Home · Paris venues
Paris venues for a company event, and what each one imposes
Paris venues fall into a handful of families, and each imposes a different set of constraints. Knowing which family you are dealing with tells you more than the capacity figure does.
Concert halls and theatres
They come with a stage, a house system, a control position and usually a resident technician. The build is shorter because you graft onto what exists rather than bringing everything, but it happens with the venue's technical team rather than alongside it, and their staff is sometimes contractually imposed.
The trap is geometry. A hall is designed for a seated audience facing a stage, and a company party has no stage: keep the original orientation and half your guests dance with their backs to the speakers. The sound is re-aimed at the centre of the floor.
The second trap is scale. These rooms fill badly below three hundred people. Better to tighten the floor and leave part of the room in shadow than to spread out and make it feel empty.
Hotels, pavilions, clubs and unusual venues
A hotel salon is carpeted, treated and flattering for sound. The constraint is not acoustic: there are occupied bedrooms above, sometimes another event next door, a firm curfew and a shared service lift that has to be booked by slot. It is the most predictable venue type provided you have spoken to the events department rather than only to sales.
A pavilion or hall is a large bare volume: height, hard surfaces, little absorption and rarely anywhere to plug in. Sound goes upward where nobody is, so it is spread low and wide across several points. Power and vehicle access are the two questions to settle first.
A club is already dark, already equipped and already built for a dance floor, which is comfortable. The trap is level: a club system is tuned for a night where nobody talks, and a company event is above all an occasion where people do. And many clubs have no usable microphone and nowhere obvious to speak from.
Then there are the unusual venues, an aquarium, an embassy, a rooftop, a palace at Versailles. They have nothing in common except that each has a resident manager, a capped sound level and a list of things that may not be placed anywhere. That is a comfortable constraint once known, and an expensive one discovered at the build.
Questions we are asked
Can we use the venue's own sound system?
Often yes, and it is frequently preferable because it is tuned to the room. We bring what is missing rather than duplicating what exists.
Does the venue type change your price?
No. The package is the same everywhere. What changes is the setup and the build time, and that is included.
How do we find out the real capacity?
Ask for the seated figure as well as the standing one, and remember that the dance floor takes a fraction of the surface. We size the system on your confirmed headcount, not on the advertised capacity.
Read next
Is your date free?
It costs nothing to ask, and we reply within twenty-four hours, in English, with an itemised quote.