An icon of Mallorcas nightlife awakes – the former TITOS transferred into the new LIO. A club concept from IBIZA, combining Dining, Cabaret and Dancefloor all together under one roof. As we know, IBIZA is well-known for eccentric performances and excellent sound from DJs all over the world – and especially locations. Tito’s was the oldest club in Palma City and one of the oldest in Europe.
Opened in the 30’s as an outdoor dinner concert hall and became a must-go location on the island. The tourist boom of 1950 and 1960 was Tito’s golden age. Lío Mallorca gives a new life to such an icon and goes back to the roots of the business offering again, as in the 1950s, a cabaret-dinner show. To achieve this comeback, the goal was to bring back that soul and turn the existing club space of the building into the theatre it used to be. GRAS Reynés Arquitectos together with interior designer Lázaro Rosa-Violán designed the new Lío in Mallorca for the Pacha Group. Nightclubs exemplify how fashion, culture and social norms influence an often-overlooked subway side of architecture. They are usually associated with places without any specific architectural features, but they are intentionally designed to create very specific experiences and go far beyond visual effects.
The soundproofing was a challenge, so a specialized acoustic project was carried out in parallel, where the building envelope is duplicated and replicated in a second inner layer, creating an intermediate air chamber that is separated using avant-garde damped solutions as a contact with the outer layer. In this way, and due to the heterogeneity of the building envelope, we design tailor-made construction solutions for each element, as well as the connection details between them.
For the interior design by Lazaro Rosa-Violan, the materials, appearance and atmosphere of the interior are just a complement to the show: the focus must go to the artists and the music. All the space is painted or clad in an ochre dark colour with mirrored walls, wallpapers, plants and natural stones. A mysterious late-night atmosphere is created. The bathrooms, one on each floor, are unisex with a central water feature. Speaking of sound going artistic – with the BeoSound Shape designed by Alexander Slaato, your walls are alive with the sound of music in the form of your own design. Every audio brand likes to claim that their products seamlessly blend form and function – but the BeoSound Shape are quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.
At first glance, the sound system looks like an art installation. It’s a cluster of hexagonal tiles arranged as you see fit to achieve a balance of cost, sound quality and wall space that suits every wall. Stand at one angle and the tiles appear to be simple hexagons, but look at them head on and their design forces an optical illusion that makes them look fully three-dimensional. You can expand up to a maximum of 44 speakers. The minimum setup contains a total of eight tiles. The speakers themselves – which contain one 13.3 cm woofer and 1,9 cm tweeter – are joined by one amplifier, one core, one dampener and one empty tile. The speaker supports a wide array of connectivity technologies, ranging from wireless technologies such as AirPlay, Google Cast, and Bluetooth, to Optical audio, 3.5mm and Toslink. Bang and Olufsen seem to have found the golden key between sound quality and art.
Another example of the art of sound is the Nautilus loudspeaker from Bowers & Wilkins.
If you’re familiar with the name, then you must be more of a speaker connoisseur rather than an art enthusiast. The Nautilus “ultimate” loudspeaker is the 4-way tube-loaded system from Bowers & Wilkins, building on their famous decades-old speaker design that has often been mistaken for a museum piece or a luxury home accessory. Well, who says that they can’t be both a functioning speaker and a work of art? But more than just giving you something that plays music packaged in a unique shape, the design of the Nautilus is where the adage “form follows function” applies.
You would think that something that looks like an artsy snail or a marine mollusc will be all form and no function. But for the past 30 years, the Nautilus has proven itself to be one of the most sought-after luxury speakers in the market. It all started with a goal to create a loudspeaker that doesn’t sound like anything else in the market and eventually evolved with a design that doesn’t look like anything else either. The Nautilus tube technology has received awards like the Queen’s Award for Innovation as it has been able to revolutionize the way speaker drive units sound with the spirals and tube design that’s present in almost all the speakers that Bowers & Wilkins has been making like their Style Icon – the Zeppelin. In a world where upgrading to a newer smartphone every 12 months a six-year wait for a product can feel like a lifetime.
But it was worth it. The new Zeppelin marks a return to the speaker’s simplest and most effective moniker for its hotly anticipated 2021 rebirth, because these days, B&W is exclusively wireless streaming. To this end, the Zeppelin is compatible with Airplay2, Spotify Connect and Adaptive Bluetooth, with Bowers & Wilkins Music App support also serving as a gateway to music. Also, have a look at the wedge from them, looks like a bowl or humidifier but it’s full of sound – and will step up your decoration game.
I’m always on the lookout for the latest trends and if I hear something like perfect sound combined with excellent design, I will let you know.