The experiential mood of the club hits guests on entry into the club where turnstyles whip up anticipation for the reception “Departure lounge” replete with pendant chandeliers, ripple fold drapes and reflective ceilings. The trip continues through a long tunnel licked with coloured lighting and it's not long before the "main room" (pic above) of the club comes dramatically into view.

It has to be said that the club is impressive not just for its vast capacity on four levels but also for the cosmopolitan design flourishes which take in everything from Lichtenstein Pop Art to Bladerunner effects.    

Influences stem from the gilded aged of New York’s Studio 54 and The Palladium club scene. Bigtime Design’s Callin Fortis led the Gatecrasher design brief which was to create a Miami-style club experience, devised in Ibiza and designed in New York. His award-winning designs and renovations of clubs such as Crobar New York, Crobar Chicago and the Cameo Theater in Miami have brought him fans such as Harrison Ford, Lenny Kravitz and Cameron Diaz.

Fortis revisits clubland’s sexy and raw roots through his own Studio 54 awe. “There was a freer sensibility to nightlife then – everyone mixed on the dancefloor,” he says. “Clubland was full of sex appeal and sizzle. I want to bring back that kind of danger and rawness to clubland; Scarface meets the dark side of Saturday Night Fever, meets a Brazilian hooker in an analogue, not digital, world.” Gatecrasher girls go for launch

Simon Raine, founder & MD of Gatecrasher concurs. "Club Design in the UK has become boring, formulaic and totally uninteresting and something must change!” he insists. “We need to put the heart, the soul and passion back into clubland.”

This sentiment saw its delivery through the expertise of a crack team of contractors. The 11-metre high by 20 metre wide matrix wall that dominates the huge main room is composed of square LED panels which transmit light, graphics and video. The matrix wall makes an instant impression with its floor-to-ceiling scale and technological advancement. Willow SoundVision created the lighting, video and LED while Definitive Media produced tailored video content which mould itself around the contours of the LED display, making optimum use of its 3-D structure.   

Matt Rawlinson Design Ltd handled the conceptual design in conjunction with with overall design project managers Design at Source  and main contractor Phelan Construction.

The matrix wall looms over clubbers

The venue takes its cue from the film set and is fairly described by the club as a juxtaposition of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas meets Blade Runner. This is a flagship Gatecrasher that outglams Gatecrasher LovesNottingham and Gatecrasher Seven in Leeds

The “Hyper Nightclub Experience” is set on four levels and the emphasis is on luxury and adventure. Four individual club rooms, six feature areas and nine bars fall within the ample space.

Across the four club rooms the venue will play all styles of music under an “exclusively for everyone” ethos banner with one-off specialist music events featuring global DJs and artists scheduled throughout the year.

Away from the cavernous main room lies Orange Pop which has its own DJ and in a bid to take it beyond the glam and technology of previous Gatecrasher venues. It's a striking, intimate environment with Roy Lichtenstein Pop Art walls and furniture to supplement the look.

 (Below) Orange Pop

Multi Surface Fabrications has done an arresting job with the bars which feature  red LED writing on a slick black bar wall.

It's a near hallucinatory experience reading the continuous lines of Lichtenstein prose about fame and success electronically scrawling up and down the wall like Stock Exchange tickers. No doubt the sentiment says something about the clientele that Gatecrasher hopes to attract, even if it is meant to convey irony."Kissing Booths" in Orange Pop offer a partially enclosed sit down area but with a vista onto the dancing in the main room to avoid isolation. 

"...an entreaty to the worldy-wise clubber who maybe equates Bed's leather panelling with the Softgrain trim in his new Jaguar XF."

  (Above) The Posh level

It's interesting that the smaller touches aren't lost among the more overblown design features. Signage by Designers Republic, for example, is clean white on black - and memorable. Smokers saw the cheeky side of the sign that directed them with "Smoking Kills. This Way."

Private bar "Posh" is situated on the next level and "the Mansion" invokes a  black-tie air with its chandeliers and grandeur, courtesy of Design at Source. And so to "Bed", with its mirror balls, dancefloor and entreaty to the worldy-wise clubber who maybe equates Bed's leather panelling with the Softgrain trim in his new Jaguar XF. 

The music has also grown up forsaking  Gatecrasher's  "glo-stick" sounds for a more even music policy across each of the four music spaces. Delivery is via Opus Audio custom made sound systems while Pioneer features in the DJ booths.           The launch party in full swing