For most of his career, Tiger Hotel CEO Glyn Laverick has served as an entrepreneur and successful concert promoter in England and Canada. With the opening of local nightclub V2 on Friday, he’s returning to familiar territory in an unfamiliar place.
Since convincing local investors and the Columbia City Council last March that he was indeed the person needed to restore the Tiger Hotel to its former glory, Laverick has worked to duplicate his success abroad to downtown Columbia. V2 will hold its grand opening Friday night as part of the already reopened Tiger Hotel.
“V2 is really big city club meets Columbia,” Laverick says. “It has a very urban look and a sort of industrial architecture. It’s a small space, smaller than other spaces in town but that sort of adds to the atmosphere, intimacy and exclusivity of the space.”
V2 is part of the larger Tiger Hotel, a boutique hotel in downtown Columbia. When the hotel was originally built in 1928, it was referred to as Columbia’s first skyscraper. After shutting down as a hotel in the mid 1980s, the space was transformed into a retirement home, a venture that lasted until 2007.
“V2 is a late-night place,” Laverick says. “We were looking to have people come and party and dance. There’s going to be top 40 music playing, and it’s going to have a party atmosphere. There’s not a lot of seating and its certainly much more of a bar.”
Prior to the grand opening of V2, the Tiger Hotel opened Vault, a restaurant and lounge.
“Vault is a little bit more grown up and a little more sophisticated,” Laverick says. “That’s not to say that a younger audience doesn’t go there, they do, but they go there for a sophisticated night out. They go there for a date night. V2 is really about dancing and having a good time. It’s about coming to party and sharing that with your friends.”
Earlier this year, Laverick gained control of the hotel with the intention of making it a trendy destination for a select audience of people. To generate publicity for the grand opening, Facebook users that liked the event page were given free passes to the grand opening.
“The key factor is really that the space itself is different,” Laverick says. “It’s different from what you have at 10 Below or at Quinton’s & Tonic at some of those other spaces. We’ve really gone all out. We have a state-of-the-art lighting system. We have high definition digital protection so there’s the video component, and we have moving lights that are the same kind of lights that you’d see on big touring concert shows and large scale theaters.”
V2’s lighting system cost the Tiger Hotel $25,000, Laverick says.
“It’s not going to be like a static light show where it’s just fading from one color to the next,” Laverick says. “It’s going to be an event. That’s what we want people to leave with, that they’ve experienced something.”
According to the V2 Facebook page, DJ Solution will serve as the club’s opening act. Doors will open at 9:30 p.m. for the club’s grand opening.
“It’s a place to party and blow off some steam,” Laverick says.