Aberdeen Hotel

The Aberdeen Hotel has traded in Northbridge since 1886, and sits on the State heritage inventory as a finely detailed Victorian Italianate commercial building. In the 1980s it became one of the most important venues in Perth for the city’s gay and lesbian community to meet, with stages built in for entertainment. It runs today as a multi-room late-night venue.

What we installed

Technical Alliance designed and installed new production lighting, performance audio and architectural feature lighting through the hotel’s rooms. The lighting design, drawn in January 2023 by our own designer, took the main room and the side room together: moving-head fixtures and beam effects over the floor, LED strobes, RGBW washes, pixel bars, Chauvet spots and a mirror ball, with the DJ booth, bar, entry, VIP booths and balcony bar each given their own RGB feature treatment.

Feature lighting doing two jobs

In a venue like this the architectural lighting is not decoration arranged around the production rig, it is part of it. The RGB treatments on the booths, the bar and the entry give the rooms their identity early in the evening and then become part of the show later, driven from the same control as the production fixtures. That is the discipline behind our architectural lighting work generally: light designed with the room rather than aimed at it.

A nineteenth-century building on a Saturday night

Several rooms running at once is a demanding brief. Each has to work on its own terms, the crossover between them has to make sense to an audience moving through, and every mounting position, cable path and service access point had to be negotiated around a building from 1886 that has been altered many times since. None of that is visible to anyone holding a drink, which is the point.

More of this work sits in Commercial & Hospitality.