The Gold Coast continues to live up to its reputation as the Las Vegas of Australia with the opening of Vanity Nightclub, a swish affair that would not look out of place in the original Sin City.

The venue is owned by Jamie Pickering and Craig Missen who also own The Bedroom Nightclub in Surfers. With their extensive experience in hospitality, the owners decided to keep the design of the venue in-house with Maya Eschembrenner in charge of the design and decoration and Bastian Foersterling acting as technical/project manager.

The brief given to Maya was to build a luxurious nightclub that is on par with Las Vegas and Los Angeles nightclubs. The nightclub must therefore have the latest looks, the best technology, and a ladies bathroom that girls will tell all their friends about. The nightclub must utilise every bit of the space whilst still maintaining functionality.

Private booth areas needed to be large and comfortable whilst not overusing space. Nothing was allowed to be wasted and hence the club has fully custom built and design elements, in fact nothing in the nightclub is a stock item.

Maya’s challenge was to ensure that the club must be completely opulent and ooze wealth. As a result, plush fabric panels line the walls where custom wallpaper hasn’t been used. Soft, mosaic, hard, patterned, flat, diamond studded, etc materials or all kinds have been used.

Maya’s concept of colour combinations, fabrics, wallpapers etc is always cutting edge. Having been given the design brief and after countless research she pieced it all together. Most of the elements were imported into Australia for this project from the USA, France, Taiwan, China, Italy and countless other countries. Gold, brass, copper, turquoise and many other classical luxurious colours were used. Having large mosaic pillars with ancient runes the colour scheme can only be described as ‘Egyptian grandour’.

“Just like a fine museum it offers so much in what is actually a rather small space,” remarked Maya. “Every area of the club showcases different elements but somehow they all look and feel like they were meant to be.”

One of Maya’s favourite design details is the 100 custom electronic LED wax candles on hand wood-turned gold candlesticks that can be found at the back of the two bars.

The ladies toilets/vanity is pure luxury. The girls have sitting sections where they can do their make-up and hair, a special make-up and hair stylist station has been incorporated with large display of perfumes, lotions, and accessories. An internet kiosk can also be found in this area. Ambient speakers, grand chandeliers, spectacular and modern gold feature tiles, and the latest engraved gold and white fabrics have been used to make this the most exuberant space.

The nightclub is designed to have a lot of subtle ambient lighting which ties the design together. A wide range of modern and classic lighting elements have been used. Ultramodern golden globe cluster chandeliers and blended with classic crystal wall lights. Computer controlled Ledion LED matrix tiles line the floor of an L-shaped dance podium while custom ‘VANITY” LED lit chrome letters light the wall.

There are two dance floors with a large selection of 25 state-of-the-art including 4 x Robe Clubscan (Mirror Scanners), 8 x iLed 2000 (Moving Head), 8 x iRock 575S (Mirror Scanners), 2 x iMove 250W (Moving Head Wash Lights), 3 x Clay Paky Raggi (Effects Lights), 2 x Robe Smoke Machines, 10 x Ledion floor tile matrix, 50m RGB DMXed LED (Light boxes), 4 x Anolis ARC3 lights (Reception) and 100 x Custom LED candle flame elements.

Control Systems include AMX (House lights) and E:Cue (DMX dance floor lights).

DJ Equipment comprises of 4 x Pioneer CDJ-1000MK3 (CD players), 1 x Pioneer DJM-1000 (Mixer), 1 x Pioneer EXF-1000 (Effects Unit), 1 x Rane Sorato unit and 2 x Biamp Nexia SP (digital sound processor - eq/crossover/limiter etc).