Fom ferns and brass to steel and glass, the decor of Chicago`s trendiest nightclubs has run the gamut over the years. Style-conscious patrons have kept club owners on the edge-do we go cowboy or faux marble?
Through the many trends-the discos of the `70s, the punk bars of the early `80s, and the industrial warehouse clubs that are popular today-one thing has remained constant, the bar stool. Mirrored balls and mechanical bucking broncos have come and gone, but with few exceptions bar furniture has remained the same.
Until recently, that is. Some of Chicago`s hottest night spots are creating a trend of their own. They`re all decked out in thrift shop chic, the kind of look that suggests ”living room” rather than ”bar.”
It was pioneered by Shelter, Mirador and Excalibur. This fall, the pace quickened with Club Lucky, which opened in Bucktown with a `40s supper club theme, followed by the Bel-Aire Room, styled after a Beverly Hills lounge of the 1950s transplanted in River West. Fifteen Thirty One, 1531 N. Kingsbury St., is the most recent entry, debuting Saturday night with a pool room straight out of ”The Hustler.”
For clubgoers weary of high-tech themes and hard seats, the `40s and `50s style furniture comes as a comfortable and comforting surprise.
We`re talking here about the furniture you grew up with: your grandfather`s mohair chair that he favored for pipe smoking and reading the evening paper, your parents` blond end tables that traveled from living room to rec room to Goodwill, your aunt`s boomerang-shaped coffee table.
It`s the kind of furniture that prompts a newcomer to wonder, ”Didn`t my mother just unload that couch at a garage sale?” It might be the same piece, but your mother wouldn`t believe where her little loveseat is now.
Shelter
”Madonna was sitting on that couch,” says Iffat Kahn, 22, a law student, of her close encounter with the woman who made ”bustier” a household word. ”She was really comfortable, relaxing, just being her obnoxious self.”
Kahn points to a `40s-style overstuffed sofa that is grouped with other vintage furniture around the Paramount Room of Shelter, a warehouse-turned-nightclub at 564 W. Fulton St.
An old wing chair placed next to Madonna`s couch evokes a different memory for Tomas Kirvaitis, 23. ”My grandmother has a chair just like that.” On a Friday evening at the Paramount Room, club guests lounge on fat mohair chairs and brocade couches. With jazz playing in the background, the room is a calm respite from the throbbing rock music on the dance floor down the hall.
”Oversized deep comfort was the feeling we wanted to project,” says Jerry Kleiner, one of Shelter`s owners who scouted out the furniture from antiques shops. Most contemporary bar furniture is neither comfortable nor durable, Kleiner says. ”These frames hold up; they`re manufactured the old way.”
Outside the Paramount Room, Shelter has a dark, subterranean feel, a maze of rooms with distressed brick walls and scattered vintage furniture, the effect of which is part speak-easy, part warehouse, part `30s hotel.
If the style of the club is hard to pin down, that`s OK, says William Hendrix of Hendrix and Hill Architects, who worked with the owners to design the space.
”The club is a collage of familiar objects put into an unfamiliar setting,” Hendrix says. ”It`s furniture that we`re all very comfortable with, whether we grew up with it or it`s one step removed, a memory of our grandparents` furniture. It gives the impression of what a house looks like.
”But placed in the vastly different context of Shelter, the raw industrial setting, the furniture transforms to a surreal experience. It`s a fantasy world. You get people coming in costumes.”
Barry Paddor, another owner of Shelter, frequently travels to New York, Los Angeles and Miami to ”chart trends.” Says Paddor: ”I`ve witnessed this around the country. . . . People just like to recapture some of the romance involved in old furnishings. The colorations, the fabrics, the lighting set a mood you cannot get using new goods.”
Excalibur
William Hendrix focused on the `50s in designing the three-tiered Dome Room of Excalibur, a nightspot at 632 N. Dearborn St. Standing on the main floor, a viewer can glimpse clusters of vintage furniture on all levels of the open room, set against walls hung with contemporary art. A two-story mural replicating Picasso`s ”The Three Musicians” appears at one end of the room. Hendrix chose shapes and textures that were modern in their time but are pure nostalgia for Baby Boomers: nubby gold fabric with metallic threads, bent blond wood and curving chrome, zebra stripes and kidney shapes.
”It`s a little museum, almost,” says Deborah Colman, who was attending a recent art opening in the Dome Room. ”I consider this furniture to be pieces of sculpture. I looked at the furniture first before the paintings.”
Not everyone shares Colman`s enthusiasm. Comments such as, ”It looks like basement furniture,” and, ”These chairs belong in a beauty parlor,”
represent the opposing view.
But for Pauline Kochanski and Kathy Domokos, photo stylists and old friends, the vintage pieces are irresistible. The furniture provides instant recognition, illuminating memories long forgotten.
According to Hendrix, that is the intent. ”Clubs are always difficult, and the designer has the challenge of making people comfortable in a room of people they may not know. If you take advantage of the psychological effects of these familiar objects, it makes the experience that much more enjoyable,” says Hendrix.
”We`re `50s kids,” says Kochanski, admiring a boomerang-shaped mosaic tile table. ”We`re in our element here. I used to make ashtrays like this,” Domokos says.
The Blue Room
When Amy Morton planned the Blue Room above her Mirador restaurant at 1400 N. Wells St., she had a clear vision of what the club would be.
”A retro cocktail lounge,” says Morton, ”the kind of place where customers do what people were doing in the `40s and `50s-sipping champagne or martinis, listening to jazz, having cigars.”
Paul Fortune, a Los Angeles designer, put the look together for Morton, and the result is a cozy mix of old and new. The room is indeed blue, a deep sapphire blue. Morton has furnished it with thrift-store finds that she cherishes: a blond wood and pea-green vinyl Thonet chair she picked up for $10. A German shoe display stand with a lighted fountain in the middle that serves as a table, a pair of red leather wing chairs from the old Ritz Hotel in Minneapolis.
Some of the pieces are objects with which Morton herself grew up. A cocktail table came from her mother`s house, and a pair of paintings from her grandfather`s South Side restaurant now grace her walls.
”It`s like going to somebody`s house rather than a club,” Morton says.
”People curl up on a couch and pull chairs around.”
Tapes of big band music and Harry Conick Jr. enhance the feeling of a
” `40s-style smoker`s lounge” some nights, she says.
A word of caution before you put on your fedora and head out the door. You may find yourself in a nostalgia time warp if you visit on a Thursday evening. It`s Dead Head Night at the Blue Room, when tie-dyed Grateful Dead fans gather to dance to the music of Jerry Garcia and indulge in a little nostalgia of their own.
