The Aubrey Restaurant Inside Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park

Context

The Team

Concert Sound Inside the Luxury 5-Star Hotel Restaurant The Aubrey

Hyde Park, London’s The Mandarin Oriental, between Royal Parkland and the fashionable Knightsbridge, offers an eclectic mix of heritage, traditional service, and contemporary flair. The Aubrey inside the upscale Mandarin Oriental Hotel is an eccentric Japanese izakaya experience for locals and visitors from around the globe. With the goal of whisking visitors into an energetic culinary tour of a night out in Ginza, The Aubrey prides itself on offering refined touches at every turn, especially with its ambiance and decor. Guests can saddle up to its distinctive bar for London’s first-ever omakase cocktail experience, where they imbibe unexpected cocktails and enjoy Japanese flavors and Asian ingredients. Live DJs perform late into the night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and at its weekend brunch service, adding to the vibrant setting.

The Challenge

The hotel itself was recently refurbished for modern-day standards; therefore, The Aubrey needed a modern and unparalleled sound experience that would match and keep up with the vibrancy of the space. The venue wanted the very best audio system available, delivering a world-class ‘background’ music experience and a sound system that would be able to accommodate live DJ sets. The Aubrey attracts well-known DJs and is fast becoming an ‘influencer’ space.

KNEKTD, a London-based audiovisual design and systems integrator, was tasked with discreetly blending a high-performance audio system into The Aubrey’s new decor and turned to L-Acoustics to assist in delivering the right sound system required. Shaun Wilson, owner and Director at KNEKTD, says, “The Aubrey’s vibe is high-end but achingly cool, and the interior design put some challenging requirements on achieving the performance required without affecting the final aesthetic of the main room or the individual areas. We needed high-performance loudspeakers discrete enough to blend with the interior furnishings, yet powerful enough to deliver the sonic escapism the brief dictated.”

The Solution

KNEKTD chose L-Acoustics’ compact X4i coaxial loudspeaker for the smaller areas and bays, along with the high-performance wall-mounted Syva colinear line source speakers for the large open area of the main restaurant. Syva Subs, hidden out of sight, provide low-frequency reinforcement across the system and are built into the custom joinery to blend in with the interior design.

Set against the dimmed room decor and dark wood-stained ceiling, X4i are bracket-mounted rather than flush to aid directivity across five small sectioned-off areas of the venue to ensure consistent sound pressure, regardless of where guests may be sitting.

In the main restaurant space, Syva speakers are wall-mounted above table height, fulfilling the need for visual discretion. Their slim column format, back-to-wall mounting, and standard dark grey-brown color perfectly match The Aubrey’s warm, rich decor and opulent style. 

The system was configured, optimized, and tuned for the space by L-Acoustics and KNEKTD, with the entire system controlled by Crestron, making sure it’s easy for staff to change things if needed. Pre-sets also cater to different times of the day, reflecting different moods.

System pictures

The Result

Over the eight-month-long refurb project at The Aubrey, with full support from L-Acoustics and a complete design layout in Soundvision, KNEKTD was in constant dialog with the interiors team to ensure the final design hit all the benchmarks in the brief for both aesthetics and sound. The result is another exceptional project in a premium London venue. On completion of the project, Matt Reid, co-founder of The Aubrey stated, “There’s always such a passion for music in Japan, where the curation of the soundtrack always comes from the room, from the feel of it. Here at The Aubrey, the sonic experience is absolutely part of the identity of the place.”

Project photos