Adapting a space to a new use by doing as little as possible and leaving its character intact. That was the aim of Trouw, a club and restaurant inside a former newspaper printroom.
This massive concrete structure of the printroom makes it acoustically ideal for music. What’s more, the raw industrial aesthetic lends the venue a ready-made identity. The design challenge was to treat the existing quality as a given while the facilitating the logistics of a dance club.
Bas van Tol responded by making clubbers enter at basement level, where the cloakroom, toilets and exhibition space are located. A stairs rises to the tall, long and narrow space above, with a kitchen at one end and a grandstand in the centre, which turns a space built for machines into one for people.
An eye-catching intervention, the machine-like grandstand echoes the vast printers that once thundered here. More importantly, it organises the whole venue by performing a host of functions: separating dancefloor from restaurant, providing storage and staff space below, creating a mezzanine above, and allowing parts of the venue to be rented for other purposes.
Existing spaces and traces are preserved wherever possible. The print control room flanking the dancefloor serves as a smokers’ den, and patrons circulate along a raised ledge from which technicians once operated the printing machines.
Bas van Tol reduced all these creative and clever moves to their essence, allowing the venue to function like a smooth machine and enabling the venue’s programmers to adapt the venue to changing requirements.