Stepping inside an institution

PETER CALDER goes behind the scenes at a gentlemen's club with a difference.

The sign swinging above the door says simply "The Atrium" Club. No further words on the frosted glass street door suggest what may go on within.

It would be easy to miss, tucked as it is behind St Matthew-in-the-City, near the southern dead end of Federal St in central Auckland.

Phil Warren didn't miss it often, they say, though it's a fair bet he's missing it now.

The impresario and Auckland Regional Council chairman who died late last month was a loyal member, says manager Sean McCombe, who opens the locked door when I buzz and greets me with a smile and an iron handshake.

The Atrium Club was widely mentioned in dispatches when Phil Warren headed off for the nightclub that never closes.

A gym, they called it, although everyone added knowingly that its most famous member didn't work out much.

McCombe, a former Otahuhu rugby league player and coach, confirms this with a sad shake of his head.

"He'd have a shower and a steam, just recharge his batteries. But he very, very rarely worked out.

"He pissed me off because he didn't work out and I had to give him a real serve in November.

"'After Christmas,' he said, 'after Christmas.'

"But it was a real haven for him and a really big part of his life."

The Atrium Club looks like a gym. It has to be said it smells like a gym.

But McCombe, who has run the place since 1984, and looks suspiciously like a gym instructor, doesn't call it a gym.

"It's a club," he says proudly, "with a gym attached."

As clubs go, this ain't the Northern or the Reform.

The single long trestle table in what might be called the members' lounge is pitted with black marks made by pins, McCombe tells me, during the building's previous life as a pattern-cutting workshop.

The Atrium has occupied the premises since it was established in 1967, but you will look in vain for padded leather chairs, humidors and whisky decanters.

There's a newspaper or two about, but a shelf full of Wilbur Smith and Stephen King paperbacks is more the Atrium style. ("All those Penthouses are gone, I hope," says McCombe with a knowing wink when he catches me studying the spines.)

In pride of place on the table is a collection of sauce bottles - tomato, sweet chilli, Worcestershire - which are used to season the meals prepared on demand by a part-time chef in the basic kitchen.

And we're not talking poached salmon, venison, artichokes.

"Good basic food," McCombe promises. "He does a brilliant fish meal on a Friday."

Ray Walker, a member since 1971 ("When one of my mates said: 'Come on up and have a look"'), echoes the sentiment. His favourite is the roast lamb sandwiches. None of your fancy paninis, thanks; good, old-fashioned white sliced.

In a new century when gyms are body-buffing centres with high-tech machinery where lycra-clad youngsters gyrate to deafening music, the Atrium might seem like something of an anachronism.

The facilities are basic, even down-at-heel - though there are plenty of personal touches: named robes hang on coathangers and members' training kit is laundered on-site and returned to their lockers.

But McCombe is not put out at all when I suggest the place is old-fashioned, even unfashionable.

"It's like an old slipper," he says. "It's comfortable. That's the way the members like it."

It's also unfashionably and unrepentantly gentlemen-only.

The gym, not much larger than a couple of cricket pitches, and the single showering and change area enforce that restriction, McCombe says.

If it all seems a little stuck in the past, it's fair to note that the Atrium has lived down at least some of its own past.

The founders and original owners, Frank Hatherley and Ron Raby, used to lay on free cigarettes for the members - Raby was famous for supervising members' workouts with a fag hanging from his lips - but the largess proved their undoing.

"They got in a wee bit of financial strife," McCombe remarks mildly, "and they had to offer it to the members."

Since 1974, the Atrium has been an incorporated society.

For all the smoke-free modernisation, this is not a club which is likely to have its doors battered down by muscled young blokes desperate for membership.

The average age is 45 and there are several octogenarians.

One, Ray Southwell, who turned 80 in October, just became the first New Zealand rower to complete 15,000km on a stationary machine.

Unobtrusive it may be, but the Atrium does not seek to be exclusive.

McCombe says it's keen for new members, but it doesn't advertise.

You're more likely to join because you've been invited by someone who already belongs and fancies you'd fit in.

After all, to twist Groucho Marx' line, you wouldn't want to belong to a club that wouldn't want you as a member.