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Playboy's Misunderstood Makeover

Playboy Club Opens in London's Mayfair

by Brian Noone | July 4th 2011 | 06:09 pm

The new London Playboy Club
Images © James Newton

The re-opening of the Playboy Club in London's Mayfair after a 30-year absence provoked two strong reactions from those who had not seen it: curious nostalgia and withering contempt. The former came primarily from those with memories of the original club's heyday, when Michael Caine and Sean Connery were regulars, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate held their wedding reception there, and the bunnies' outfits were more risqué than the average swimming costume. The aspersion, on the other hand, came by way of those who found the ageing 'Hef' and the entire Playboy brand to be either decades behind the times or simply in poor taste.

What a surprise, then, to see that the bunny still has a few tricks stashed – if not up its sleeve, then somewhere near its fluffy bobtail.

The new Playboy Club is more than the low-lit liquor den and gambling hall that critics allege (though it is a bit of both). It's also a restaurant – the chef of which earned her stripes at The Fat Duck and The French Laundry – a hopping nightspot with international DJs, a bar by famed mixologist Salvatore Calabrese and even a barbershop. According to the club itself, it's an 'adult playground', but the place feels, from top to bottom, like a gentleman's club.

This does sound very 1960s, but the architects responsible for the interiors, Jestico + Whiles, who just recently completed the exterior of the über-modern W Leicester Square not too far away, have flipped the dour old concept on its head. Natural light flows into the upper storey – dubbed 'heaven' by the architects – through diaphanous curtains, stretching across the leather chaired Players Bar and the adjacent restaurant to the casino floor. Private gambling rooms offer the possibility of daylight, as does a large cigar terrace at the rear. Meanwhile, downstairs in 'hell', oriental screens with colour-changing LEDs hide patrons at both the nightclub and Salvatore's bar from prying eyes.

Inside the London Playboy Club

Not that there is anything particularly louche to see. The bunnies' outfits are remarkably tame – certainly less revealing that what you see on a sunny day in nearby Hyde Park – and the most spectacular sights in the club are the rich, saturated Louboutin red in the disco's decor, the all-white classic telephone box upstairs and the mammoth wall of old liquors in the bar, including cognacs more than two centuries old.

The exterior of the London Playboy Club

The new It-club this is not: the location, behind the Four Seasons, is less glamorous than its old haunt at 45 Park Lane. What's more, the Playboy brand doesn't have enough swagger to attract the bad boys, but there's still too much taint to attract the pristine ones. Don't expect a celebrity wedding reception any time soon.

It is, for the moment, just another London member's club, one with pedigree even. It also has a television series of the same name starting this autumn in America, with a focus on the first Playboy Club in 1960s Chicago and aimed at the coattails of the retro-chic programme Mad Men.

Could such respectable urbanity be the future of Playboy? Some might say the new Playboy Club is a hop in the right direction.

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