We wanted somewhere to go that wasn't a bar.
So we're building it. This is what it's for, who's making it, and why it's named after the speed a record turns.
There's a particular hour on a night out where you look around and realise nobody is talking. Not because there's nothing to say, but because the room has made it impossible. The music is too loud to hear anyone under a shout. You've bought three drinks you didn't especially want, because standing there holding nothing feels strange. It's eleven, you're tired in a way that isn't sleepiness, and tomorrow you'll remember roughly none of it.
That's not a failure of the venue. It's the venue working exactly as designed. Loud rooms sell more drinks. Crowded rooms sell more drinks. A place with nowhere comfortable to sit keeps people at the bar. None of it is a conspiracy, just the honest arithmetic of a business that only makes money when you're consuming something.
The trouble is that this is most of what's on offer after five o'clock. The cafes close. The galleries close. The libraries close. What stays open is licensed, and so the whole back half of the day gets handed to a single format, whether it suits you or not.
Plenty of people it doesn't suit. People who've stopped drinking, or never started, or just decided they'd rather not build every friendship on top of it. People who'd like to meet someone new without three drinks of run-up. People who find loud rooms genuinely difficult rather than merely tiring. They haven't stopped wanting to go out. They've just run out of places to go.
So 33⅓ is a social club and a third space, built for connection, conversation and creativity, and a conscious alternative to alcohol-fuelled nightlife. Somewhere health-conscious creatives, entrepreneurs and curious minds come to unwind with community rather than to drink through an evening.
The practical version: music at a volume you can talk over, played properly on a system that deserves the records. Seating that's sunken and circular, so people end up facing each other instead of facing a bar. A studio where you can paint or write or play something. A bar built around teas, adaptogens and nootropic drinks made to sharpen you rather than blur you, and a short low-proof list for anyone who wants one.
We're not anti-drinking, and this isn't a temperance project. Alcohol just isn't the point, and once it stops being the point the room can be built around something else entirely.
On rooms doing the work
The thing we keep coming back to is that connection isn't really a matter of atmosphere. You can make a place warm, dim it beautifully, choose immaculate music, and still watch everyone stay in the group they walked in with. Warm and connected aren't the same thing.
What changes it is architecture. Whether the seating faces inward or outward. Whether there's an obvious way to join a conversation without interrupting it. Whether the volume lets a stranger say something to you at normal speaking pitch. Whether arriving alone is a recognised way to arrive, or a small humiliation you have to push through.
That's a design problem, and it's the one we're actually working on. The records and the lighting are the easy part.
Who's making it
We're partners. We've spent years making rooms and programs for other people, and a while ago we started describing the same missing place to each other often enough that we admitted we should probably build it.
Elizabeth
The Room & The FeelingA visual artist, working in paint and drawing, who used to paint film sets for a living. It turns out that's an unusually good preparation for this: a set has to feel like a real place to someone who's only ever seeing it from one angle, and so does a club on its opening night.
She grew up on the Gold Coast and has never entirely forgiven this city for the weather. Warmth is what she's chasing here, and she means it fairly literally, in the light and the colour and the actual temperature of the room. Every material choice in the space is her working out how to bring some of that north with her.
By day she works in the NDIS space, running videogaming sessions where neuroatypical people build social skills and make friendships. That work shapes more of this club than anything else. It's why the volume stays low enough to hold a conversation, why the rooms are legible rather than chaotic, and why there's always somewhere quieter to stand. A space that's exhausting to be inside isn't a social space. It's just a loud one.
She's also thoroughly taken with Japan, and with the lo-fi listening bars that worked all of this out decades before anyone called it wellness. Off hours: chill house, indie rock, snowboarding, videogames.
Evan
The Sound & The StructureWorks in mental health, with a background in neuroscience. Which is a roundabout way of saying he's spent a career on the question of what actually makes people feel better, and arrived at an answer that's much less interesting than the field would like: mostly, it's other people, seen often enough to count.
An audiophile, seriously enough that the hi-fi is not a line item he's willing to be sensible about. Jazz, and live records, and the specific pleasure of an album heard properly, front to back, rather than shuffled into the background of something else. A good system doesn't make music louder. It makes it worth sitting still for.
He's lived in four countries. What rearranged him wasn't the scenery, it was sitting across from people who'd grown up nothing like him, often enough that it changed what he thought was normal. You don't get that from your existing friends, and you don't get it from an algorithm. You get it from being in a room with strangers, regularly, for long enough that they stop being strangers.
That's the thing this club is really for.
Why a speed
A twelve-inch record turns at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute. It's slower than the seven-inch single, and the slowness is the whole point of it. The groove gets more room. The sound gets more space. You get a side of music rather than one song and a scramble to the next thing.
That speed is what made the album possible: not a track to get through, but forty minutes you sit inside, in an order somebody chose for you, ending somewhere you didn't pick.
It seemed like the right thing to name a room after. Long enough to settle into. Slow enough to notice who's sitting next to you.
One last thing, since people ask. There are no capital letters anywhere on this site. Nothing here needs to raise its voice to be worth reading, and that felt like a reasonable place to start as we mean to go on.