Inside Green Room, Brooklyn's most seductive new nightclub

(Image credit: Courtesy Jack Simonds)

The East Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn is awash in flashy nightclubs—massive, converted warehouses with headache-inducing light shows and kitschy chrome-laden decor. Large crowds pack in every weekend to see their favourite celebrity DJs perform but only get a glimpse of them playing in isolated booths high above the dance floor. It’s hard to truly engage.

With Green Room noted nightlife entrepreneur Nick Spector set out to imagine something entirely different — an intimate environment for a more discerning audience seeking a higher quality of programming, not just a wild night out.

The club's name references the type of backstage spaces where performing artists prep for shows or take breaks. Similarly, the new club, 'is supposed to be a haven for the creative class,' Spector says.

Designed in close collaboration with Brooklyn-based British designer Jack Simonds, the compact boîte embodies the back-of-house space in more ways than one: It isn’t just a green room but also a green house. Guests dance under a drop ceiling of suspended house plants much closer to the DJ, who is directly in front of them, not in a soaring pulpit.

Blackened plywood elements like booths and seats seamlessly blend into the main travertine-topped bar, which is finished with hand-chiseled detailing. Red neon lights – contained in extruded metal diffusers but also exhibited as standalone artworks – reflect off of dark surfaces. A few handblown glass-and-lambskin sconces diffuse the light even further. The bathrooms are clad in hand-cast tiles that reflect dim light with a mesmerising 'slightly trippy' effect, per Simonds, allowing guests to recalibrate before returning to the dance floor.

'We deliberately limited anything man-made or overly-refined,” Simonds says. 'Everything feels connected to the plant and natural world in some capacity.'

The suspended forest canopy isn’t just a randomly-arranged green wall, but a careful orchestration that elevates house plants to individual sculptures. The metal bar stools resemble a lot of Simonds’s other work — designs that stem from his desire to emulate, and even freeze frame, the structural idiosyncrasies of plant forms.

'Ultimately, we wanted Green Room to feel different from a traditional club, more like you’ve stepping into a design-driven friend’s living room for a house party,' says the designer, himself a seasoned raver.

'Globally, clubs have lost touch with what a great visual experience is, often opting for the over-the-top,' he adds. 'What people actually want is something real and tactile, especially when their senses are heightened and they need to feel grounded and present.'

What people actually want is something real and tactile.
Jack Simonds, Designer

Though the design was the main focus, sound quality wasn’t an afterthought. As a long-time electronic music fan, Simonds spent years analysing the best spatial features and configurations to achieve acoustic optimization by observing what works and what doesn’t. Hidden and embedded solutions include a floating dance floor helping transfer low frequencies and bass through dancer’s bodies as they move.

Spector, the club owner, hopes Green Room will particularly resonate with more mature electronic music fans. 'The audience is getting older,' he explains. 'A lot of people don’t feel comfortable in the current landscape. We wanted to create something for that veteran community.' Refreshingly, there is a strict no-photo policy.

'Green Room feels very much of this moment,' Spector continues. 'What I hear from guests is that our space has become exactly what they hoped for – a real green room for New York’s underground electronic music scene.'

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Adrian Madlener is a Brussels-born, New York-based writer, curator, consultant, and artist. Over the past ten years, he’s held editorial positions at The Architect’s Newspaper, TLmag, and Frame magazine, while also contributing to publications such as Architectural Digest, Artnet News, Cultured, Domus, Dwell, Hypebeast, Galerie, and Metropolis. In 2023, He helped write the Vincenzo De Cotiis: Interiors monograph. With degrees from the Design Academy Eindhoven and Parsons School of Design, Adrian is particularly focused on topics that exemplify the best in craft-led experimentation and sustainability.