Richmond Social
Richmond, Victoria, Australia
Richmond Social is a Black Rhino Group pub on Swan Street in Richmond, designed by Enth Degree Architecture as a series of separate named rooms that turn warm and red after dark, each entry announced by its own illuminated name. Lucretia supplied the pieces that the scheme is built from: decorative and bespoke lighting through the dining rooms and the gaming room, illuminated signage at every entry, a 35 metre LED banner wrapping the gaming room, and the crystal brick and gold wave panel the gaming room is finished in.
Drawing a venue like this means holding four different trades in the same head at once: a chandelier made to a panel count that does not exist yet, nine signs whose red has to match from room to room, a screen that has to run continuously around a corner, and a counter face that has to glow with no visible source. Each of those would normally come from a separate supplier on a separate lead time with its own set of shop drawings, and the coordination between them lands back on the design team.
At Richmond Social they came from one supplier instead, so panel counts, sign colour, screen content and material finish were resolved against the same set of drawings and delivered to the same site programme. The design is Enth Degree's throughout, and what follows is an account of how each part of it was made and delivered.
Made to the panel count on the drawing
The Moonlit chandelier over the gaming room is the piece to look at first. Built from illuminated panels in stainless steel and German acrylic, it is made to order rather than chosen from a range, with the panel count, panel size and finish all set per project. Richmond Social specified its own number of panels, so nothing on the drawing had to be adjusted to suit a fitting that already existed.
In the dining rooms the ColorWave pendants are specified in green, which is what holds the other side of the balance in a venue that runs warm and red after dark, and because the glass is hand blown the colour sits in the material rather than on it. At a smaller scale the Galaxy and Clairvoyance wall lights break up the wall between the larger fittings, one in crater-textured glass and the other in laser-cut crystal on solid brass. The decision to set green against red was Enth Degree's, and the glass was made to suit it.
A logo turning on the entry floor
Nine rooms, nine signs, one red
Richmond Social is not one room but nine, from Zaza Lounge, Luna Lounge, Coco Lounge and Moonlight Lounge through the Gaming Room, Night Shift and Final Pulse to the Rooftop and the Sapphire Rooftop, a guest will immediately know which of them they are standing in. Each one is announced by its own illuminated name, and after dark those signs carry most of the light in the building.
Nine signs across one venue behave more like a system than a set of separate pieces. The lettering changes character where the room does, upright and geometric through the lounges and script across the Sapphire Rooftop, but the red holds at the same saturation from one room to the next, which is the first thing to go when signs are ordered a few at a time from different fabricators. Holding a colour that strong is a lighting problem before it is a fabrication problem, because every letter has to keep an even face across the full length of a word, and that is where most illuminated signage gives itself away. All nine were fabricated and lit against the same drawings for the lighting and the screen.
Every room, in order of arrival
One image, all the way around the room
The brief was a banner running the full perimeter of the gaming room, around 35 metres, carrying content that plays the whole way round without a break. That is a harder ask than its size suggests, because a ring that long is not one screen: it is assembled from individual LED modules, and every joint between them is a place where the image can come apart, in geometry and in colour.
The modules were set out so the strip closes on itself, and the content was authored in the CMS as a single long-form video mapped across the whole assembled surface rather than tiled panel by panel, so what runs is one image moving around the room instead of the same clip repeating on every panel. Over that length the consistency of the batch matters more than the peak specification, since a module that drifts in brightness or colour shows up immediately against the ones beside it and there is nowhere in a 35 metre ring for it to hide. The venue runs the screen itself from the CMS, changing what plays without anyone touching the hardware.
Assembled and mapped as one job
Module layout and content mapping were handled together rather than as a screen supply plus a separate content exercise, so what the venue was handed is a system it can re-programme itself.
A counter that glows from inside
The gaming room cafe counter is faced in Square Crystal Brick in yellow, each block a hollow high-purity glass unit of 190 by 190 by 80 millimetres, with LED strip run behind the face so the counter reads as a lit surface rather than as an object with a light on it. Colour tone and surface finish are set per project.
Overhead, a gold wave panel runs across the gaming room ceiling, made to the profile Enth Degree drew, and its rippled face picks up whatever the LED banner is running, so the ceiling shifts colour with the screen. Both are materials rather than fittings, which is the part that usually falls outside what a lighting supplier can take on.
Specified in this project
Photographs from site
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