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Marquee Installations Revive Isobar In St. Ives

Neil Muckle has used his 14 years’ management experience with Mitchells & Butlers to convert the popular Isobar, in the Cornish holiday resort of St. Ives, into a thriving all-day café bar and genuine nightclub venue. At the same time he aims to increase the capacity to 600.

To accomplish all this, he turned to the tried and trusted Nigel Hodgson of Core Design who in turn enlisted Mark Brown of Marquee Installations. Nigel had been responsible for conceiving many of the successful interiors when the then Bass Leisure were rolling out their successful high street brands.

Neil came down to St. Ives from Nottingham (where he had been running the local Scream bars for M&B) at the beginning of the year to head up the new operation. He and his Dude Bars business partner Nick Kenlay discovered the popular St. Ives venue — which has been operating as a nightclub for many years. In purchasing the venue, they decided to retain the Isobar name.

Welcoming the chance to work outside the corporate ‘brand’ environment, Nigel Hodgson arrived on site the second week in January. His brief was to get the ground floor bar fully functioning as a multi-purpose chameleon venue in its own right — from an early breakfast and coffee operation through to a pre-club feeder.

“As well as the interior design our brief was to re-design the flow round the entire building to enable it to function as a single unit,” says Hodgson. The original club entrance is now a fire escape and the first floor dance venue is accessed from steps at the rear of the downstairs café bar which also links to basement toilets.

Adding to the chameleon effect are the retractable windows, which open to the outside by day, while voile curtains are drawn across at night, changing the appearance with the help of different colour washes. A world of natural colours, smoked mirrors, timber, chrome and leather seating downstairs is offset by a more vibrant black and red finishes upstairs, with chainmail hung at high level.

The entire audio and visual infrastructure was specified by Mark Brown. Eight of his favoured RCF Monitor 8’s (wall-mounted) reproduce the daytime music from a Pioneer multichange CD player in the two-zone main bar, matched with a pair of Tannoy T40 bass bins. By night, source playback devices can be trolleyed out of store to the DJ plug-in point, the Technics SL1200 decks cased in a DJ coffin, alongside Pioneer DMJ-500 mixer and Denon 1800F twin CD player.

The music is switched via a Cloud Z4 four-zone mixer and the chillout areas are nicely washed with Pulsar Chromadome LED’s, matched — at either end of the venue — by Abstract VRX colour-changers (with rotating gobos) to create a party atmosphere.

The main bar also has plenty of visual aids, with a pair of Samsung 42in plasma screens taking feeds from Sky TV and a DVD jukebox, custom built by Leisurelink, while a pair of 17in Neuvo TFT screens provide spot monitors. A BENQ LCD projector front-projects onto an electronic drop-down 6ft big screen, in 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio — so sports fans will also be satisfied.

Says Mark Brown: “Neil Muckle has deliberately gone for a London urban bar feel which will attract the tourist market in high season but also be popular with locals the rest of the year.”

In the chillout/stairwell area leading upstairs a pair of Bose 203’s provide a hint of what is to follow. The main bar is serviced by four further Monitor 8’s, with the low frequencies this time reinforced by an RCF ESW1018 Event series sub.

A further step up leads hardcore dancers into the womb of the venue — immersed in a soundfield created by four of Logic Systems’ two-way hi-packs and four (2 x 15) compact subs, controlled by an XTA DP226, and like the downstairs, all powered by QSC PLX and RMX series amplifiers.

Of the choice of dancefloor speakers, Brown says, “Neil wanted an awesome sound system. Logic Systems design and manufacture some of the best audio systems at the moment and the LS series was ideal for the job.”

Here, three Technics SL1200’s and Denon DN1800F CD player, mixed through a Pioneer DJM-500 mixer, complete the highly-specified (and permanently anchored) DJ station, while reference monitoring is provided by an RCF Vision 1000.

Marquee Installations have designed an exhilarating, multicoloured lightshow over the dancefloor, using a mirrorball to further scatter the beams. A combination of Abstract VRX scanners and Martin Pro Wizard multi-coloured effects spots, Destroyer X250 rotating beams and CX-2 colour changers are also brought to life by a JEM stage hazer.

Isobar’s other essential services have also been wisely commissioned, with Ian Moore from Harvey Shopfitters (main contractors), and Cannings (aircon and H&V) among the suppliers.

And so the club might not have met its planned Easter opening — which was always an impossible ask — but from early May, and well before the tourist season kicked in, Neil Muckle found himself the proud owner of a durable and multi-purpose venue, designed for maximum utilisation.

http://www.marqueeinstallations.co.uk

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Marquee Installations Revive Isobar In St. Ives

25th May 2004

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