David Lynch’s Club Silencio

In trademark shirt buttoned to the neck and requisite coffee in hand, cinematic auteur David Lynch reminisces to NOWNESS —in his distinctive, offbeat monotone—about his childhood love affair with the woods and smoking cigarettes. Born in Missoula, Montana, the polymath spent an itinerant childhood in the small-town, white picket fence America depicted in the opening to his disturbing psychosexual horror Blue Velvet. With a father who worked for the Department of Agriculture, Lynch’s fascination with nature was crystallized young and emerges in the rustling, ominous trees that surround the cherry-pie world of Twin Peaks. At Silencio, the club he conceived and designed, Lynch has neatly managed to marry his aforementioned twin passions with an ingenious smoking room disguised as an indoor forest. “The mood and feel that exists in the club comes from great lighting,” he explains. “You think of colors and shapes and the way the light plays off those things. The club has no windows, so once you’re inside, you could be anywhere, or nowhere.”