UPDATE: The club is not affiliated with Seattle-based JET Hospitality, a hospitality group that offers alternative lodging options like luxury glamping, eco-friendly tiny homes, bungalows, and lodge rooms, and full-feature RV sites.
A new Midtown bar opening over Fourth of July weekend hopes to bring a taste of ancient Persian culture to an area most commonly known for being the cultural epicenter for Houston’s Sperry-wearing crowd. Babylon, a new nightclub concept from Denver-based Jet Hospitality, will provide Houston bargoers with a leviathan, 6,000-square-foot playground modeled after its namesake city’s famous hanging gardens.
The nightclub, opening on Friday, July 1, is housed in the building that was formerly home to Howl at the Moon. At Babylon, guests can expect an opulent, vaguely Mesopotamian experience that is immersive and interactive: Jet Hospitality has updated the space to include lush seating, ample low lighting, a Fertile Crescent–worthy collection of foliage, and enough gold embellishments to have your inner Indiana Jones scanning the room for booby traps. The spacious new nightclub will offer guests a variety of seating arrangements—enough to accommodate both small and large groups—in addition to having ample bar seating.
The bar will play host to frequent performance-driven evenings and will serve as a new local hot spot for house music—because nothing says ancient Babylon quite like house music. (Although we do think the ancients would have enjoyed an electric lyre solo every now and then, had electricity been available back in 1700 BCE.) In order to keep the party going, Babylon will host both in-house and celebrity DJs on a regular basis. The space has been transformed to include tall ceilings and an inviting dance floor, so there will be plenty of room for guests to practice their dance moves—both ancient and modern—beneath a truly biblical hail of staccato synths.
The nightclub, which will be open on Fridays and Saturdays from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., is hosting a grand opening celebration all this weekend, a celebration that will include, according to a release, several exotic animals. Alas, per the Code of Hammurabi, you must offer a replacement camel if you liberate one from its outdoor display area—an eye for an eye, a hump for a hump!