It started with a few
thousand pounds and a desire
to bring classical music
to a wider audience – now
experience creator The Lost
Estate has hired former
Merlin CDO Mark Fisher to
help it go global. Magali
Robathan finds out more
The Lost Estate’s 58th Street experience is based on New York’s Jazz Age / Hanson Leatherby
'Welcome to 1890s Paris and Le Chat Noir, the world’s first cabaret club. Show-stopping theatrics, decadent haute-cuisine, exotic pleasures, set in a world of absinthe, art, and anarchy...’
This is the promise from immersive heavyweights The Lost Estate for their recently-announced new show, and it is part of a business plan backed by ex-Merlin chief development officer Mark Fisher designed to take the company to the next level. Fisher was appointed non-executive director of The Lost Estate in March 2025 to help develop a growth strategy for the group, which is eyeing further locations in the UK and then the US.
Founded in 2017 by Royal College of Music graduates Rowan Bell and William Kunhardt, and Royal Academy of Music graduate Eddy Hackett, The Lost Estate combines theatre, live music and fine dining to bring historical stories to life. Shows include Cuban spectacular Paradise Under the Stars, Charles Dickens-themed Great Christmas Feast, 1930s New York jazz production 58th Street and immersive Swan Lake experience The Great Masked Ball.
As The Lost Estate enters the next stage of its growth, Attractions Management speaks to Eddy Hackett about the Tropicana, time travel and boot strapping the business:
What are you currently working on? Our 1950s Cuban immersive experience Paradise Under the Stars is currently running in our West Kensington site in London. It launched in April 2025 and runs until the end of September 2025. It features a three course Cuban feast, live music and cabaret inspired by Havana’s legendary Tropicana nightclub. We are also running 58th Street, a 1930s New York jazz club experience in Peckham, London. Our inspiration for that show was a real life speakeasy entrepreneur called Belle Livingstone who ran a speakeasy called 58th Street Country Club in New York.
We are also mid production for a remount of The Great Christmas Feast, our immersive event inspired by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This will be the eighth year of that production, which will run from 14 November 2025 to 4 January 2026, also in West Kensington.
Our latest production, launching in March 2026 in West Kensington in London, is called Le Chat Noir. The show is a fantastical take on the birth of cabaret in turn-of-the-century Paris at Le Chat Noir – the club where cabaret was born. We are developing the concept further, but it will feature a cast of four cabaret performers who will perform a mix of physical theatre and mime, burlesque, contortion, song and spoken word. It will also feature a violinist, cellist, pianist, clarinettist and percussionist, and will feature romantic and impressionist French music such as Satie, Debussy and Ravel, transposed onto a rag-tag gypsy band. Art director and set designer Thomas Kirk Shannon is responsible for the design, and it will be staged in the round with satellite stages, and a capacity of 220.
What is the history of The Lost Estate? I studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and spent 20 years performing as a freelance classical percussionist with the Royal Opera House and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
I met [The Lost Estate co-founders Rowan Bell and William Kundhardt] in 2012 when I became the principal percussionist for the Arensky Chamber Orchestra, which Rowan and Will had formed with the aim of making the presentation of classical music more accessible.
At the same time, I had started to get involved with English National Opera, and was asked to be the chair of a new board that they set up to advise on how to make the institution more accessible to under 30s.
It was a time when Punch Drunk, Secret Cinema and Gingerline were emerging – we were really interested in the new presentation format of immersive experiences coming through. There was no-one was doing that for classical music, and we could see that there was a huge opportunity there.
It also became apparent how fractured the experience of going to a concert of a West End show was in London – rushing to get to the West End after work, grabbing something quick to eat before going to sit in a cramped, uncomfortable theatre. During the interval, you’re queueing to get a drink, which is often overpriced and not particularly fantastic. It’s all very rushed. The whole experience of hospitality and performance and place felt very fractured.
We decided to bring all of these three elements under one roof to create the perfect audience experience.
How did you fund the company? We bootstrapped the business, putting in a couple of thousand pounds and focusing that money entirely on social media marketing. We created a website and marketed that, and used the revenue from the initial ticket sales to fund the production. We did that for a number of years, just gradually building the company and reinvesting any profits back into it. Today we are a profitable and entirely independent company.
Our first experience took place in 2018 – it was called In Night’s Darkling Glory, and was inspired by Richard Wagner’s tragic opera Tristan and Isolde. We rented a fantastic three-storey Victorian leather tanning factory and hired ex-Masterchef champion Natalie Coleman to create a medieval style banquet, and design team Darling and Edge, who transformed the warehouse on an absolute shoestring. The experience started with the dining experience, followed by a storytelling experience with an orchestra on the middle floor. On the top floor, we performed 45 minutes of this Wagner score with a beautiful singer and then the audience came back down to the ground floor for a fantastic mixology experience. It was very homespun and kind of fringy.
The Great Murder Mystery launched in 2021, and we have also created The Great Christmas Feast and 58th Street. We launched Paradise Under the Stars in April 2025.
Over the years, the production values have improved hugely. The level of immersion and depth of detail we go to has really grown.
What was the inspiration for Paradise Under the Stars? With The Great Murder Mystery and The Great Christmas Feast, we had moved away from music-productions to theatre experiences. We wanted to return to our roots as musicians. My background is as a percussionist, and I played a lot of Cuban music with musicians of African heritage when I lived in New York – that music is very special to me.
All of our experiences are inspired by something that actually happened, so we started looking for an amazing, compelling, real-life story that we could draw from. We settled on the Tropicana club in its heyday in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when it was this amazing, cool club showcasing incredible Cuban spectaculars. We read a book about the Tropicana club at that period, and it was ripe to turn it into a production.
From those starting points, we built the production layer by layer, with the music, the foods, the mixology, the entrance experience all the way down to the after experience.
How did your collaboration with Mark Fisher come about? We were introduced to Mark Fisher through our finance director, who previously worked at Merlin. We met him last summer and instantly hit it off. When I first met him, I was project managing the fit up for our Peckham space – I was in a hard hat and steel toecap boots, filling a skip. I think he liked the fact that we were building our company in very hands-on way, and we had loads of conversations over the ensuing six months, culminating with him coming on board as a non executive director. He is helping us to mature the company in its current operation.
What are your growth plans? Our ambition is to become the number one experiential hospitality provider globally.
Our five-year growth strategy, developed with Mark Fisher, sees us start by solidifying our existing products and really maxing out London. After that, we will look at the rest of the UK for more venues – we are currently looking at Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh as potential targets.
After that, we will start looking at the US – initially the East Coast, possibly Boston – and then Chicago or Austin.
That will take us to the end of our five year plan, when we should be in a position to do a full on equity raise to a much bigger expansion into the States and globally over the next five to 10 years.
Le Chat Noir
new show Le Chat Noir promises to turn the clock back to 1890s Paris
The Lost Estate’s 30,000 sq ft venue in West London is being rebuilt as a 360-degree recreation of original Paris cabaret club Le Chat Noir, complete with flickering gas lamps. A roaming house band, Les Enfants Vagabondes, will weave through the crowd, while ‘Toulouse-Lautrec’ sketches club-goers and absinthe fountains drip into waiting glasses. Expect show-stopping theatrics, exotic routines and the anarchic energy that made the original club the talk of Paris.
The design is by art director and set designer Thomas Kirk Shannon.
Tickets include a three course French meal, and cost from £99 for a table with views of the stage to £199 for the luxury package, which includes a VIP booth in front of the stage, a glass of champagne and aperitifs on arrival, VIP coat check and an off menu vintage nightcap. Between courses, guests can sample Belle Époque cocktails at the emerald-lit Bar de Absinthe – fuel for an evening the producers promise will be “one of love and madness.”
Expect show-stopping theatrics,
exotic routines and the anarchic
energy that made the original
club the talk of Paris
The upcoming show will reimagine a night at Le Chat Noir / Hanson Leatherby
Read more from this issue of Attractions Management magazine
View contents of Attractions Management 2025 issue 2
Editor's letter: Betting on horror
Year-round horror experiences are a fast-growing trend, but will the companies betting big see their investments pay off?
People: Thelma Golden
As the Studio Museum in Harlem prepares to reopen, its CEO explains why the institution is more important than ever
People: Linda Conlon
A driving force behind the creation of the International Centre for Life, CEO Linda Conlon has seen massive change over the past 25 years. So what’s next for the science centre?
People: Fiona Eastwood
With a passion for the industry, the new CEO of Merlin Entertainments says she is ready to lead the company to a new era of expansion and growth
Design & fabrication: Making a scene
As Adirondack Studios celebrates its 50th birthday, we speak to co-founders Michael Blau and Tom Lloyd, and production art director Lara Brunelle
Theme parks: Out of this world
The first major US theme park to open in almost 25 years, Universal Epic Universe is big news for the industry. We hear from the creative team that made it happen
Immersive experiences: One love
The creators of new Vegas immersive experience Hope Road have partnered with Bob Marley’s children to tell the story of his life and music
Zoos: Into the wild
Billed as Asia’s first adventure-based zoo park, Rainforest Wild Asia lets visitors experience animals in a whole new way. We find out more
Theme parks: Sleeping beauty
Fairytale magic meets traditional grand hotel at Efteling’s newest accommodation offering. Its designer shares the vision
Immersive attractions: Lost in music
As immersive music and hospitality company the Lost Estate announces its latest production, co-founder Eddy Hackett shares its global expansion plans
Immersive: Virginie Valastro
A dramatic ancient canyon made for an amazing starting place for the creation of a spectacular new scare attraction, says its creator
Museums: Roman Vinoly
The recently-opened National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, was one of architect’s Rafael Vinoly’s final projects. His son tells us what the project meant to his father, and how he intends to continue his legacy
It started with a few
thousand pounds and a desire
to bring classical music
to a wider audience – now
experience creator The Lost
Estate has hired former
Merlin CDO Mark Fisher to
help it go global. Magali
Robathan finds out more
The Lost Estate’s 58th Street experience is based on New York’s Jazz Age / Hanson Leatherby
'Welcome to 1890s Paris and Le Chat Noir, the world’s first cabaret club. Show-stopping theatrics, decadent haute-cuisine, exotic pleasures, set in a world of absinthe, art, and anarchy...’
This is the promise from immersive heavyweights The Lost Estate for their recently-announced new show, and it is part of a business plan backed by ex-Merlin chief development officer Mark Fisher designed to take the company to the next level. Fisher was appointed non-executive director of The Lost Estate in March 2025 to help develop a growth strategy for the group, which is eyeing further locations in the UK and then the US.
Founded in 2017 by Royal College of Music graduates Rowan Bell and William Kunhardt, and Royal Academy of Music graduate Eddy Hackett, The Lost Estate combines theatre, live music and fine dining to bring historical stories to life. Shows include Cuban spectacular Paradise Under the Stars, Charles Dickens-themed Great Christmas Feast, 1930s New York jazz production 58th Street and immersive Swan Lake experience The Great Masked Ball.
As The Lost Estate enters the next stage of its growth, Attractions Management speaks to Eddy Hackett about the Tropicana, time travel and boot strapping the business:
What are you currently working on? Our 1950s Cuban immersive experience Paradise Under the Stars is currently running in our West Kensington site in London. It launched in April 2025 and runs until the end of September 2025. It features a three course Cuban feast, live music and cabaret inspired by Havana’s legendary Tropicana nightclub. We are also running 58th Street, a 1930s New York jazz club experience in Peckham, London. Our inspiration for that show was a real life speakeasy entrepreneur called Belle Livingstone who ran a speakeasy called 58th Street Country Club in New York.
We are also mid production for a remount of The Great Christmas Feast, our immersive event inspired by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This will be the eighth year of that production, which will run from 14 November 2025 to 4 January 2026, also in West Kensington.
Our latest production, launching in March 2026 in West Kensington in London, is called Le Chat Noir. The show is a fantastical take on the birth of cabaret in turn-of-the-century Paris at Le Chat Noir – the club where cabaret was born. We are developing the concept further, but it will feature a cast of four cabaret performers who will perform a mix of physical theatre and mime, burlesque, contortion, song and spoken word. It will also feature a violinist, cellist, pianist, clarinettist and percussionist, and will feature romantic and impressionist French music such as Satie, Debussy and Ravel, transposed onto a rag-tag gypsy band. Art director and set designer Thomas Kirk Shannon is responsible for the design, and it will be staged in the round with satellite stages, and a capacity of 220.
What is the history of The Lost Estate? I studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and spent 20 years performing as a freelance classical percussionist with the Royal Opera House and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
I met [The Lost Estate co-founders Rowan Bell and William Kundhardt] in 2012 when I became the principal percussionist for the Arensky Chamber Orchestra, which Rowan and Will had formed with the aim of making the presentation of classical music more accessible.
At the same time, I had started to get involved with English National Opera, and was asked to be the chair of a new board that they set up to advise on how to make the institution more accessible to under 30s.
It was a time when Punch Drunk, Secret Cinema and Gingerline were emerging – we were really interested in the new presentation format of immersive experiences coming through. There was no-one was doing that for classical music, and we could see that there was a huge opportunity there.
It also became apparent how fractured the experience of going to a concert of a West End show was in London – rushing to get to the West End after work, grabbing something quick to eat before going to sit in a cramped, uncomfortable theatre. During the interval, you’re queueing to get a drink, which is often overpriced and not particularly fantastic. It’s all very rushed. The whole experience of hospitality and performance and place felt very fractured.
We decided to bring all of these three elements under one roof to create the perfect audience experience.
How did you fund the company? We bootstrapped the business, putting in a couple of thousand pounds and focusing that money entirely on social media marketing. We created a website and marketed that, and used the revenue from the initial ticket sales to fund the production. We did that for a number of years, just gradually building the company and reinvesting any profits back into it. Today we are a profitable and entirely independent company.
Our first experience took place in 2018 – it was called In Night’s Darkling Glory, and was inspired by Richard Wagner’s tragic opera Tristan and Isolde. We rented a fantastic three-storey Victorian leather tanning factory and hired ex-Masterchef champion Natalie Coleman to create a medieval style banquet, and design team Darling and Edge, who transformed the warehouse on an absolute shoestring. The experience started with the dining experience, followed by a storytelling experience with an orchestra on the middle floor. On the top floor, we performed 45 minutes of this Wagner score with a beautiful singer and then the audience came back down to the ground floor for a fantastic mixology experience. It was very homespun and kind of fringy.
The Great Murder Mystery launched in 2021, and we have also created The Great Christmas Feast and 58th Street. We launched Paradise Under the Stars in April 2025.
Over the years, the production values have improved hugely. The level of immersion and depth of detail we go to has really grown.
What was the inspiration for Paradise Under the Stars? With The Great Murder Mystery and The Great Christmas Feast, we had moved away from music-productions to theatre experiences. We wanted to return to our roots as musicians. My background is as a percussionist, and I played a lot of Cuban music with musicians of African heritage when I lived in New York – that music is very special to me.
All of our experiences are inspired by something that actually happened, so we started looking for an amazing, compelling, real-life story that we could draw from. We settled on the Tropicana club in its heyday in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when it was this amazing, cool club showcasing incredible Cuban spectaculars. We read a book about the Tropicana club at that period, and it was ripe to turn it into a production.
From those starting points, we built the production layer by layer, with the music, the foods, the mixology, the entrance experience all the way down to the after experience.
How did your collaboration with Mark Fisher come about? We were introduced to Mark Fisher through our finance director, who previously worked at Merlin. We met him last summer and instantly hit it off. When I first met him, I was project managing the fit up for our Peckham space – I was in a hard hat and steel toecap boots, filling a skip. I think he liked the fact that we were building our company in very hands-on way, and we had loads of conversations over the ensuing six months, culminating with him coming on board as a non executive director. He is helping us to mature the company in its current operation.
What are your growth plans? Our ambition is to become the number one experiential hospitality provider globally.
Our five-year growth strategy, developed with Mark Fisher, sees us start by solidifying our existing products and really maxing out London. After that, we will look at the rest of the UK for more venues – we are currently looking at Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh as potential targets.
After that, we will start looking at the US – initially the East Coast, possibly Boston – and then Chicago or Austin.
That will take us to the end of our five year plan, when we should be in a position to do a full on equity raise to a much bigger expansion into the States and globally over the next five to 10 years.
Le Chat Noir
new show Le Chat Noir promises to turn the clock back to 1890s Paris
The Lost Estate’s 30,000 sq ft venue in West London is being rebuilt as a 360-degree recreation of original Paris cabaret club Le Chat Noir, complete with flickering gas lamps. A roaming house band, Les Enfants Vagabondes, will weave through the crowd, while ‘Toulouse-Lautrec’ sketches club-goers and absinthe fountains drip into waiting glasses. Expect show-stopping theatrics, exotic routines and the anarchic energy that made the original club the talk of Paris.
The design is by art director and set designer Thomas Kirk Shannon.
Tickets include a three course French meal, and cost from £99 for a table with views of the stage to £199 for the luxury package, which includes a VIP booth in front of the stage, a glass of champagne and aperitifs on arrival, VIP coat check and an off menu vintage nightcap. Between courses, guests can sample Belle Époque cocktails at the emerald-lit Bar de Absinthe – fuel for an evening the producers promise will be “one of love and madness.”
Expect show-stopping theatrics,
exotic routines and the anarchic
energy that made the original
club the talk of Paris
The upcoming show will reimagine a night at Le Chat Noir / Hanson Leatherby
Read more from this issue of Attractions Management magazine
View contents of Attractions Management 2025 issue 2
Editor's letter: Betting on horror
Year-round horror experiences are a fast-growing trend, but will the companies betting big see their investments pay off?
People: Thelma Golden
As the Studio Museum in Harlem prepares to reopen, its CEO explains why the institution is more important than ever
People: Linda Conlon
A driving force behind the creation of the International Centre for Life, CEO Linda Conlon has seen massive change over the past 25 years. So what’s next for the science centre?
People: Fiona Eastwood
With a passion for the industry, the new CEO of Merlin Entertainments says she is ready to lead the company to a new era of expansion and growth
Design & fabrication: Making a scene
As Adirondack Studios celebrates its 50th birthday, we speak to co-founders Michael Blau and Tom Lloyd, and production art director Lara Brunelle
Theme parks: Out of this world
The first major US theme park to open in almost 25 years, Universal Epic Universe is big news for the industry. We hear from the creative team that made it happen
Immersive experiences: One love
The creators of new Vegas immersive experience Hope Road have partnered with Bob Marley’s children to tell the story of his life and music
Zoos: Into the wild
Billed as Asia’s first adventure-based zoo park, Rainforest Wild Asia lets visitors experience animals in a whole new way. We find out more
Theme parks: Sleeping beauty
Fairytale magic meets traditional grand hotel at Efteling’s newest accommodation offering. Its designer shares the vision
Immersive attractions: Lost in music
As immersive music and hospitality company the Lost Estate announces its latest production, co-founder Eddy Hackett shares its global expansion plans
Immersive: Virginie Valastro
A dramatic ancient canyon made for an amazing starting place for the creation of a spectacular new scare attraction, says its creator
Museums: Roman Vinoly
The recently-opened National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, was one of architect’s Rafael Vinoly’s final projects. His son tells us what the project meant to his father, and how he intends to continue his legacy
Expo 2030 Riyadh is being planned as a permanent visitor destination, with organisers
confirming the six-million-square-metre site will become a Global Village after the event closes.
The owner of one of Australia's best-known waterparks has acquired a major competitor,
creating a new attractions business spanning two of the country's largest visitor destinations.
The Toverland theme park in the Netherlands has announced a €98m expansion programme
that will add a resort, new attractions and staff facilities as it pursues plans to become a multi-
day destination.
Hotel de France, located on the British Isle of Jersey, has created a wellness retreat package
that includes a hot yoga session that will take place in Jersey Zoo’s butterfly sanctuary.
A new immersive attraction designed to transport visitors into the final hours of ancient Pompeii
is preparing to open near the world-famous archaeological site in southern Italy.
Experience design company, BRC Imagination Arts, has completed a transition that sees founder
Bob Rogers pass ownership of the business to four long-serving senior executives, while
remaining actively involved with the company.
Movie Park Germany has opened a new Paramount Pictures-themed attraction as part of its 30th
anniversary celebrations, using immersive storytelling and adaptive reuse to reinforce the park’s
longstanding “Hollywood in Germany” positioning.
Therme Manchester’s 28-acre development, which will include interconnected glass pavilions
that measure 65,000sq m, will be the largest bathing and wellbeing attraction in the world once
complete, according to prof David Russell, CEO of Therme UK.
Efteling has opened Hooghmoed, a new family drop tower designed to broaden the appeal of its
recently launched Sirene Island themed area and introduce younger visitors to thrill attractions.
A proposed Puy du Fou development near Bicester and Universal Destinations and Experiences’
planned resort in Bedford are emerging as part of a wider transformation of the Oxford–
Cambridge Growth Corridor into a major centre for UK leisure and tourism inv
+ More news
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