The New York Club Opening This Fall Was Designed Around a Room, Not a Kitchen

Most members' clubs open with a kitchen and add a bar. Stylus opened with a listening room and added everything else around it.

The building at 48 Clinton Street, on the Lower East Side, has been a produce market in the 1940s, a recording complex called Loho Studios, and a rehearsal space for Blue Man Group. This fall it becomes Stylus, a members' club built across 10,000 square feet — 8,500 of it indoors, the rest a terrace — with membership capped at 750. The number is deliberate: a room engineered for sound only works if it stays this side of crowded.

The centerpiece is a double-height space the club calls Ephemeral, fitted with a spatial audio system built with Devon Turnbull's OJAS and Amadeus Acoustics technology that lets the room's reverberation be reshaped for a vinyl session one night and a live set the next. A basement room runs 40Hz light-and-sound sessions, closer to sound therapy than nightlife. O'Neill Rose Architects led the design, with Milan-based Paolo Matera and design consultant Selene Privitera shaping the interiors and MARA advising on the hospitality side.

The kitchen answers to Anita Lo, who held a Michelin star for nine consecutive years at Annisa before the West Village restaurant closed. At Stylus she is culinary director rather than the room's namesake — small plates, a tea program, low-ABV cocktails, and guest chef residencies built around a menu that draws on the Japanese technique she was known for downtown.

What Stylus is betting on is that New York's members' club boom — a decade of rooms selling proximity to other members — has room left for one selling something quieter: a space built for a specific sense rather than a specific crowd. Whether 750 people want to join a club organized around how a room sounds, rather than who is in it, is the wager the Lower East Side gets to watch play out this autumn.

— Camille