Goode Night

SPOTLIGHT

Eric Goode—who will tell you (often) he doesn't consider himself a "nightclub person"—describes his new club, M.K., as "more a design project.. .kind of as if we were building our fantasy house." It has a bedroom (PreRaphaelite), a library (Victorian), a palatial powder room (French Deco), and a split-level restaurant (Vienna Secession). In the age of abstention, this latest addition to Manhattan's shifting clubscape—called M.K., Goode insists, for reasons "too silly" to explain—offers sanctuary to a crowd whose nocturnal adventures are largely stylistic, and who like going out to feel like staying in.

Goode was one of the wunderkinder behind Area, downtown's living night gallery, where the thematic mise en scene, ranging from Sex to Suburbia, changed with the whims of its owners. M.K., says Goode, now thirty, is "more subtlety and less shock value.... It's just that we're all older." The 1914 building, originally a bank, in Manhattan's newly defined Flatiron District, was converted by a core staff of mostly Area alumni for around $1 million (about a tenth of what it cost to do Palladium in 1985). Goode and his partners—sister Jennifer (shown here with harp), Serge Becker, and Bruce Frank—say they emphasized an eccentric eclecticism over the single-period feeling of "another club" (read Nell's). There is a Grand Hotel lobby over a cracked-cement basement discotheque, which is next to bank-vault coat-check rooms. And throughout there are the signature eerie artifacts—many from the loft Eric recently moved out of—which make the place unmistakably Goode enough. "It's almost like sitting in my living room," he says in the library, surrounded by zoological bones, stuffed dogs, and butterflies under glass. "But it's much nicer now."

BEN BRANTLEY