Birmingham’s Risa venue entertains David Gabriel

David Gabriel Design has designed the interiors and architecture for Risa, the £4m Regents Inn-owned entertainment venue, which opens in Birmingham on 28 June.

The 2694m2 venue features two clubs, four bars and the country’s biggest Jongleurs comedy club. There are 12 Risa venues across the UK, but the Birmingham venue will become the flagship and signals a change in the Risa-Jongleurs format.

‘The size of the venue presented the opportunity to create a different presence,’ says a Regent Inns spokeswoman.

The size of the venue also meant the consultancy had a virtual ‘blank canvas to work with’, says David Gabriel Design managing director David Gabriel.

‘We started with a huge empty space and wanted to create a kind of journey for people, through areas which each had a very different feel to them,’ he says.

The consultancy has sliced through the first floor of the building, creating a floating steel floor with a staircase that curves around the structure.

‘The most complicated part was removing the first floor slab to enable the steel platform disc and stairs to be installed. That creates the entrance feature and was vital to the scheme,’ says Gabriel.

The aesthetics of the venue range from minimalist to ‘moody’. Features include sunken seating areas, bamboo floors, fibre optic moving ceiling lights, hand-made glass walls and floors and an illuminated bridge.

The consultancy also had the task of creating a ground floor bar that could switch from a relaxed lunchtime venue to a ‘sophisticated’ evening bar, but solved the problem by installing colour changing lights.

David Gabriel Design was appointed to the project in June last year and is the corporate brand consultancy for Regent Inns.

Graphics for Risa were created by Drawbridge.