The Riviera Music Lounge is a music club located in the Riviera Hotel in Benidorm. It is a fresh lately refurbished hotel in the mediterranean beach of Spain. The hotel company is a piece in a compound of hospitality businesses including 4 hotels and 6 Bars all close together in Benidorm.
The Hotel had a space with no use at the basement and wanted to give an extra service to fullfill the clients needs. The requierements that space had to cope were: giving live concerts, night parties and cellebrations, it had to have a stage and a dance floor. It had to be a cosy ambient but at the same time appealing and sophisticated. One of the challenges was the fact that it had no facade to the street and clients had to walk through the hotel to get to the venue. The local should be outstanding for people to get in there.
We thought it had to be a very different atmosphere to the rest of the bars the company had all of them theme bars (western, geographical, pirates,…). So the concept was a New York Jazz Club. Live music had to be one of the main topics of the venue and we wanted to reflect the warm atmosphere of a hidden club. As the space was located at the basement we had just one window and almost no reference from the street we wanted it to be a precious space where the light was sieved and golden, with nobel materials such as back lighted onix marble for the preciousness, brick as a memory of the NY jazz clubs and wood and velvet for the cozy touch.
The main feature of the lounge is the backlighted marble bar that fills the room with a magical golden light. The walls are mainly covered with names of jazz masters, also musicians portraits reinforce the music character of the club. A big lounge bench runnig through the wall with a velvet upholstry provides the bar a 70’s club appearance. The velvet curtains also refer to a theater. We tried to make difference between the stage and dance floor and the bench area more intimate and cosy by a different ceiling treatment. The former has an acoustic tiled cieling while the later has a plywood boards floor and cieling.
