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Club Evolution
At 414 Sound Bar, just opened in the Minneapolis Warehouse District in November, the DJs are spinning neo soul, disco, hip hop, and house—and that’s where the usual club experience ends.
Sophisticated LED lights in the top of the bar and in the floor can each produce 80,000 different colors. VIP guests are checked in with a biometric fingerprint scan rather than an ID card. And—appropriate for a place that’s adopted a bar code as its logo—even paying the tab is a slick encounter with technology (see sidebar below).
This is where nightclubs are going, says Johann Sfaellos, in part because he’s taking them there. Sfaellos owns 414 Sound Bar and a club each in Greece and Colombia with business partner Enrique Delgado. (Sfaellos opened another Warehouse District draw, the Lounge, in 1995 and sold it in 2005.) During 15 years of managing clubs and consulting on their design—a career that began with managing Prince’s Glam Slam outposts in Los Angeles, Miami, and Minneapolis—Sfaellos says he’s watched as “the big clubs died, they went down to smaller clubs, and now technology is merging with the clubs” in ways that make the experience of being there even more enveloping and intimate.
His main Sound Bar innovation: working with vendors to perfectly sync up sound, LED lighting, and a room-surrounding projection system. With light coming from sources all over the room, “you just have a glow, and that whole glow reacts to the music when the beat goes on. So you kind of have a sensory overload,” Sfaellos says. The LED lights can also, in effect, “pixilate” whatever is projected on the screens near the ceiling and scatter it around the room, whether that’s undersea images, the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower, paintings by the artists Sfaellos shows in Sound Bar’s front-of-house lounge, or a live performance.
Besides offering Sound Bar’s highly customizable environment for private events, Sfaellos wants to replicate it in 12 more clubs (six in the United States, six around the world) where record-launch parties or multimedia art showings might be simulcast across time zones, and clubgoers on several continents could share the experience—giving club hopping a new meaning.
Sound Bar is the first club or restaurant in the Twin Cities to utilize wireless pay-at-the-table technology. The set-up comes from Roseville-based Evolve Systems, which specializes in Web-based customer management systems. Evolve collaborated with California’s VeriFone and Florida’s Sterling Payment Technologies on the project.
Evolve positions the pay-at-the-table system as a measure of identity theft protection—customers swipe their own credit cards and keep possession of them through the whole transaction, and the equipment doesn’t store any card numbers. Sound Bar’s Erika Aresta says customers and wait staff like the convenience—no running back and forth to tables to deliver bills and process credit cards.
Denise Logeland is TCB's managing editor.
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