Five months since the reopening of Mayfair’s most famous (and spontaneous) subterranean nightspot, we revisit our interview with the man at its helm
Every day, for about an hour, Luca Maggiora sits in an empty room, turns down the lights, and dreams of the nightclub he’s yet to open. “I close my eyes, and then I visualise completely how this is going to be,” he says of Tramp, the storied subterranean den that he recently took over, and which will be reborn under his fresh rule this autumn. “So it’s the opening night and I open the door,” he says (we are sitting on two deep corduroy sofas 100 yards away from the site, which whirrs and hums currently with drills and hammers and people with step ladders; the storm before the calm). “And I think: What do you smell? What do you touch? What do you feel? What kind of people do you have around you? How loud is the music? How long do you have to wait for your main course?” he chants, his eyes shut and his shoulders relaxed now; the Buddha of St James’s. “Are people laughing or reacting or dancing? I imagine everything!” It means, Maggiora explains, that if anything untoward should happen in real life – a minor royal receives a daiquiri to the lap; a Bichon Frisé is loose among the stilettos – he is utterly calm; he is ready; he has already lived it a thousand times before.
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