The Windmill

Brief

Three floors in Soho, running cabaret and club programming in the same building on the same night, with a restaurant operating alongside. The existing system had to come out and a new one go in without the venue closing.

We were appointed at Stage 6. That is late, and we say so, because what the constraint list below demanded is a different kind of work to a Stage 2 appointment and it is worth being straight about which one this was.

Constraint

The venue was trading throughout. Strip out and installation had to happen between operating hours, on a building that had to be presentable for a show the same evening.

The programming brief pulled in two directions. Cabaret needs intelligibility, restraint and a system that disappears behind a performer. Club needs pressure. A single system tuned to the average of those two does neither well, and the venue could not afford separate systems for separate nights.

Physically, the room fought back. Floor space for bass enclosures was minimal across all three floors, and the stage, which is where bass would normally live, is a solid concrete structure with nothing to install into.

Design response

The system was built in two tiers. The first tier runs alone for cabaret, voiced for clarity and controlled level. For club programming the second tier couples in automatically, adding pressure without retuning, without a second system, and without an engineer making a judgement call at 11pm. One installation, two rooms, depending on what the night is.

Bass was distributed rather than concentrated. With no stage cavity available and little floor area anywhere, we specified a larger number of smaller enclosures spread through each floor instead of a small number of large ones in the places convention would put them. That recovers pressure the room would otherwise have lost, and it produces a more even response across a venue where the audience is standing in very different places on different nights.

Where there was no home for an enclosure, we built one. A section of housing was constructed below the wooden floor area close to the stage, and further housings were built on the first floor.

DJ booth monitoring on the stage is removable, so the cabaret stage is a cabaret stage.

Integration

Installation was phased around the trading calendar, with each stage of the strip out and install completed and made safe between operating hours. Housing construction was coordinated with the existing structure rather than cut into it.

Outcome

The venue programmes cabaret and club on the same system across three floors, with the changeover handled automatically rather than manually. The installation was completed without the venue losing a trading night.