ED Week 13: Yoshiwara

After finishing the garden and the club exterior last week this week I moved onto the interior of the club.

As the club is a much more intimate place I wanted to reflect that in the colours and mood of the place, therefore a lot of the cold blues of metropolis and it’s stone walls are replaced by warmer woods and softer furnishings. The Japanese influences in the pleasure garden have also seeped in here, in fact the garden comes inside in the seating areas around the entrances which were inspired by the raked gravel of Zen gardens as well as the large glass walls of the club which almost seem to bring the outside in through their smokey glass.

When it came to designing the layout, the fact that I rarely if ever visit nightclubs produced a unique challenge, in the end I decided to look at the building as a multifunctional space that would be used from everything from intimate social gatherings to vast banquets and fetes, with this in mind I created a structure and layout that were quite open plan and fluid that could be transformed as the need demanded.


I wanted to observe metropolis' usual colour scheme whilst emphasizing the club as aplace of relaxation and retreat. Therefore browns and reds seep in in a way that they hadn't before.

For the final pieces it was impossible to contain the two main floors of the club in one image and still appropriately fill a page spread so I decided it was better to produce two separate images for each level.

The lower level dance floor

The upper level Bar.

Like the Cathedral, as I designed the interior I wanted to think of the hero assets of the room, the things you would notice and focus on as you move around the environment.

In the Cathedral it was the statues, but here its the chairs and the ornaments of the upper bar. With this in mind, once I'd finished the final pieces I also designed these assets, I tried a few different colour palettes for them but for smaller ornaments there's a high likelihood they would appear in more than one colour. For the lower seating and the ornaments the themes are strongly Japanese influenced and I looked at traditional objects and ornaments - Kokeshi and Daruma.