible while the reflected ceiling plan is still live. Each enclosure landed where the garden wanted an ornament rather than where acoustics alone would have defaulted. Coordination ran with Superfutures through design, and the system was commissioned against the room as built rather than the room as drawn.

Outcome

The room runs dinner service through to late night members events on a single system, moving from forty covers to a dancing capacity of 120 without a member of staff reaching for a volume control and without anything being wheeled in. Sound has weight in the basement and no presence in the restaurant above it. The project was featured in Mondo-DR as a design-led audio integration.