Club Design Challenge: The Itty Bitty Titty Club
inno123
In those articles the only challenge I gave myself was designing the best club possible under the fairly typical limits of all-nude but no-alcohol. With an alcohol club you can presume that if the club isn't making money on the dancers it can make it up with drink profits. With a no-alcohol club you have to make it based on pretty much the dancers alone.
So I decided to revisit club design but this time to give myself a real challenge: design a club in two thousand square feet total. How small is that? Well Sapphires in Vegas claims to be the largest in the world at 70 thousand square feet so one could fit 35 of them in it. A review of listings on stripclubproperties.com shows that the vast majority of clubs are from 4 to 8 thousand square feet. A large club might be 10 and what most people would consider a huge club, like SR Vegas would be 20. What really made me try for two was a news story about a city being sued over a zoning ordinance that was described as a de-facto club ban. Among such limits as a 10 PM closing time and a six-foot distance barrier was a maximum size of...two thousand square feet.
Like the earlier articles there are renderings of the finished design in my profile pictures, along with the ones from the original set of articles. Selecting and downloading the picture will get the full resolution versions.
Much like those 300 square foot sample apartments at IKEA setting a very restricted square footage forces one to be very efficient and to make decisions regarding what is essential.
Do small right and you get 'cozy' and 'intimate'. Do small wrong and you get 'cramped' and 'crowded'. At least if you do it right 'cozy and intimate' are not bad adjectives for a club to have associated with it.
In addition I added the challenge of wanting to do this as a strongly themed design. Most clubs have no theme, they just picked a name because it sounded sexy. A few are moderately themed, such as in the choice of artwork or logo or colors. But a strongly themed design tries to put you in a very specific place in every detail. Specifically I decided on the theme of a Moroccan Harem.
The essential challenge of shrinking a club is that you can't just take a 5000 square foot club that could service a maximum of 25 dancers and shrink everything to a 2000 square foot club that can service a maximum of 10. Ten dancers on a peak night is not enough to have the variety and availability to really attract customers at peak times. And if you cant get them in at peak times you aren't going to cover your overhead. I needed enough private dance spaces in my two thousand square feet to still keep twenty dancers and forty customers. I needed a lot of private dance spaces. That brings up another issue, which is what proportion of lap dance versus VIP spaces. In a larger club you can afford a little inefficiency if there is a bigger demand at one time for VIP versus lap dances. So the first decision was to just have one type of space serve two purposes. How? In the prior article I said that the essential difference is that the people in the lap dances should be part of the spectacle but the VIP be a mystery. The customers should be enticed by what they see is going on in the lap dances but intrigued by what might be going on in the VIP. How do you do both with the same booth? Simple; two curtains. A sheer curtain for the lap dances but then pull the heavy curtain for the privacy and mystery of VIP. Without having to worry about whether the mix of the two offerings is right. And since there is no extra space for hallways make them all right off of the main lounge area.
With the whole perimeter of the lounge area used for private dance booths it meant an island stage would be needed. This put even more pressure on the seating space. The typical club has concentric zones of seating from the stage. there is the tip rail seats, then there is the lounge seating zone, and then there are the wall booths. The wall booths were already gone because that was where the private dance booths were going, but even with a minuscule stage there wasn't space for both lounge seating and tip rail seating. So instead have just one zone of seating, trying to combine both the cozy sit-with-me vibe of the wall booths with the intimate proximity to the stage of the tip rail. And many of the seats are less than an arm's length from the stage edge anyway.
Since the club is so small the stage does not need to be more than one step high, which fortunately eliminates any need to give any space to stairs. With the tip rail gone it means that no dancer is ever more than a couple of steps away from any customer. Since the stage is going to be too small for any sort of acrobatic moves anyway and we have gotten rid of the DJ and gone with voice-tracking to save the space of a DJ booth the stage changes concept from being a performance space to a presentation space, where the performers (as many as want at a time) present themselves with enticing moves and views until one of the customers gestures for them to come to them, at which point they are just a couple of steps to be at their sides. And if they agree on going to the private dance booths those too are just a couple of steps away. The net result is a very intimate relationship between stage, seating, and private dances.
There is one small window for the soft drink service and one small booth for the floor manager station. There is one ten foot square business office and the security office/front desk is essentially a wide hallway. The entrance lobby is also essentially a short wide hallway. Bathrooms are four single-person unisex rooms, and there is a small booth for the floor manager.
Oddly enough shortly after I finished this design challenge I was contacted by somebody wanting to do a three thousand square foot BYOB club. The BYOB added some extra elements and the extra thousand square feet required fewer sacrifices, but actually some of the elements of this design, I'm not saying which, made it into that one.
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What a club looks like inside or outside is pretty much irrelevant to me EXCEPT for the design of the VIP Room. I'm MORE interested in how the club is managed.
Oh I certainly agree that management is essential, but design an management go hand-in-hand. A skilled manager will realize if something in the club's design is preventing its effectiveness, and a bad design can present headwinds to effective management.
For example how many overhead people are needed? Is there a way to do with fewer? Is there a way to offer customers more choices? Are there typical ways of doing things that just make life harder for the dancer, more complicated to the manager, and add nothing for the customer?
If a 2000 sf club needed multiple bouncers, a bartender, waitresses, a bathroom troll, a DJ, etc. it isn't going to be able to make money.
Hope this works out for you inno!
Then what fraction of a customer's time is spend in private dances? It depends of course on whether the guy is dribbling out ones at the stageside, slowly sipping his one drink at a table, or immediately grabbing the first hot girl he sees for a half hour VIP. But a good average might be one third of their time in private dances. That means that you need two club seats for every private seat. That cuts both ways. If you have too many booths for club seats there won't be enough space for PL's to sell to. If you wind up with six booths and 12 club seats you may have the ratio right but it means that your club can serve an absolute maximum of 18 customers at once!
This is what I am meaning by the need for a synergy between design and management. It also means that even though you think you only care about one thing just about everything matters to make that one thing suit you. For example you might think that you don't care about proper lighting and cleanup facilities for the dancers...until you see a dancer with bad odor and ugly makeup!
Do you have REAL stats on how many VIP Rooms are in use at any one time in a club. I'd like to see them.
How about the number of stories for the club? Especially in view of the death of a dancer after a fall.
But the point is you can't just say 'the only thing that matters....' because these things all interact with each other.
U have any example of a club U've designed?? many of Ur ideas sound gd but i'm disturbed that U spend more time on VIP (a minority service) than lighting, seating & acoustics.
ANY small club needs an elevated stage
missing something so basic, so minor, tells me this is a fantasy, not a real design proposal at all.
Of course I had ideas on lighting, sound, seating, and acoustics. Look at the renderings included in my profile. It isn't really a part of what I wrote about though because a 2000 sf club does not present any particular challenges to sound and lighting compared to a more standard size club.
As to 'real' clubs as I wrote I am working with an owner who has one under construction right now. He doesn't want me blabbing all over the place what his new club and some of the nonstandard things we are doing as it is in a competitive market. Maybe after it is open he will approve of me writing about the club and the design process.
I'd say the booths could be smaller. Many of the Detroit clubs have 4×4 ft booths. At Honest John's I'd say they're closer to 3×3.
But isn't that what the whole sales pitch on the VIP room? It's much more private...you know...?
having done some tests you can certainly so the essentials of a lap dance in a 3'x4' space, but particularly will full height walls it can be pretty claustrophobic. And for some customers (see Alucard's comments) having a bit more than the minimum space is an important thing.
One thing I have been looking at in the 'real' project I am working on is how do you make a VIP room seem more welcoming without making it larger. A hook to hang your hat? A safe place for the dancer to put her purse and hang her dance costume? A waste can? A squirt bottle of hand sanitizer or lotion?
The main thing I would suggest is a shelf or small table to set my drink down. In most clubs these days it seems to be unsafe to leave your drink unattended, and many don't have any place to put it while getting a LD. A trash can is nice in an "extras" club. A coat hook is sometimes nice, if I'm wearing a suit I usually want to take the jacket off during the dance. I don't need a place for my hat, I check that at the door.