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Technology now enables designers to create club interiors that change to match every mood. Bethan Ryder illuminates the latest trends
Club designers across the globe are reigniting the halcyon days of Saturday Night Fever through the sophisticated use of LEDs, fibre- optics and even plain old tungsten lighting. Leaps in technology, plus lower prices, have thrown the spectrum of possibilities wide open to interior and lighting designers.
Developments in LED technology are particularly exciting, believes Kale Lucroux of Robert Singer Lighting, one of the leading entertainment lighting companies in the US. 'Nowadays they are more effective as a light output, and any combination of hue and saturation is possible - you can produce 16.7 million colours,' Lucroux says. 'The price has dipped, and the control systems are simpler. Instead of huge fader boards you can present everything on a laptop computer. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination.'
Over the past six years, drenching bleached-white interiors with ambient, ever-changing multi-coloured lighting emitted by neon or LEDs have been de rigueur. There's also been an increase in fibre optic use and the integration of LEDs into the interior structure of clubs, so that walls, bar counters or ceilings sparkle, glitter and pulsate.
Venues receiving the star treatment include Christian Liaigre- designed Yauatcha in London, with its ceiling of twinkly fibre optics in the basement restaurant. Bar facades are becoming positively radiant too. DJ Claude Challe's club Nirvana in Paris, designed by Jonathan Amar, has an orange glass-fronted bar illuminated by a galaxy of fibre optic hearts and stars. At London hotspot Kabaret's Prophecy,...