The new KEF Music Gallery, which opened in early June 2024 in Oxford Circus near the center of London, was built from scratch to not only demonstrate KEF speakers in a luxury environment, but also serve up a quality cup of coffee.
“In our Gallery space, which is where you walk into from the outside, we have our own in-house, open-to-the-public café where baristas serve freshly made coffee,” says Sarah Yule, KEF’s marketing director, Europe. “We’re London’s best-sounding coffee shop!
“The whole place is active and live so you could sit down in Vinyl Corner and listen to one of your favorite albums, or you could sit in one of the chairs and listen to some TIDAL or Apple Music being streamed across our Dolby Atmos array — I believe we are the first public café in London to offer an Atmos experience.”
In addition to the Gallery on the main floor, KEF has some offices upstairs and a purposeful and packed experience center in the basement. The technology in the space was installed by integrator Durgesh Sinh of Nucleus, based in London, which is also a KEF dealer.
“We were keen to have the job go to someone who knows the brand,” adds Yule. “Speaker brands do not usually build an experience center and retail space like this, so we wanted the AV installer to be someone within our community — someone who already specifies our products — because having someone who understands our product range and how it’s going to sound can be a key voice within the whole process. Nucleus have just been fantastic throughout the whole job.”
First Floor Tour
The first-floor Gallery that includes the café and a Podcasting Studio, which has a window facing the street so that those passing by can quickly get that this is a spot for audio.
“The idea of the Gallery is to create an unintimidating beautiful space that helps people just fall in love with listening again,” says Yule. “The whole space is on a Crestron Home system, and we have several different zones that we can switch between. If we’re playing through the Atmos system, for instance, and we have someone who really wants to listen to the LS60s, we can bring down the house system and we’ll give them an iPad so they can play back whatever they want through those speakers.
“On some afternoons we’ll have an ‘Album of the Day’ vinyl that we pick out and we’ll do a listening session for an hour or so where we will play it all the way through from beginning to end.”
The Podcast Studio has acoustic foam treatment that makes it reminiscent of an anechoic chamber, without actually being one. According to Yule, “It’s a little taste of our Maidstone facility, where we do our Global R&D and speaker testing.”
To make the first floor as flexible as possible, Yule went with a staple in the pro studio world. “There is a proper patchbay between the Gallery space and the Podcast Studio,” she says. “The entire space is using audio over IP for connectivity, but between those two rooms there are audio analog connections as well, and there are even a couple of XLRs. The reason for that is, if I’m doing an event in the main Gallery space and I want to do a live recording of it, I can do it through the Podcast Studio. Or, say, if I want to do a livestream and mix in some live commentary. It makes the space as flexible as possible.”
Going Down
There is a flight of stairs down to the main experience center, but, in a place such as this, even that is an experience. Called “The Portal,” the stairwell is all black except for a single LED strip going down the full length of the double-flight stairway. There are 10 speakers — four on each side and two on the ceiling — that, while not a full Dolby Atmos environment, can do object-based audio experiences. It features KEF’s Ci160RR-THX architectural loudspeakers controlled by an AudioControl Concert XR-6S AV receiver and a pair of AudioControl Pantages G4 5-channel Class H amplifiers.
“The idea of this space is to be a sort of palate cleanser and take you from the ground floor, which we see as our Discovery Zone, down to the basement, which is our Immersive Zone,” says Yule.
With their palettes sufficiently cleansed, visitors will exit the The Portal into The Hub, which is the room KEF uses for its meetings and training sessions. Sporting a fully operational bar, it is also a place to take VIP customers.
The Hub features multiple KEF CI speakers in various sizes and price points that can be selected in all kinds of configurations to allow clients to hear the differences between them. The centerpiece of the room, however, does not feature any tech — it is a 12-foot, Sebastian Cox-designed table that is made from a single piece of Kentish Oak, which in addition to being an impressive piece of furniture also gives a nod to the company’s Kent founding.
Off to the left of The Hub are two rooms — the Atelier Room and the Living Room. “The Atelia Room is basically a blank canvas for storytelling,” says Yule. “If we have got a product launch coming up, then we’ll set up the room like a booth at a tradeshow. We’ve also done photography exhibitions in there. Our first major exhibition was a partnership with the David Bowie estate where we held a celebration of the creation of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. We had one of the largest collections of Mick Rock photography lent to us from the Ziggy Stardust era on display.”
The Living Room is a listening room that is designed as a high-end residential apartment. There is a 2-channel hi-fi system and a 5.2.4 Dolby Atmos home cinema setup as well. It features KEF’s Ci5160RL and Ci3160RL for the LCR and surrounds, Ci200ERs in the ceiling, and KC62 subwoofers. The home theater setup is powered by a Yamaha AV receiver with a Sony 77-inch LED TV. The 2-channel system features a Hegel amplifier and a Lumin streamer.
On the other side of The Hub is the Ultimate Experience Room, which is a 9.14.4 theater screening room. And yes, those numbers are in the right order. “We have nine KEF Ci3160 reference speakers on the sides, front, and rear; four CI250s in the ceiling; and 14 KC92 subwoofers,” Yule explains. “The are seven subs at the front of the room, arranged in a pyramid shape with two on each side and three at the top. That sub-configuration is mirrored at the back.
“Our Ultimate Experience Room needed to be a 9 out of 10 minimum in terms of acoustic performance, and we were dealing with a building where we couldn’t dig down, the ceiling height was restricted, and we had big concrete pillars that we couldn’t move. We had to work with what we’ve got, and so there was a lot of work that went into materials and acoustic design. We used Trinnov’s WaveForming technology in this space to have more control over how the bass performed, and we were able to get the maximum levels without creating a lot of problems or uncontrolled bass response across the room.
“We’ve been really pleased with how it’s turned out.”
The final area of the facility lies just off the Ultimate Theater Experience. It is called the Coms Room and it holds six racks of AV equipment that is powering the whole building. “We have over 22,000 meters of audio and network cables — not including lighting and power,” says Yule. “It took about a month to pull all the cables and terminate them — and they’re beautiful. They’ve been color-coded based on use case and they’ve all been double-loomed to make sure that we’ve got space for future flexibility in case something needs to move.
“This area also has a patchbay where all of the different network points around the building link up, so we can basically route anything we would like around the building.”
A Space for All
While built and owned by KEF — and featuring many of its products — this space showcases so much more, including how all these components can work together to create a luxury residential and commercial space.
“With our space, there is something for consumers, for audio lovers, and for people within the creative community,” concludes Yule. “It’s also a tool for our dealers, distributors, and installers. It’s a place for our industry and also a place where people can showcase solutions. It can do everything from being a home environment to being a retail environment or a commercial project — and it does it in a way where the differences between those uses are not really noticeable.
“It’s been nice to see these worlds come together and find these new solutions, and I hope that it can provide an honest point of inspiration for people.”
For more information, visit https://uk.kef.com/pages/kef-music-gallery.
