You’ve seen the pictures from the opening night (yes, it was as wild as it looked) and promoted by the team that produces the famous Sydney ’LOST’ parties, every Saturday night is a themed party at AND.

So the interiors had to be suitably impressive – a backdrop that looked good, but also worked as a hard-wearing, high-traffic, high-jinks kind of environment.

Aiming to blur the lines between nightclub and interactive art installation, Paul Schell, Group General Manager of Hotel Pursuits – who were responsible for the design – told us about some of the features:

Australia’s largest jigsaw puzzle installation

An ode to Eadweard Muybridge’s ’Pigeons’ from his photographic series, Animals in Locomotion. Each piece is individually installed on handmade copper springs, in differing relief on the elevation behind the bar.

Laser-cut Tyveck paper silhouette

A 420-square metre glazed cavity wall, complete with Dmx lighting control, provides the spine of the circulation zone. The composition sits across 12 planes with an under sea scene from one elevation through to the interior of an atomic era submarine; the third elevation in the series is a cheeky double entendre involving a stallion rearing up on hind legs.

Laser projection lighting installation

160 custom lipstick-sized, concealed fixed-plane lasers highlight architectural lines in the property over the club’s main dance floor. If you conceal the point of origin of the lasers and use an awful lot of them, you end up with something akin to the sci fi classic and brilliantly art directed remake of the movie ’Tron’. The Lasers reflect off a gold textile hand woven ceiling, creating different levels of reflection dependent on the view point and weave of the textile.

The Sub room

A room enshrouded in vintage green canvas, ceilings, walls and floors. Pilfered sugar refinery water filters were remade into light fittings, along with various pipe details from the closed refinery. The key feature of the sub room is the waterbed seating – custom made water bladders, hand covered and laced in situ. The room is defined by the atomic submarine tyveck installation and was to represent a submarine’s acoustically dampened space. The seating engages every patron who sits on it, creating motion and interactivity with others seated ’further down the line’.

Outdoor library space

6000 recycled books rescued from the paper pulpe, triple-wrapped in plastic for water tightness and laid in brick pattern to form a major acoustic wall. The space is further defined by 120 milk crates formed into a chandelier suspended above the space, further complemented by anaglyptic wall paper, Lego block chair rails/ cornice details and Louis XIV-inspired furniture coated in peacock green industrial rubberised coating.

Private karaoke rooms

Two private karaoke rooms are accessed with electronic keys thru secret doors inside our custom 70’s style photo booth. One room is themed Japanese Samurai and cinematic femme fatale; the second room in thousands of Jpop and Kpop images montage, complete with cheesy laser lighting.

As well as visually, the venue also raises the bar in terms of multi-media and user interaction, with a magnet wall, photo booth and instagram/user content-generated bar, while karaoke customers have the ability to digitally record their antics and push footage to their favourite social networking sites.

AND

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