Home / Venues / Brooklyn / Giando on the Water
Floor-to-ceiling glass onto the East River and the Manhattan skyline, under a massive skylight. Spectacular — and one of the most reflective rooms we work.
Giando's whole appeal is transparency — floor-to-ceiling windows onto the East River and the Manhattan skyline, crystal chandeliers, and a massive skylight overhead. It photographs superbly and it is acoustically about as hard as a room gets.
Glass absorbs essentially nothing, and a skylight means the ceiling reflects too. Sound bounces from every direction, and what suffers first is always the human voice. Music survives being a little smeared; a toast does not, and guests who lose the thread start talking, which ruins it for everyone in front of them.
The answer is coverage rather than volume: several smaller sources placed close to guests and aimed at them rather than at the surfaces, at levels that keep speech intelligible. Turning it up is what actually makes a room like this worse.
Early in the evening the view does the work. Nobody is looking at uplighting while the sun is going down behind Manhattan, and lighting specified only for a dark room is invisible for the first two hours.
Then the light goes, the glass turns to mirror, and the room needs to become the thing people look at. That is a genuine transition and it should be cued rather than left to happen. It is exactly what intelligent lighting is for — a room that changes as the night does.
Worth knowing: in a glass room, fixtures reflect. Aimed carelessly they double up in the windows and read as clutter. Aimed well the reflection works for you.
Giando runs a flexible open floor plan, which is an advantage and a responsibility. There are no fixed walls dictating where the floor goes, so the layout is a decision rather than a given — and where we set up determines how the room fills.
The private outdoor terrace is effectively a second room. If cocktails are out there it needs its own coverage, and being on the Brooklyn waterfront it is exposed — wind matters for anything spoken outdoors.
Load-in is the Williamsburg reality. Waterfront Brooklyn venues have real constraints on access and timing, and we plan setup around the venue's actual schedule rather than turning up and negotiating. More on how we work the borough on our Brooklyn page.
It's a consideration, not a problem. Glass and a skylight reflect almost everything, so speech suffers first. We use distributed sound aimed at guests rather than at surfaces, at controlled levels.
Not for the first couple of hours, honestly — the view does the work while it's light. We program the lighting to take over as the daylight goes rather than setting one look all night.
Yes, as its own coverage. It's exposed waterfront, so anything spoken out there needs microphone choice that survives wind.
It has real constraints, like most waterfront Brooklyn venues. We plan setup around the venue's schedule in advance rather than negotiating on the day.
Yes - it's a room we've worked more than once, so load-in and setup are known quantities rather than something solved on the day.
Send your date and we'll confirm availability, usually the same day. Peak-season Saturdays go furthest ahead.
Also considering somewhere else? These are rooms we work regularly.
Send your date and we'll confirm availability and what the room actually needs.
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