St. Lui, Christchurch — Side One, Across the Road
A Christchurch warehouse, one brother’s lifelong record collection, and a lounge that finally left the house.
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: St. Lui
Address: 303 Cashel Street, Christchurch, New Zealand
Website: https://www.stlui.co.nz
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/st._lui03
The smoke reaches Cashel Street first. Smokey T’s has been feeding this end of central Christchurch since 2018, when Tristin Anderson turned seventeen years of kitchen work towards the long patience of a smoker. Across the road there is now a converted warehouse, and the patience has moved inside.
St. Lui opened on 25 September. It belongs to Tristin and his brother Nathan, who call it their dream lounge, and the phrase is more literal than it sounds. The records on its shelves are Tristin’s, gathered since he was a teenager, and for years they lived in his front room. Then they were due for the garage. They went to the bar instead, on the reasonable grounds that the brothers were never at home to hear them.
That is how a good many of the best listening rooms begin. Not with a concept. With a collection that has outgrown the house.
The brothers point plainly at Japan, at rooms where recorded music is the reason for being there rather than the wallpaper behind the conversation. The fit-out follows the brief: acoustic panelling along the walls, a hi-fi system at the centre of things, and a fire. Records are played in full, and they are, in Tristin’s words, all sorts. That matters more than it might seem. This is not a room built around one genre’s orthodoxy. It is one person’s long accumulation, heard the way it was meant to be heard, side one before side two.
Christchurch has spent fifteen years deciding, building by building, what it wanted to put back. Much of the centre is new now, and a short walk from St. Lui the stadium rises out of that rebuild. New cities fill quickly with bars designed for the crowd before kick-off, and St. Lui makes no secret of welcoming it. What’s interesting is what it gives that crowd once the door closes behind them. A needle. A whole side. Something to sit still for.
The evenings aren’t purist. The bar talks openly about DJ sets and live music alongside the lounge, and at the weekend it runs until two in the morning. But the bones are a listening room’s bones — the panels, the system, the full albums, a collection with one man’s fingerprints on every sleeve — and the line it has chosen for itself is a quietly unusual one for a new venue to hang over the door: Still, there was good.
Low and slow on one side of Cashel Street. Side one, then side two, on the other. The same patience, carried across the road.
I write about rooms like this every day at Tracks & Tales Daily. Subscribe to hear about the next one, or read more of the world’s listening bars. — Rafi Mercer
