Drama Park Lane: inside the secret London club where Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio go to party

It’s the secret London celebrity hangout where everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Rihanna and Rita Ora go to let their hair down. Haven’t heard of it? That’s kind of the point, says Samuel Fishwick

Neon-painted shopping trolleys laden with bottles of Belvedere Vodka and Dom Pérignon zig-zag between the tables, while dancers in Agent Provocateur lingerie dangle themselves over a silver bridge suspended over the DJ booth. Club kids crowd the dancefloor to the sound of Rihanna’s Work while in another room guests are throwing bizarre shapes in a hall of mirrors.

Haven’t heard of Drama? That’s part of its charm. Nick House opened the club last September with co-founders Tom Eulenberg and Ryan Bish from Soho nightclub Cirque Le Soir, wanting to make an clean break from the ‘queues round the corner’ at House’s previous smash hit Mahiki. ‘That’s how you bring in the movers and shakers’, says House, ‘by cultivating something more in-the-know.’ No signage, no marketing campaign — just three guys and their little black books.

And it’s worked. As the club reaches its first anniversary, Drama’s class of 2016 is more A-list than your average Oscars after-party. Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell, Rihanna and Drake popping bottles underneath a glittering, shark-shaped disco ball? Check. Andy Murray doing shots — no, not the tennis kind — until 4am? Check. And Usain Bolt — yes, the fastest man on the planet — behind the DJ decks? Yes, that happened too. Bolt is said to have got so carried away that he skipped out on a £10k bar tab and had to return the next morning to pay it (you try running after a man who travels 100 metres in 9.58 seconds). ‘He was a terrible DJ,’ says Eulenberg with a smile.

The walls are in a constant state of flux, with street artists commissioned every two months. ‘It feels like a cliché to call the club a canvas, but that’s how it feels,’ says House, who gets tips from his friends at the Lazarides Gallery on who to feature. In the bathrooms scratch ‘n’ sniff wallpaper puts the ‘fun’ into functional — cherry for the men, banana for the ladies.

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House knows how to build a network — alongside Mahiki, he co-founded the Cameron Diaz favourite Whisky Mist (formerly on the Drama site), the Alpine-themed Bodo’s Schloss, Steam and Rye, a bar and restaurant in the City themed around early-20th-century America, and Guy Ritchie’s Punch Bowl. The most important commodity he trades in, he tells me, is people. Eulenberg, with his trademark trilby, is one of the ‘most charming men’ House has ever met — he used to work for House at Whisky Mist, and was coaxed back for this project having been a smash hit with celebs such as Cara Delevingne at Cirque Le Soir.

‘You build a team that not only can make a cocktail and lock the doors at the end of the night, but that also has an amazing influence over lots of groups of people,’ says House. Their best nights are carefully stacked like a house of cards — A will invite B, who invites C — a whole alphabet of stars. British model Roxy Horner, Leonardo DiCaprio’s rumoured flame, is a regular at the club and is said to have invited him down — while he, in turn, brought Naomi Campbell; when Rihanna last came, it was because her childhood friend the photographer Melissa Forde was hosting the night.

Celebs get an informal credit rating and Drake is said to be an ‘A plus’. He doesn’t get the column inches of a Rihanna or a Rita Ora, but he brings a trail of other celebrities with him. ‘When Drake’s at a night, everyone wants to be there,’ says House. Eulenberg shows me a video of Drake’s last visit, champagne cocktails festooned with sparklers everywhere, a crowd going wild to the start of Hotline Bling. Eulenberg says it’s up to the DJ whether they’ll play a musician’s music on the night — some, presumably, can’t think of anything worse. ‘Ora loves hearing her own music — we played a few of her songs and she jumped up on stage to put on a show.’

Star power isn’t always easy to handle. In June, after a girl not on the guest list was turned away, she was back an hour later — on the arm of Leonardo DiCaprio. She had been outside, crying — it later transpired it was her birthday — only for DiCaprio’s entourage to scoop her up on the way and sneak her in. She spent the evening on a table with DiCaprio and 10 other models. If you are going to be someone’s plus-one, it doesn’t hurt if they are an Oscar winner

Others aren’t so lucky. ‘As a general rule, we say no team sportsmen, because they turn up with their rowdy mates — not like Leo, who’ll turn up with ten models,’ says Eulenberg. The title-winning Leicester City football team, flush from a 1-0 victory over Watford, managed to sneak into the venue because they weren’t recognised on the door. ‘We’d have barred them if we knew who they were,’ says Eulenberg. Another casualty was Brooklyn Beckham, turned away from a fashion party last September for being underage.

‘We told him to wait a bit, and we’d roll out the red carpet for him when he turns 18,’ says Eulenberg. Reality TV stars are turned away without exception. ‘It’s a problem when they get in,’ says House. ‘We’d need an emergency meeting the next day if that happened.’

While House is the behind-the-scenes man, Eulenberg is the effervescent marshall on the field. ‘An engineer of hedonism’, as House likes to call him, he’s responsible for making DiCaprio feel like ‘he’s in his living room’, or that Ellie Goulding is feeling ‘the vibe’ — that clubland enigma ritually revered by party impresarios.

His Instagram is festooned with selfies starring Andy Murray and A$AP Rocky, with Eulenberg usually wearing a jauntily perched hat or — for Halloween — a garish clown costume.

‘We need a whole line in the budget just to cover Tom’s Halloween outfits,’ jokes House. Stars, according to Eulenberg, bring the energy — although some are more turbocharged than others: while ex-One Direction members prefer to sit more quietly in the corner, it’s ‘madness’ when Rihanna’s there. She’s ‘a party animal, up on the stage and dancing’ says House.

The knack, Eulenberg says, is to cultivate an environment in which people feel comfortable. ‘There’s no manual to how you create energy,’ he says, but there are ingredients: ‘alcohol, a dark room, models — spun in with some celebrities’. House says most clubs only have a two-year shelf life — so can they buck the trend?

‘It’s about momentum,’ he says. ‘You don’t become a London landmark overnight — it’s about blending influential celebrities, the movers and shakers, and the cross-section of customers who don’t worry about being seen letting their hair down.’

If House is to be believed, this is just the first act. There’s plenty more drama left in the tank.

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