Tucked inside the famed Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel, the 140 Supper Club is a unique room complete with a password and century-old descending staircase. The 740-square-foot space seats 30 guests at a farmer’s table that runs the length of the space for the hotel’s menu of four decadent, seasonally inspired dinner courses. The space is newly available for private events this summer.
The icy-cold bar Frost (the temperature is kept at 21 degrees) now has a sister space for those who prefer room temperature. The Gallery at Frost Ice Loft is a sunlit event space and home for the arts overlooking Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. The 2,600-square-foot Gallery has 15-foot-high ceilings with hardwood floors and a rotating lineup of ice sculptures. The gallery, which opened in early July, holds 130 guests for receptions.
Following a renovation, 25,000 square feet of meeting and event space at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge premiered in July. The President’s Ballroom holds 1,000 guests reception-style or seats 900 theater-style in the 7,000-square-foot space. It also has 1,300 square feet of prefunction space and an adjacent outdoor courtyard. The Charles View Ballroom, which offers floor-to-ceiling windows and views of Boston’s cityscape, is ideal for groups of 400 for receptions or 220 for banquets. The multilevel, 3,262-square-foot Empress Ballroom with a private balcony and Charles River views holds 350 guests for receptions or seats 220 for banquets. The Patriot's Hallway, a combination of five smaller rooms, holds 150 guests per room for receptions.
Bliss Spa, located at the W Boston, underwent its own face-lift and reopened in March. The theater district spa added amenities with the introduction of a new high-tech nail lounge featuring mani-pedi stations with personal iPads. For groups, the 5,800-square-foot space holds 30 for private events in one of five studio spaces, where planners can offer catering and activities. Guests can then be called individually for treatments.
Housed in a pre-Civil War-era building overlooking Boston Harbor, the Boston Harbor Distillery serves as both a distilling facility and an event space, complete with a tasting room. The whole space, which opened in June, is 11,000 square feet and holds 200 guests for receptions, which can feature samples of the distillery’s trademark brand, Putnam New England Whiskey. A private meeting room, dubbed the Chart Room, comfortably seats 30 people.
A Boston branch of Japanese coffee chain Ogawa Coffee opened in late May, serving artisan coffee beverages along with breakfast, lunch, and sweets. The 1,538-square-foot space seats 50 guests. Alternately, stadium seating for 50 is available via retractable seating in front of the bar. The space has three televisions, including one that can be programmed using AirPlay, and is available for buyout.
A co-working space by day, the newly refurbished Oficio has doubled its square footage while creating a cozier vibe. It has a 750-square-foot event space available for weekend or evenings that holds 50 for receptions or seats 20 and has wireless speakers for music. There are also two breakout rooms, one that seats 10 guest and the other for four guests. Each includes an HD monitor for presentations, direct phone lines, and glass markup walls. The renovation finished in June.
Newton staple 51 Lincoln has redesigned and renovated its 350-square-foot private dining room into a new concept called the Tasting Room at 51 Lincoln. Limited to just 20 people at a time, the space offers oft-changing five-course tasting menus. The space, which opened in July, is available for buyout, including on Sundays and Mondays when 51 Lincoln is closed to the public. The room comes with audiovisual capabilities.
For teambuilding or wellness-focused client entertaining, Barre & Soul has opened the first barre studio in Cambridge. The latest branch of the concept is a 3,000-square-foot studio centrally located in Harvard Square. Owner Andrea Isabelle Lucas can hold traditional barre fitness or yoga classes, or design a specialized class for private events. The space, which opened July 13, holds 75 people.
Formerly known as Estelle's, Cluckit was opened in mid-June by popular Boston chefs Brian Poe and Gordon Wilcox as a foray into piri piri grilled poultry, seafood, and meat. At the bar, guests can choose from 30 draft lines and another 70 beer selections available by bottle and can. The 1,500-square-foot South End space is available for semiprivate dining and buyouts of as many as 95 guests.
At the holiday party, treasure maps designed by Prim & Pixie were given to guests, highlighting the various interactions that were scheduled throughout the night. The maps were designed to feel historic and aged, and complemented the theme with sections including "The Grand Arrival," "Into the Forest," and "Into the Desert."
For the New York Yankees 2014 Homecoming Dinner honoring Mariano Rivera, Chris Koch, and Andy Pettitte, invitations arrived with all three honorees spotlighted in the form of custom baseball cards.
Zagat honored its local list of the 30 best chefs under 30 years old—Zagat’s “30 under 30”—in Austin with an event where drink coasters referenced other celebrities and personalities, real and fictional, who achieved fame by the same age.
Every year for Essence magazine's annual Black Women in Hollywood event—an award luncheon that takes place during the week before the Oscars—producer Caravents creates a gallery of framed oversize portraits that are also pictured in the magazine's special issue. The artistic tributes hang in the Beverly Hills Hotel's grand stairway, which acts as the entrance to the celeb-mobbed event.
This year's Essence Black Women in Hollywood event also included a Target-sponsored “Power of Our Presence” wall, where guests could pull a message of inspiration; as the messages were removed, images of honorees appeared beneath the star-shaped installation.
The Museum of Modern Art honored Quentin Tarantino in 2012, choosing not to plaster the walls with explicit references to the filmmaker's iconic movies. Instead, the New York art institution crafted a more subtle homage with a color palette of indigo and a commissioned sketch of Tarantino. Nathan Milner's sketch—artwork commissioned by Tarantino that depicted the director and iconic characters from his films—was incorporated into visuals, used on the step-and-repeat, and printed on the dinner program.
A scant 200 guests made the invite list for Elle’s Women in Hollywood event in 2008 at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, where Moët & Chandon bottles bore the names of honorees.
In honor of Tommy Hilfiger receiving the C.F.D.A.'s Lifetime Achievement award in 2012, the Princeton Footnotes performed a live tribute to the designer. Naturally, the all-male a cappella group was outfitted in head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger clothing.
The Children's Defense Fund's Beat the Odds award ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2012 honored five Los Angeles high school students who overcame personal obstacles and achieved academic excellence. To incorporate the teenagers into the night's visuals, the organizers used a gallery of black-and-white portraits as the backdrop for the stage.
The Gene Siskel Film Center honored Gwyneth Paltrow at its 2013 fund-raiser at the Ritz-Carlton Chicago. Instead of simply presenting the actress with an award, the evening included an hour-long onstage Q&A session. Amanda de Cadenet, host of Lifetime TV's The Conversation and a friend of Paltrow's, led the discussion. The event's menu also included dishes inspired by Paltrow's films.
For the first-ever event marking its annual list of Game Changers in 2010, the Huffington Post wanted to produce an interactive experience that would appropriately honor the leaders and innovators selected by the five-year-old news site's readers. The awards were bestowed on 100 individuals, people who used new media to make a global impact in fields as diverse as business, politics, sports, and food, and scrolling projector displays mimicked the way the Huffington Post presents content online. The changing text also served to educate attendees on the works of each Game Changer honoree. David Stark produced the event at Skylight Soho in New York.
TD Bank's employee recognition dinner—called the “Wow” awards—got a major format change in 2009, meant to avoid the feeling of a typical dinner and presentation. The event shrunk from 2,000 people to 100, with the 27 honorees, their guests, and TD Bank senior execs all siting at a single amoeba-shaped table. Lucite easels displaying photos of the evening's honorees lined the hallway.
The party following the A.F.I. Lifetime Achievement award presentation at Los Angeles's Sony Pictures Studios in 2011 drew inspiration from honoree Morgan Freeman's blues club in Mississippi. Nods to the club and city came in the form of decor, flowers, and a Southern food menu from Wolfgang Puck.
Since the hologram-like projection of Tupac from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival went viral in 2012, its innovator AV Concepts has repeated the stunt. At this year's Rock the Bells festival, dead rappers ODB and Eazy-E appeared to take the stage.
A new art piece on this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival grounds called "Mirage," envisioned by festival art curator Paul Clemente and created and executed by experiential design and media company Pearl Media Productions, took the form and architecture of a mid-century Palms Springs mansion, standing at 40 feet tall, 80 feet wide, and 100 feet long. A total of 12 zones of high-tech HD projections made it appear that changing activities were taking place inside the home's rooms and its pool. The project required 18 gigabytes of custom content and more than 70 facets of individual video over the course of the six-day festival.
In 2010, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Lynda & Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion opened with a masquerade gala for 1,000 guests. Art from the Resnick's collection came to life by way of projections under the dinner tent.
As an eye-catching way to show off his new line of street wear in 2012, rapper Lil Wayne used virtual images rather than fabric to outfit a display at fashion expo Magic. The booth on the crowded show floor of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center included two blank mannequins that New Jersey-based company Pearl Media clothed in outfits from the Trukfit collection using 3-D projection mapping. Virtual images of brightly colored T-shirts, patterned pants, and baseball caps were shone onto the white figures, which had shorts, trousers, shirts, and hats molded to their shapes.
To mark the 25th anniversary of Shark Week, Discovery hosted an event in 2012 that put sharks in the pool of the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. They weren't real, of course, but served as convincing projections devised by the planning and production team.
In October, the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong celebrated its 50th anniversary with an 800-guest bash. A 3-D projection on the building's façade told the story of the hotel's history, starting with its 1963 opening and detailing its development as a global luxury brand.
When Spain's Ushuaia Ibiza Beach Hotel planned its opening party for the 2013 season, the team brought in French production company High Scream to make the 12-hour party memorable—and highly visual. High Scream’s Romain Pissenem worked with XL Video's Ian Woodall to develop an idea for a projection mapped onto the hotel’s 30- by 20-meter swimming pool, which would become the largest-ever projection screen to date in Ibiza.
In September, Paramount Home Media Distribution hosted a party at L.A.’s California Science Center in celebration of the DVD/Blu-ray release of Star Trek Into Darkness. The Production Elements-produced party had the dramatic built-in decor benefit of NASA’s retired space shuttle Endeavour. And Kinetic Lighting projected a space scene all around it using a combination of digital projectors and moving lights fitted with custom glass gobos.
In 2009, the Annenberg Space for Photography opened in Los Angeles with a tented party where a dramatic scrim hanging overhead showed a kinetic display of still images.
At the Warner Brothers International Television Distribution gala in 2012 at the Warner Brothers Studios lot, digital mapping by Bart Kresa covered the back lot buildings with dramatic projections, including fiery images that furthered the event’s pyro-centric themes.
The line between movie magic and reality was hopelessly blurred at the Warner Brothers party for the American premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2007. Following the film's screening, 900 guests found themselves reimmersed in the wizard world of ancient castles, prophesies, and enchanted fireplaces for the premiere party. In one area attendees could lounge under a ceiling that featured alternating projections of clouds dotting blue skies and stormy weather.
For Walmart's shareholders' meeting earlier this year, Rabbit Hole Creative worked alongside Drury Design Dynamics to create a dramatically mapped stage set that added to the visuals of the annual event held in Arkansas.
During Miami Music Week, the 10th edition of the Music Lounge by BMF & iHeartMedia came to W South Beach hotel from March 17 to 19. BMF created a 7Up decor piece made from plastic bottles, which provided a backdrop for photos.
South by Southwest 2016 took place March 11 to 20 at various locations in Austin, Texas. An extension of SXSWi's food program, FYI network hosted its first culinary activation at the Driskill Hotel from March 12 to 14. Along with a "Quesoff" competition and a station that gave lessons on Instagramming food, the event featured an edible wall installation. Designed by food typographer Danielle Evans, the wall—which spelled out "Feed Your Imagination"—included local eats from Voodoo Doughnut, Sugar Mama's Bakeshop, and Whole Foods.
Greeting card company American Greetings partnered with ad agency MullenLowe and creative design agency Guild for Analog, a three-day event that encouraged guests to ditch their smartphones and get creative with old-school ways of communication. The experience featured vintage typewriters, vinyl records, and custom greeting cards that attendees could mail out using mailboxes, which were also part of the event's decor.
This year's Dining by Design, hosted by Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, took place March 17 to 21 at Pier 92. Echo Design's setup had a "Change Your Stripes" theme, evoking a safari sit-down dinner with a thatched rug, canvas director's chairs, caged pendant lighting, and a life-size zebra.
Sunbrella partnered with Ghislaine Viñas Interior Design to offer a twist on a tropical tablescape by using a monochromatic purple-blue palette with hanging leaf-like fabric cutouts, banana-decorated fixtures, and tassel-adorned chairs.
The seventh edition of the Model Beach Volleyball Tournament took place February 20 to 21 at Lummus Park in Miami. In the sponsor area, models volunteered to participate in the dunk tank, which also served as a photo op.
The Chicago museum celebrated the start of Black History Month with its 33rd annual gala on January 30. The event featured a wall from the Flower Firm, which was decorated with crates holding leaves and miniature garden plots.
Perez Art Museum Miami's gala took place March 4. The event had a concept from Lee Brian Schrager and included interactive artist stations like a floor-to-ceiling coloring book, which invited guests to doodle on the wall.
To celebrate the Game of Thrones Season 5 Blu-ray/DVD release on March 15, HBO staged a visual dragon "crash site" at Union Square Park in New York. The low-tech activation had skid and claw marks, toppled trash cans, broken benches, and fake smoke. The site also informed fans of an evening screening event for the Season 5 release.
