Case study

Animales BBQ Co.: a full AV design-build

A restaurant and live music room in North Minneapolis, designed and built from an empty shell.

Location North Minneapolis
Project type Full AV design-build — ours end to end
Our role Design, rigging, wiring & install
Result The developer has kept working with us

The room

Animales BBQ Co. is a restaurant and live music room in North Minneapolis, developed as a single designed environment rather than a dining room with a PA added to it.

The brief

The developer had just finished Berlin with us and came back before this room existed. The brief was short: they wanted the best of everything, and they wanted the AV to look like it belonged to the building rather than like it had been installed into it.

That meant coming in at concept, not at construction documents. Pure design-build — the scope evolved as the room did, which is the part of this work we like most and the part that only works when the client and the crew actually trust each other.

The design

Ours end to end. We drew the lighting plot and the rack elevation and coordinated both against the furniture plan, so fixture positions, speaker locations and sightlines were resolved on paper while the seating layout was still moving.

Sheet L-1 of the Animales BBQ Co. lighting drawings: rigging plan, overhead lighting detail, grid and stage section, and front elevation — Sheet L-1 from the first concept set for Animales: rigging plan, overhead lighting detail, grid section and front elevation, with every fixture, channel and trim height drawn before the rig went up.

Because we were designing the lighting, the audio, the video and the acoustic treatment together, decisions in one discipline could be paid for in another — a fixture position that solved a sightline problem, treatment placed where it also hid infrastructure.

The install

Rigging, wiring and install, all of it ours.

Over 160 crew hours went into the room. That number is what a design-build actually costs in labour when the lighting, the audio, the video, the backlighting and the treatment are all being installed by the same crew against a drawing set that is still evolving with the build.

The result

The developer has kept working with us. That is the measure that matters in this kind of room — Berlin led to Animales, and the relationship has outlasted both builds.

Video distribution and control runs on Crestron, over IP, so sources can be routed to any screen in the building and the whole thing stays operable by staff who should never have to think about how it works.

Tell us about the room.

Send over the venue, the date and roughly what you need. We read every request and reply with real questions, not a form letter.

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