The Melbourne-founded catering and venue business celebrated the opening of ILUMINA on Tuesday night with an industry event showcasing the venue’s capabilities.
The hero space of the new venue is its Main Hall, where Tuesday’s event primarily took place – an 869m2 flat floor space that can be split into two other spaces: a 519m2 flat floor North Hall and a 350m2 Central Hall with retractable tiered theatre seating for 168.
The production partner for ILUMINA, Harry the hirer, has fitted the space out with an array of visually arresting screens, including those that wrap around the room’s pillars.
As a cocktail venue, Main Hall has capacity for 800 guests, with banquets of 560 possible. Combining the Main Hall on level 3 with the level 4 spaces provides a cocktail capacity of 1,200.
The other two floors – 2 and 4 – feature smaller meeting spaces, ranging in size from 164m2 to 14m2 for groups of four to 80 attendees.
All of the spaces at ILUMINA have natural light during the day.
Tuesday night’s event featured a varied menu from The Big Group, with cocktails from Maybe Sammy, whose bar located just blocks away has been repeatedly named as one of the world’s best cocktail establishments.
A slim catwalk-like stage provided an elevated space for futuristic performers, while an abundance of native foliage hung from the ceiling truss and sprung from the sides of the room, provided by Joost Bakker, whose sustainability work with the Big Group over the last two-plus-decades has inspired many of his other projects.
The event pulled a noteworthy crowd, with Tourism Australia’s chair, Penny Fowler AM, as its opening speaker.
“The recent expansion of The Big Group into Sydney is significant and we can already see the ambition you have to transform the events industry landscape,” Fowler told a roughly 500-strong audience.
Founder of The Big Group, Bruce Keebaugh, who started the company with his wife Chyka in Melbourne 35 years ago, also spoke at Tuesday’s event, flattering the local crowd with favourable comparisons between Sydney and Melbourne and sharing the origin of The Big Group which was built from $500 of seed capital and Chyka “cooking boardroom lunches from her mother’s kitchen”.
“We had big dreams,” said Bruce.
“We set to recreate and merge the worlds of catering and eventing. My base theory was that if the environment did not match the food or we didn’t have a full view of the client’s brand and event expectations or strategy, we could not support the event correctly. So culinary creativity, client collaboration, innovation is how we build and design our venues.
“We want to make our space easy and fun for you to use and we are very honoured to be a small part of the Sydney event landscape.
“Collaboration is the key to success. We see our role in the Sydney events community as a provider of great venues, with flexible, fun sales and eventing staff to support your events with great food and service excellence,” he said.
Bruce also shared that everything from the furniture to the cutlery, crockery and glassware for the new venue had been locally sourced.
Already a significant presence in Melbourne, with the likes of the eclectic Ormond House – host of the Asia Pacific Incentives and Meetings Event (AIME) welcome event in 2018 – and The Glasshouse in Richmond’s sports precinct, The Big Group entered the Sydney event market in 2024, becoming the catering partner at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) on Circular Quay.
The Big Group has already made a considerable impact at MCA, playing a role in the refit of the gallery’s largest event space, Foundation Hall, and creating an impressive upscale restaurant, Canvas, within the upper-floor space that used to offer a cafeteria style offering at the gallery.
Outside of operating venues, The Big Group also provides corporate hospitality at many of Australia’s signature major events, working at the likes of the Australian Open, the Melbourne Cup, the AFL Grand Final and SXSW Sydney.
