Club of the Month: Refuge (NYC)

It's Monday morning, just a few hours after Seth Troxler and Victor Calderon played an unannounced afterparty set at Refuge. Owners John Dimatteo and Craig "Shorty" Bernabeu are already back at it, like they are most days. The disco ball needs polishing. The dance floor needs sanding and topping up with urethane to keep it looking shiny and to protect the wood underneath. Shorty's already been up a ladder rewiring something. There's always something to do, but it's never a chore for these long-time industry veterans.

"Refuge is a nonstop evolution," says Dimatteo, who has produced thousands of large-scale shows across the US over the last 30 years. "Most clubs, they put the sound in, they put the lights in, they book the DJs, everything's great. With us, we never stop. Everything's one of a kind, so it's very intense, hands-on labour."

That, in a nutshell, is Refuge - an audiophile dance club that turns one this September, built with love by two guys who decided to create the club they'd always wanted to attend. They have no one to answer to but each other and, as it turns out, a very demanding room. "It's a passion project in the sense that we're taking our collective experience and putting everything we've got into this," Dimatteo says. "And it just so happens that when you do that, it makes for an incredible business as well."

Shorty puts it more simply: "If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself." He is behind the design, tuning and optimisation of many world-class analogue systems at venues including Nowadays and Analog BKNY, and also helped Floating Points design his celebrated Sunflower Sound System. His latest masterpiece is Rex, the 10-foot-tall, fully bespoke 4-point analogue system Shorty built from scratch specially for the Refuge main room. It is polished lovingly by staff over the course of a weekend, and he calls it, without hesitation, the best work of his career. 

Every sound system has a voice, and Rex, he says, is "full, relaxed and easy on the ears, with a tremendous amount of impact. It's a musical system with a lot of attitude and authority." So authoritative, apparently, that DJs who play it start hearing records differently. "There's been a lot of people turning into audio snobs after they play Refuge," Shorty laughs. "They leave and say 'I can't go nowhere else now because of you.'"

Producers are now even using the system as a reference point to test unfinished tracks before they get mixed down. It is so good, in fact, Shorty often hears the speakers reveal deep information about source inputs, relays them on his Instagram, then details taking the whole thing apart and rebuilding it in pursuit of audio perfection.

The space itself is a standalone industrial complex dating to somewhere between 1850 and 1880, with 35-foot ceilings and brick and beams that have clearly seen more than a century of use before Refuge ever got its hands on them. Finding it took years. 

"In New York City, you might find the right space and the right deal, but you have a luxury condominium a stone's throw away, or you find the right deal, and the numbers are impossible," says Dimatteo. After seven years of searching, he and Shorty found the building in August 2023, closed on it in January 2024, ran a stripped-back test phase of 13 events through the back half of that year, then shut down, regrouped, and reopened as Refuge proper in September 2025. Along the way, there were surprises even two guys with this much collective mileage hadn't seen before, not least in an obsolete 19th and early-20th-century wiring system that turned up mid-renovation. 

There is a deliberate no-LED-wall policy at Refuge. The warm, atmospheric room is lit with sophistication to amplify what's already there. "It's not about video," Dimatteo says, and mobile phones are also banned. "The building itself has a lot of nice, unique architecture that we accentuate, lighting up beams and the bricks." 

There's even a set of windows now fitted with remote-controlled shades, and during the Troxler b2b Calderon set this past weekend, Troxler timed a magical early morning moment perfectly. "He hit the button at the right time, and it went from being pitch black to being the sun pouring in," Dimatteo recalls of what is sure to become a must-experience moment for dancers from around the world. "People eat it up, man. It's very, very special."

The past weekend also saw the launch of a new outdoor system, Brutus, Rex's looser sibling built for a different set of constraints. "It's gotta give you that oomph," says Shorty. "But it's a little fluffier, a little lighter because you have an outdoor element, so you can't have too much strength behind it because we would have noise issues. It's right on the threshold where it's perfectly legal."

Even the DJ booth carries an obsessive level of love and care: it has rubber flooring to save DJs' backs and knees on long sets, pull-out drawers for CDJs so nobody's leaning across a table, and 10 in-built record bins so no one has to crouch down to flip through crates mid-set.  The likes of Sasha, Ricardo Villalobos, Cassy, Sonja Moonear, David Morales, Stacey Pullen, Jellybean Benitez and Tony Humphries have all passed by so far to test out custom studio-grade isolators once used by Prince, digital analogue converters, and acoustic design led by Al Fierstein of Acoustilog, who once worked with the likes of Studio 54, Paradise Garage and Sound Factory. 

"So DJs, when they're doing a long set," Dimatteo says, "it flies by." Long extended sets and residencies are key to Refuge, while bookings often lean into established names who have long proven their worth, rather than chasing what's hot on any given week. "We give artists four, five, six hours so they can play music they don't get to play, and it sounds so great. They stretch out and tell stories, get out of their element and show different sides of what they like musically."

Perhaps the most telling detail isn't technical at all; it's who shows up. "We have people that are in their 20s all the way up to their 60s and from all walks of life... professionals, artists, all different types of people," Dimatteo says. "It's really representative of what New York City is. It's a real melting pot of people coming together that probably would not encounter each other under normal social circumstances."

They've noticed people buying tickets without even checking the lineup first, and there have been lines around the block at 6 am on a Saturday morning. That crowd reaches well beyond the five boroughs: Eventbrite data shows attendees from 48 US states plus Washington, DC, and 78 countries and territories over the past year, putting Refuge firmly on the map for clubbers visiting New York. Since its official opening in September of last year, the venue has recorded 108,095 tickets claimed through the Eventbrite platform alone. 

"It's been decades since I've seen that in New York" Dimatteo admits, adding that other DJs, unbooked and unpaid, also show up just to hang out, which his always a good sign a venue is doing things right. 

Refuge sits in the IBC, the industrial business zone technically considered part of East Williamsburg, in a pocket of Brooklyn that has developed into something of an unofficial entertainment district. Within walking distance are around 15 other nightlife and cultural spaces, alongside restaurants, bars, galleries, boutiques and after-hours spots. Brooklyn Monarch, Signal, Green Room and others sit nearby, while a little further out are the likes of House of Yes, Elsewhere and Pacha.

John sees the area as a modern equivalent of old Manhattan. “We believe where we are today is what Manhattan was in the nineties below 27th Street. Right? It's the modern renaissance of art and culture, but today it's in Brooklyn, not Manhattan.”

Refuge is an ongoing story that is "only 50%" told, says John. New rooms, a renovated courtyard, extra bathrooms, and a new basement level are all promised, alongside infinite tweaks to the sound system that most won't even notice. 

The anniversary hasn't been a single night, either. It's been running across the entire month, with acts like Two Shell, Chris Liebing, Ahadadream, Coffintexts, Serge Devant and more giving crowds copious reasons to make the trip to Brooklyn, and that feels apt. One year in, Refuge isn't looking back and declaring a job well done. Instead, John and Shorty are still focused on how to make the next night better than the last.

The celebrations close this weekend, September 25–27, with a 72-hour nonstop dance marathon featuring a 12-hour opening set from Deep Dish, sessions with John Dimatteo and Shorty, a Sunday sunrise set from Victor Calderone, and a closing turn from Brothers Macklovitch (A-Trak & Dave 1). 

Bring some stamina and grab your tickets here.