The newly built @sohoplace theatre in London's central West End theatre district opened on 22 October 2022 with the play "Marvellous". Lasa Marmo manufactured and supplied the LASA VENATO VENA VERDE® marble used throughout the playhouse from 2020 onwards. The three-storey balustrade of the staircase and corridor leading to the audience seats behind the façade is particularly striking. It consists of impressively backlit stone-glass laminate panels that can be seen from afar.
Over twelve years, British star architect Simon Allford, Co-Founder and CEO of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), had worked with British construction giant Derwent London as developer, London theatre producer Nica Burns of Nimax Theatres, award-winning London architect Haworth Tompkins for the design of the auditorium on a project which ended with the completion and opening of the @sohoplace theatre. The new Playhouse is the first new theatre building in London's West End for 50 years. It is part of a 340-million-euro construction project to spatially redevelop the eponymous underground station on Tottenham Court Road, whose platforms are located below the newly created buildings. Spectators can admire twinkling lights in the form of constellations as they walk through the building. The conceptual realisation of a theatre with an artificial starry sky also included the use of 300 square metres of raw panels of the Lasa Marmo commercial type LASA VENATO VENA VERDE® in a thickness of 2 cm, which were processed into stone-glass laminate panels by the Baden-Württemberg natural stone veneer manufacturer LIXOS®. The panels were then used to completely cover the balustrade of a staircase and corridor running along three floors to the spectator seating divided between the floors. The backlighting of all the panels allows the colours, textures and grains of the LASA VENATO VENA VERDE® to shine with unprecedented intensity due to the glass exterior façade. This special type of lighting illuminates the texture of the LASA marble and the history and creation of the stone becomes part of the living space. In addition to the corridors and the staircase, the refined LASA marble can also be found in other places in the building. For example, as a surface for the counter table of the interval bar (crush bar).
