A few meters from the Casa de les Punxes de Puig i Cadafalch, Barcelona has a new space that offers culture in select, particular and exclusive doses. Only for members. As in the city's sports clubs and gyms, a monthly fee of 100 euros gives access to cultural activities and reservation of spaces in the venue at no additional cost. It is By Safe House, the city's new social club that Isidoro Andaluz has launched and which will have its official public inauguration on February 17.
By Safe House has been operating since last September and its current associates have been able to enjoy the therapeutic monologues that the club programs every Saturday with comedian Raúl Alcaraz. There have also been opera and wine pairings, with soprano Sílvia Sabater and sommelier Anna Solé, and a film course has begun.
All of this and much more that is planned is announced on the club's website and in an application through which members can reserve their tickets for intimate concert events, such as those organized with the Terrassa Jazz Festival, wine pairings and culinary tastings, artistic performances, presentations, or lunches and dinners, since the venue has a restaurant, cocktail bar and a wine cellar with more than 180 wine references.
The club's premises are at number 147 on Bruc Street. Inside, it has three large spaces differentiated by furniture and decoration, versatile and distributed over two floors, with a total of 700 m2. In them, light and music set the mood at every moment of the day. More light and softer music during the day and, as night approaches, the intensities are exchanged, leaving less light and giving more energy to the sound, in the hands of a disc jockey. In this way, during the day, on the ground floor, sofas and comfortable work tables allow meetings, product presentations, work or personal meetings, or teleworking in a pleasant and comfortable environment.
The bar counter is always available for a good coffee or a bite to eat while working or during a break. The kitchen is open from 11 in the morning to 11 at night. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and signature cocktails are served, prepared by mixologist Antoni Escoda, a passionate bartender. The venue also has an exclusive bar to enjoy its wide range of selected wines. Sommelier Anna Solé López, an enthusiastic expert in wine culture, advises members.
Two companions
Each member can access the club premises with two companions on an occasional basis. By Safe House is a meeting point, an extension of home and office, a reversible space for leisure and work, with a varied menu of cultural activities always active. The fee ---notes Isidoro--- is tax deductible, since its amount is contributed to the cultural foundation created with By Safe House. In addition, members can benefit from special discounts at restaurants, spas, and other centers associated with the club.
When a member reserves one of the venue's spaces for a private activity or celebration, their attendees digitally receive, through the application, a membership card for that day. The venue's hours are Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 in the morning until 1 at night. Members also receive, on Fridays, a newsletter with the weekly program that also appears in the club's application.
Isidoro, the promoter
Isidoro Andaluz is the creator of By Safe House. He was born in Switzerland 63 years ago. For someone who speaks seven languages, like him, culture is daily bread and what motivates all the activities he programs at the social club. Isidoro arrived in Barcelona in 1982, "in the midst of the cultural effervescence of fashion, architecture and music," he recalls. "Pasqual Maragall opened the city to the world," he expresses. His first job in Catalunya, in addition to learning the language, was working for the petrochemical company Basf, the firm that also carried cassette tapes. His knowledge of languages greatly helped him in his functions in the customer service department. And soon he began to develop as a promoter, public relations and director of leisure venues in Barcelona, such as Distrito Distinto, Fibra Óptica, Otto Zutz, Barsalles, Atlántida in Sitges, and Amnesia and Blue Marlin in Ibiza.
During his time at the Amnesia nightclub in Ibiza, in the early 90s, Isidoro traveled practically once a month to London, where he spent a few days to sign disc-jockeys. And it was there that he discovered private clubs, open 24 hours, where "you could eat, read the newspaper, have a drink. I became a member of one on Regent Street," he explains.
Why a private club?
The idea of opening a private social club in Barcelona arose from a feeling: "Some of my friends and I felt orphaned of a place like they used to be, where public relations people did an excellent job of selecting attendees for certain venues. Now, at 60 years old, we missed that meeting place to listen to good music and have a drink in a trusted environment. In the open venues, today everything mixes, you no longer control the atmosphere there will be," argues the head of By Safe House.
The space also aims to pay tribute to art, enology, and signature mixology, in a renewed version of the traditional English club. The chosen name, By Safe House, is also a tribute to safe houses, a term used by the CIA in the 40s to refer to houses where protected witnesses or agents infiltrated in hostile territory were hidden.
This Barcelona club was born thinking of "local entrepreneurs and businessmen, leisure lovers and culture curious, and identifies itself as a safe place, where different profiles, cultures, styles, sectors, and thoughts coexist."
On the lower floor there are two differentiated spaces. One of them is prepared to host private parties or work meetings in a small committee, with its own bar. The other is equipped with versatile professional technical material to present products or transform into a dance hall.
With By Safe House, Isidoro opens the possibility of "enjoying leisure, business, and privacy in the same space and enabling a new way of conceiving relationships, both professional and social," and recovering some of that effervescence, the cultural explosion of the 80s in Barcelona.