ivy Nightclub A 500-Capacity Nightclub Between a Restaurant and a Rooftop
IVY occupies the second floor of Kanù in Old Town, Maine — a 500-capacity nightclub with a dance floor, a stage, and eight elevated VIP booths, one floor above the restaurant and one below the rooftop lounge. The bar anchors the room, and a 25-foot media screen faces the dance floor, wide enough to carry a DJ set, a game, or a comedy night without the room being rebuilt around it. The club runs live music and comedy both.
It is the loudest room in a building with family dining underneath it. Gypcrete was poured over the second floor for fire rating and to deaden sound, so a full house on a Saturday doesn’t reach the tables below. The soffit that wraps the room hides a high-capacity HVAC system sized for several hundred people moving at once.
The windows are the part most people miss. Bars were added so a raucous crowd can’t put a body through the glass, but the room keeps its daylight. Rather than replace the openings with conventional wood double-hungs, the original units were swapped for Marvin direct glaze — protecting the historic character of the Main Street facade while giving the club a clean, uninterrupted opening.
The bathrooms are deliberately over-built: indirect lighting, tile, and hammered copper trough sinks. In a venue like this they are one of the few rooms a guest sees alone, and they were designed accordingly.
Location
STYLE
CATEGORY
Restaurants + Bars
Nightclubs
Performance Venues
Services
Architectural Design
Interior Design
Master Planning
Permitting
Lighting Design
Fabrication
PROJECT SIZE
project COLLABORATIONS
Flooring
wall treatments
Gage Carve
Interlam
Lighting design
Erik Milles, Reflex Lighting
Tile
rooftop pavers
Wood-Fired Pizza Oven
FirePits
PALOFORM
Furniture
RT Furniture - Las Vegas
PHOTOGRAPHY
Brandon Barré | Architectural
Darren Setlow | Lifestyle
Inspired Design
In consultation with our architect Ervin Architecture, it was important to use woods throughout the space since wooden canoes were the first canoes my family produced here. Our connections to Old Town Canoe inspired the name KANÙ.
Owner + Restaurateur
Project story
The Building
A 19th-century brick and timber mercantile building on Main Street, acquired as part of an adaptive reuse initiative to turn downtown Old Town into an arts and entertainment district. Buildings like this were built to carry freight — heavy timber joists, iron columns, tongue and groove floors — and decades of economic stagnation had left the original structure largely intact under later infill.
Bringing it back meant stripping everything but that original structure, then solving what decides whether a building can hold people at all: two means of egress on every floor, full sprinkler coverage, fire separation between floors, and structural reinforcement.
Isolating a Dance Hall
A nightclub in the middle of a three-venue building is a containment problem before it is a design problem.
A one-hour UL-rated fire separation wraps the floor. The structure was reinforced beyond what a normal assembly space requires — a dance floor carries moving load, not static load, and deflection limits are tighter as a result. Two means of egress serve the floor independently of the venues above and below.
None of this is what a guest notices. All of it is what lets three venues operate in one building at the same time.
The Room
Mirroflex and Gagecarve surfaces catch and break up the light rather than absorbing it. The bar front is the fixed point in a room built to change constantly.
The eight VIP booths sit elevated above the floor, with sightlines to the stage and to the crowd. Snakeskin upholstery, and color-changing linear lighting set into the steps leading up into each booth.
Against all of it, the original brick was left alone. Grazing light rakes across the walls that were never changed, so the nineteenth-century building stays visible behind the finishes rather than being covered over by them.
A green room off the back gives performers somewhere to be before and between sets.
Timeline
Ervin Architecture was brought in in 2017 to produce renderings of the client’s vision — restaurant below, nightclub above, rooftop lounge on top. Those renderings secured the building.
Construction ran into the pandemic. Supply chains, costs, and the safety of the crew on site all had to be managed while the work continued.