Author Archives: Hazel Buckthorpe

The Silo is an innovative city hotel focused on local art and culture in Cape Town…

The Silo at the V&A Waterfront, perched above the much anticipated Zeitz MOCAA at the old grain silos – is a striking new addition to the vibrant Cape Town hotel scene. The architecture is a juxtaposition of an industrial feel with a modern take on what a luxury hotel could be. The interiors are bold and have a strong emphasis on colour, local culture and contemporary African art.

Our brief was to capture this unique aesthetic in music – and design a creative and engaging music concept that communicates originality whilst still appealing to a broad range of international and local patrons.

By combining interesting cult under-the-radar music references with bold, avant-garde contemporary tracks from Africa and beyond we created a concept that is as unique as the hotel itself. The music ebbs and flows throughout the day, providing the perfect backdrop to this one-of-a-kind property which has already made it on to Condé Nast Traveller’s 2017 Hot List.

One of the most unusual boutique hotels in Dubai needed to stand out from its skyscraper neighbours with its design and ambience…

Creating a distinctive sound for an established hotel group with a well-rooted brand identity is a challenge in itself, but using music to build a new brand from scratch is a different story altogether. As anyone who works in the creative sector will know, constraints and ground rules can make the job easier. But working to an open brief, with no established route to follow, can be like climbing a mountain without a rope: a little intimidating and a bit risky, but hugely exciting and more than worth it when you reach the top.

This was the opportunity we had with Desert Palm. One of the most unusual boutique hotels in Dubai (and not solely unusual because it is a boutique hotel in Dubai), it’s a 38-bedroom pocket of understated luxe that flies in the face of the city’s customary high-rise flamboyance. Set on 160-acre polo estate, it has been the host venue for some of the world’s biggest tournaments over the years, and acquired a stellar reputation for its subtle Arabic glamour, exceptional service and rare-for-Dubai peaceful green surroundings. Although it is set just 20 minutes from the hyperactivity of downtown, it really is an oasis in the desert.

Until recently, Desert Palm was part of an international hotel group, but in 2017, it made the move to go it alone as an entirely independent brand. This demanded the development of a new and distinct identity – one that held equal appeal to its wide-ranging clientele of international luxury travellers, Dubai denizens looking for an escape from the city, and near neighbours who come here to watch games, eat in the two restaurants, hang out in the bars, and generally treat the hotel as a social hub.

The Desert Palm team had embarked on a steady programme of brand reinvention that set out to retain this audience, but which would also broaden its appeal to a new tranche of discerning international guests. They asked us to create an engaging, cosmopolitan soundscape that would add vibrancy and uplift to the atmosphere, with mood-adjusted channels for the hotel’s spa, lobby and three F&B outlets – each one taking into account the ambience, design and daily rhythms of the space.

With no existing brand guidelines to start from, effective identity creation has to begin on the ground. So, late last summer, Music Concierge’s Dubai consultants checked into Desert Palm to soak up the atmosphere, explore everything the hotel had to offer, talk in detail with the team, and mentally map the guest experience hour by hour and step by step. Living the Desert Palm lifestyle through the guest’s perspective gave us the first spark of inspiration, and soon the tracks began to flow together.

By September – just in time for the kick-off of Desert Palm’s high season in November – the soundtrack was finished, Music Concierge had reached the mountaintop, and Desert Palm not only looked different to every other hotel in and around Dubai, it sounded it, too.

In a highly evolved, fiercely competitive entertainment arena like Hong Kong, only the strongest food and drink concepts survive. That, of course, means they need a clear, compelling and coherent identity; every facet of the space – design, menu, sound, view, ethos – has to come together and make a targeted statement to a distinct audience group. That’s hard enough to do for one venue to worry about, but when you have five to consider, it’s a much more daunting challenge…

Creating a distinctive sound for an established hotel group with a well-rooted brand identity is a challenge in itself, but using music to build a new brand from scratch is a different story altogether. As anyone who works in the creative sector will know, constraints and ground rules can make the job easier. But working to an open brief, with no established route to follow, can be like climbing a mountain without a rope: a little intimidating and a bit risky, but hugely exciting and more than worth it when you reach the top.

Given such a dynamic market and audience, the triumph of Tastings Group, a family of five independent bar and restaurant venues in Hong Kong, is all the more impressive. Over the last eight years, the group has launched a steady stream of hits – each of them entirely distinct from their siblings. As a restaurant group, Tastings has more identities than Bowie.

About 18 months ago, the group contacted the Music Concierge team in Hong Kong to request our help in streamlining the soundscapes in four of their venues, beginning with one of the World’s 50 Best Bars – the HK icon that is Quinary – and later extending the project to include the lounge element of Michelin-starred VEA Restaurant, the colonially inspired bar The Envoy, and the hugely popular gin joint Origin.

Despite their family connection, each of these is founded on a clear concept and had the design credentials to back it up. Quinary is the sophisticated industrial-style cocktail bar where those in the know go for experimental cocktails and sensory spectacle. The Envoy takes its guests back the bygone era of British colonialism in Asia, fusing both culinary and decorative traditions with playful contemporary quirk. VEA’s skyline bar is the cocktails and small plates counterpart to the destination restaurant next door. Origin is the gin-loving speakeasy on Hong Kong’s hottest nightlife strip Lan Kwai Fong. Our challenge was to underline and enhance those identities through sound. In the cases of the first three, it made most sense for our approach to be led by the concept – to create playlists that harmonised perfectly with the visual design and food-and-drink philosophy.

For Quinary, this meant supporting the elegant contemporary-industrial aesthetic and future-focused mixology with fresh, unexpected and compelling new music that heightens the sheer sensory immersion that its cocktails provide. At The Envoy, we sidestepped the potential pitfalls of the colonial theme – it would have been all to easy to resort to retro clichés – and blended together contemporary tracks with samples of period jazz and a playful touch of 1950s American exotica. The result, like The Envoy in general, was sophisticated and historically inspired, but without taking itself too seriously.

When we got to Tasting Group’s newest enterprise, VEA Lounge, the existing deep house soundtrack matched the mood of the space – where guests would gather for pre-dinner cocktails before taking their tables in the restaurant, or while away the whole evening – but the playlist leaned towards the linear. Being solely genre-led, it lacked contrast and storytelling, and was difficult to engage with as a result. We took a more thoughtful approach, building on a contemporary jazz base and introducing intriguing juxtapositions – keeping it interesting without losing VEA’s atmosphere of refinement.

Origin required a different approach. Given the bar’s location amid a high density of bars and dining venues in one of the most vibrant nightlife strips in Central, a solely concept-led approach to the music would risk losing footfall to the neighbours. In this instance, the Music Concierge team had to carefully balance the commercial demands of the site with the integrity of the Origin brand, using music to create a fun, energetic and youthful atmosphere that was accessible to the Lan Kwai Fong crowd, but tempered with a sophisticated leftfield note – a case of fitting in but standing out.

Europe’s premier, and indeed only, dedicated design event for the hotel industry kicks off on 21 November, bringing more than 170 exhibitors to Islington’s Business Design Centre to show off the latest products and furniture from some of the biggest names in design and interiors.

This year’s theme – ‘Loyalty: Lessons in Love’ – is driven by consumers’ growing appreciation of experience above material factors, and the importance of nurturing memories as a means of developing brand loyalty. A hotel than can provide a platform for positive experiences for guests will linger longer in the memory and increase the likelihood not only of repeat visits, but also of active brand advocacy on the part of the guest.

The set design of the Sleep event explores this focus on the experiential, considering every aspect of how the hospitality environment comes together to influence to loyalty; from interior design details and the nature of the service, to the menu in the restaurant and the music on the sound system.

That’s where we come in. At Music Concierge, we’ve spent over a decade exploring the triangular relationship between sound, brand identity and customer experience, so we’re very pleased to be working with Bang & Olufsen to create and deliver an event soundtrack based on Sleep’s loyalty theme. You can hear what we’ve come up with across the show floor – but the best place to catch it is the Sleeper Bar, designed by Russian architecture and interiors studio Sundokovy Sisters, so pick up a ticket here, and we’ll see you at the show.

A little over two years ago, 95A Rye Lane in south-east London was a disused multi-storey car park with an uncertain future. Today, the newly minted Peckham Levels is a hothouse for creative entrepreneurs, a neighbourhood focal point for food and drink and a thriving community hub, where artists and architects rub shoulders with jewellery designers and dance collectives. We speak to the founder to hear the vision…

Opened in December 2017, Peckham Levels is the brainchild of Make Shift, an initiative devoted to rescuing abandoned buildings, transforming them into vibrant, supportive and diverse creative spaces that make a positive impact on their surrounding communities. The first was Pop Brixton, which saw an empty plot become a shipping-container village of 50 creative businesses; Peckham Levels followed, and now Make Shift is eyeing up a site in Hackney Wick.

The man at the helm of Peckham Levels is site director Lodewijk ‘Luds’ Van Den Belt. Under his watch, seven storeys of empty bays have become 50 creative studios for local artists and entrepreneurs, a handful of larger workspaces, an events venue, a yoga studio, a street food courtyard and rooftop bar. By day, the site is abuzz with Peckham creatives; by night, it draws in crowds from all across London looking for a bite to eat, a few drinks and some fantastic music.

Such a dynamic project, with such a varied audience, needed music that captured the creative energy that animates the space, which paid tribute to its South London community focus and which matched the changing use throughout the day. Before opening, Music Concierge worked with Luds and his team to ensure that the public spaces on levels 6 and 7 had a sound that did justice to Peckham Level’s ambitions, social spirit and diverse community. Now that the playlists are in place and the Levels have come to life, we caught up with Luds for the lowdown on his hopes for the project, the importance of music and his secret love of 80s power ballads…

Peckham Levels is an unusual concept – how did it come about?

With anything we do, we aim to deliver what local communities want; we don’t take a cookie cutter approach. So we do an enormous amount of public consultation, and we really reach out to understand what the local needs are. In this case, there was clearly a need for small creative spaces in Peckham. Lots of artists and creative entrepreneurs were faced with this space problem – how do you develop an idea beyond the kitchen table? How do you start to approach a business or creative idea seriously without the space to back that up? We’re hopefully providing a really interesting space for very local, very creative entrepreneurs to start projects.

Where do those entrepreneurs come from?

Of our tenants, 65% are Peckham locals and 85% from Southwark – which far exceeds our initial agreement with the council, which was 75% Southwark residents. That process of getting our tenants was so interesting. Once you put an opportunity out into a community, the applications and the ideas that come back are wild. The amount of creativity well exceeded our expectations. There was so much local talent; so much local creativity – the response was amazing. For our 50 studios, we had more than 400 applications.

Allocating spaces must be quite a challenging process – on what basis do you decide who gets in?

40 studios are internally scored on the basis of locality – where they’re from, what their relationship is with Peckham and Southwark; and they get scored on their idea, their commitment to the community-investment scheme (all our members pledge to give an hour a week to a community project), and their ethos – whether the overarching values of their businesses and project match ours; and then we have an element of financial due diligence – can they afford the rent? Next, everyone gets interviewed and then we try to vary the range of disciplines as much as possible. Ten of the 50 studios are let at 30% of market rate, so they cost around about £80–90 a month. They’re given to creative businesses on a one-year lease to really work on their plan, get started, and we work with them quite closely to establish what their goals are for that year, and then they get heavily supported with their rent. We have a steering group made up of local business owners and residents, stakeholders, council members, and youth representatives, and they decide on on those 10 between them, using a scoring system.

Looking at the list of members of the spaces, the diversity in there is quite astonishing, you’ve got sound engineers, violin makers, hair salons… It’s a really broad spread of creativity…

We really want to represent the local community as much as possible, so obviously –discipline, age, gender – everything gets looked at and gets balanced out. It’s a really interesting, but also quite a challenging, process and massively time-consuming. With the first tenants we have in, it definitely feels like we’ve managed to create a really diverse and interesting community. It’s really, really exciting.

What made you turn to Music Concierge to create the sound of the food and drink space on levels 6 and 7?

Our contact with Music Concierge came about because one of the directors is a local resident – locality is taken into consideration in all these things. Music programming obviously has a key role in ambience, in setting the tone and the vibe of that public floor. All of us internally in the team are very heavily into music, and although it’s all different genres, we all appreciate music in our lives. Music sets the tone for the atmosphere; it sets the tone for the time of day; it sets the tone for the user experience…

How would you describe that tone?

It’s very dependent on time of day. Daytime is very much about maintaining a relaxed, engaging atmosphere that keeps people on site and using the space, because lots of people come to work here so it needs to create an atmosphere but not be too invasive on people’s concentration levels. There are also lots of families, lots of young parents with children, so it needs to be very friendly. It needs to also take into consideration that a lot of people work on those floors every day, so it has to be consistently and constantly changing as well, because otherwise staff members would go crazy. So the aim is to be friendly, keep people coming back to the space and keep the atmosphere light. In the evenings, it’s different – you want something fun and exciting.

What was the most important consideration in terms of the sound of the space?

Peckham has a vibrant music scene and we’re looking to see that represented – local, progressive, creative music in the evenings that appeals and speaks to people from the area. The Music Concierge playlists are proving to be really popular. We also have an event space, Ghost Notes, and they do their own music programming – their whole vision is to support local music in south-east London. They have really interesting initiatives where all the door money goes to the artists, and they’re very tuned into the local music scene. What we’re really aiming for is for that space to be a real community asset, so we know people locally who use the space, who host events, who meet their families here, who work here, and who, even if they don’t have a tenancy, could potentially exhibit here as an artist or photographer. We want locals to take real ownership of the space and music is key to that, because if that music’s wrong then people will not be attracted to the space. If you’re playing 80s power ballads and people don’t want that then I guess it’s not that appealing to stay and have a meal…

I would love to sit in a reinvented car park listening to 80s power ballads.

Funny you say that, I’d love to as well.

Finally, what are you listening to these days?

I’m a massive vinyl-head, so I’m very much into seventies soul and funk – that’s my thing. And also vintage reggae. My first real passion was late-eighties and nineties hiphop. The last album I bought was Trouble Man by Marvin Gaye, and before that There’s No Place Like America Today by Curtis Mayfield – not one I’ve ever heard before, but it’s very good, with an amazing track called Billy Jack. That’s what I’m listening to the most at the moment.

Level Kids plays around with the concept of brand immersion…

Levels Kids is the multi-award winning children’s department store at City Walk Dubai. This is the second instalment of the Level brand in follow up to the now world-renowned Level Shoes based in Dubai Mall – the world’s largest store dedicated to footwear.

The Level Kids store is a truly unique sensorial retail journey that intertwines luxury fashion for kids together with enchanting experiences. Spanning over 10,000sqm of retail space with every floor designed for a specific age group, children from 0 to 12 are fully catered for, not just in terms of clothing, but also with interactive activities to create memorable experiences.

We helped to curate a signature sound for each floor of the store that intertwines the Level brand DNA with the target age group.

We also worked with the store’s creative team to design a bespoke selection of soundscapes that help bring the store journey to life. Whether that’s on the ground floor diving into an underwater world with a submarine; or creating a whimsical, dream-like journey with fairies, colour and blossom in the Enchanted Walk; or a changing selection of soundscapes to bring the store’s seasonal window concepts to life – the result is a ground-breaking fusion of immersive visual concepts, music and sound effects which makes the store experience all the more captivating.

After a double whammy of events back in November, Sleeper magazine’s AHEAD awards hit Singapore in mid-March, with a shortlist of 48 hotels and noteworthy hotels in China, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Vietnam and the Maldives, all in the running to take home something shiny.

This is the first AHEAD event of four in 2018, and its second-ever Asia-focused awards ceremony. Delegations of hopefuls on the shortlist will join the great and good of the Asian hospitality scene at the recently opened Andaz Singapore on Thursday 15 March. The hotel is a futuristic honeycomb-fronted vision at the heart of DUO Singapore – the curvy, garden-roofed skyscraper complex designed by architect Ole Scheeren – and a fitting location to celebrate the cutting-edge of the Asian hotel scene.

Having taken charge of the music for every event in AHEAD’s two-year history, the Music Concierge team are only too eager to be back on soundtrack duty, and we’re currently fine-tuning the evening’s playlists to set the mood and ratchet up the tension. We’ve had a blast at every one of the previous events, but we have to say that the Dubai edition last November was a particular highlight for our MEA team, as Music Concierge client Rove Hotels took home a trio of gongs, including ‘New Concept of the Year’ – an accolade we’re delighted to say we played a small part in securing (through our work on Rove’s signature sound.

The 12 category winners of the Asia leg will join AHEAD’s honour roll of triumphant hotels from last year’s events in Singapore, Miami, Dubai and London, and secure their place in the 2019 global showdown – the culmination of AHEAD’s two-year programme to establish the best of the best in worldwide hospitality. We can’t wait.