Leather surfaces draped with ecstatic bodies; the thwack of paddles whistles through the smoky air as chains rattle and spit drips from open mouths. Pink satin curtains frame intertwined figures, twisting in pleasure—beings suspended from silks, from ropes, hold the room still in the silence between slaps—and soft lips kiss stilettoed feet with desperation and reverence. A taupe bench, covered in soft suede, rotates to offer a playful moment of pause as latex straddles latex, the rubbery friction ringing out beneath moanful melodies that fill the open space. Voices build and rise in mutual orgasm, bursting forth and flowing from one moment to the next.
Playrooms—dungeons, darkrooms, backrooms—are spaces designated specifically for sexual exploration. In recent years, they have become more present in mainstream consciousness, thanks in large part to the 2010s flurry around Fifty Shades of Grey (which widely came under fire for portraying—and perhaps normalizing—a problematic BDSM dynamic). More recently, the popular Netflix home renovation series How to Build a Sex Room showed unassuming British interior designer Melanie Rose helping hopeful couples and polycules realize their erotic dreams—and gifting them an envy-inducing amount of sex toys and furniture in the process.
Amidst more supportive and diverse representation of alternative sexual dynamics, conversations around playrooms are evolving, with a growing understanding that such spaces are not always basements lined with rusty chains and lit with a single exposed lightbulb (although still completely valid if this floats your boat!). In reality, playrooms can be erected wherever you choose, fitted with the colors, textures, furniture, and toys that feel most aligned with your desires, and be characterized by the people and intentions existing within them. They also can be a political statement—a bid to take up space historically denied to the marginalized—and sit atop a storied history of radical queer deviance and resistance.
Today’s playrooms often take inspiration from the “blackrooms” of the post-war American gay biker scene, and the queer parties and darkrooms of the ’60s and ’70s United States. The black walls that glistened in the darkness, the raw materials, the exposed metals, and the riding leathers—this aesthetic set the precedent for the most common tropes of today’s queer playrooms. Against the backdrop of a social and legal environment hostile to same-sex relations—which were heavily criminalized across the States—these spaces offered gay men safety in their pursuit of pleasure. They also allowed men to occupy a “new gay ideal of masculinity,” as The European Observatory on Memories put it, that opposed normative ideas of effeminate homosexuality (which the patriarchy read as “weak” or “lesser than.”)
In the decades that followed, queer nightlife expanded to offer people spaces to more safely explore their sexuality and expression. Soon, many cafes, bars, and clubs developed darkrooms in the back where punters could also cruise and have semi-public sex without leaving the safety of the venue. Some of these overlapped with, or hosted, fetish and BDSM nights, while others simply provided leather sofas, lube, porn, and—as a response to the ’80s AIDS crisis—condoms and advice on safer sex. While the majority of darkrooms catered to men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM), Gayle Rubin wrote about the dyke fisting club The Catacombs, and London’s Rebel Dykes started the world’s first-known so-called lesbian S&M club, Chain Reaction, in the 1980s.
Today’s playrooms build on these influences—honoring those who fought to carve out earlier zones of safety and connection—and expand on them to explore new aesthetics and challenge conventions. These spaces offer more than simply a physical place in which to flirt, cruise, have sex, or engage with BDSM and kink furniture. They’re sites of self-exploration and expression led by curiosity and pleasure. They’re liminal spaces that both deepen and transcend experience—and for this reason, they must be designed intentionally.
Reimagining the dungeon
A playroom created with care and intention involves thoughtful consideration of materials, lighting, furniture, colors, equipment, music, and a plethora of other aspects that develop and supplement sensory environments. Together, they create a multi-sensory experience both embedded within our reality, but also sufficiently removed from the everyday so that it may speak to and fulfill desires outside of the confines of daily routines and stresses. So that we may feel present and embodied during sexual exploration, whether solo, with one or many partners, or with strangers. So that we may experience sensual and sexual self-actualization, reaching across and into fantastical realms that co-create alternative worlds and futures.
For Jared Philippo, the founder of Berlin-born Pinky Promise, there are three main considerations when designing a physical playspace: Creating immersive experiences with thematic alignment; offering both comfort and color; and striking a balance between privacy for guests, and visibility and access for the welfare team. Working with different art directors, the team curates lighting, beds, and kink furniture, as well as props, textures, and structural pieces to ensure that different play environments are varied but always “soft and soulful.” “Nothing too dark and dingy, we want to ensure that there's a lot of color framing the space”, says Jared. “We also always want the feeling to be inviting for people who want to be lying in beds for a while—we want them to feel as comfortable as possible”.
Pinky Promise’s approach to building a reimagined playroom is a direct response to the traditional darkrooms, nowadays often associated with techno, black leather, and hardware. Six years ago, Jared envisioned an alternative in playspace design, based on “a dissatisfaction at the time with environments that I felt weren't lending themselves towards building more elaborately and also softly furnished spaces for sexual play,” he explains. “So I felt I had to come from my background in immersive theater to examine what could be done for people to explore pleasure and creativity around intimacy, and where those needs were not being met from other kink parties at the time.”
Materials are also central to the ethos of designer Domhnall Nolan, who has a background in metal work. With projects such as the gorgeous London queer clubhouse Roses of Elagabalus under his belt, he also is the creator of the Play Pieces range of modular sex furniture for the London-based queer sex-positive rave and play party Joyride, who “wanted a chic space that felt less expected as a typical sex dungeon.” Nolan understands both the importance and parameters of designing furniture that is “sturdy, strong, and able to withstand a lot of action.” Inspired by the sexual aestheticism of 1970s gym equipment—and the homoerotic culture and expression that it fostered and inspired—Nolan’s Play Pieces collection is soft, sexy, and raw, a combination of metal, cognac-toned leather, and other unprocessed materials. The pieces are also composed of adaptable modules that can be re-arranged to allow for non-prescriptive queer sexual positions.
“That whole [’70s] period has always been very sexy to me”, says Domhnall. “It’s a Barbarella-esque approach to a sex dungeon—so it’s a little bit camp as well, which adds a small sense of humor. I think people need it in those sometimes very intense sexual environments.”
While there’s nothing wrong with the classic dungeon-esque approach—I’m personally a fan—it’s important that there are a range of options available for people with different leanings and at different stages in their journeys. As parties that respectively describe themselves as “a sensual playground to explore, heal, and express your sexuality,” and “a space where people can embrace their identities in an open-minded and debauched atmosphere,” it feels key that playrooms at Pinky Promise and Joyride are inviting, offering a softer place to land. Jared explains that they invest significant thought and energy into the entrance, which is important in conveying the theme of the night and allowing guests to feel immersed en route to the playroom. This also creates a channel for safeguarding, offering a place for the team to be visible and hold conversations with partiers.
Safeguarding and welfare considerations are, of course, a key component in building a communal playroom. Pinky Promise often will have around 30 members of staff working throughout the night, with enough coverage so that any issue can be met with a response. They also ensure the rooms are stocked with hygiene-safe health products such as condoms, lubes, dental dams, and disinfectant spray to use on the furniture post-play. Jared shares that their playrooms are not only cruising spaces: the welfare team also holds space for people to meet and talk beforehand—setting the tone around expectations, consent, and appropriate behavior—to “not only bring accountability, but also ensure that the environment is protected.”
“There's a lot in our messaging around how to feel and embody what you want from your own sexuality, irrespective of anyone else”, they add. “And how to make sure you enter this environment feeling understood so you never have to cross your own boundaries, because that's really not what this party is about.”
Co-created spaces
A room is simply four walls until human activity and memory transform it into a place. Thus, approaching a playroom with awareness, embodiment, and communication is both an individual and a collective responsibility. What is it that is required of the player(s)—of those co-creating the space with their presence, sexuality, exploration, moans, pain, and pleasure? Considering the intangible psychological worlds, and the collective and diverse experiences, that are manifested in playrooms, building one also demands that we endeavor to understand our own desires and boundaries—to communicate them with others, to respect those of our partners, and to set aside ego for the sake of a mutually pleasurable shared experience.
During a time of loneliness, extreme capitalist consumption, and unaffordable rents, playrooms can act as third spaces to provide a landing place for those seeking slower, deeper, and more authentic human connection. They can reclaim physical space for pleasure. This is part of the mission of STÜCK [shtük], the lovechild of sex-positive and kink community Klub Verboten (KV) and club ecosystem and design lab Playbody Studio. “An embassy for softness and sobriety,” STÜCK houses purpose-built modular furniture that prompts curiosity and play—central facets in our pursuit of authentic sensuality and alternative world-making.
“We removed some of the visual clichés we've inherited,” says Hanny Amin, KV and STÜCK co-founder. “It isn't the only visual language kink needs to have. Concrete, purpose-poured rubber, custom stainless steel curves. Non-threatening curves, soft haptics. STÜCK’s design language follows a function that sees a human as a whole.”
The suggestion is a kink space of the future, taking cues from the past. Inspired by the innovative spirit of historical queer spaces that emerged and evolved based on the community’s shifting needs, STÜCK functions as one response for the current moment, asking questions like: “Where else can sensuality and queer connection live? Why should spaces that allow sexual expression only exist at night, behind the doors of a club? Why can’t they also feel domestic, social, soft, or part of everyday life?” As such, it serves also as a co-working space and café for three days a week, and houses exhibitions, talks, life drawing workshops and other “social activities from intellectual exchange to cuddles to fisting.” It’s a landing pad for the burnt-out disillusioned club rat, the sober kinksters and anyone wanting to change within a space as it changes with the cultural landscape.
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The playroom continues to offer a radical space that affirms queer desire, a gathering ground for new connections, and a site of increased self-understanding and self-actualization. For we do change when we engage with a collectively created space. Whether within shiny black walls lit with a single red light or among silks draping golden thrones, an alternate reality is created and can travel with us. Playrooms have the potential to exist as heterotopias—Michel Foucault’s theory of a world within a world, which reflects the structures and rules of the external sphere, but exposes, distorts, subverts, or dismantles them to create space for something new, something better.
In the playroom, normative expectations are disrupted to fulfill desires, to offer models of relating that could help us heal and build safer—and more reparative—neighborhoods. Models that we can transpose onto the structures of our broader lives. That can help us to build relationships with ourselves, lovers, friends, and the Earth with self-awareness, honesty, communication, consent, and care. And, most importantly, with a playful curiosity that imagines life beyond the restrictive structures of oppressive categories.
Perhaps this is what it takes to truly build a playroom—an intentional pursuit of pleasure that looks beyond the moment and considers the self as part of a living, breathing network. A hedonism that is collective and community-driven. A hedono-futurism—rooted in love as action and the demand for better, for all.
Curious about the spaces we co-create together? Explore more on interiors, interiorities, and intimacy in A Fucking Magazine Issue 3: Rooms with a View.
