Raving With the Rich

“Just push 3 and it will take you right in,” says a doorman--make that elevator man--who stands at the velvet-roped gateway to Pure Love.

Upstairs, this Santa Monica club sees gray-haired seniors and gloved debutantes dance to a modern mix of hyper rave-style house music as a go-go dancer in fishnets sets a funky tone.

This is the way the rich rave.

Managers at Club Lux, host of Friday night’s Pure Love theme night, have decided to bring the energy of the local underground dance scene to their usually staid and proper clientele. And while the music doesn’t exactly turn this neo-Victorian-decorated spot next to Santa Monica Airport into a bass-booming warehouse, the result is an atmosphere rich with hip culture.

As blazer-wearing youths sway to deep beats spun by underground deejay Mark Lewis, others lounge over a view of private jets on the airfield. An onstage flute player wearing sunglasses adds a jazzy note to the hypnotic sounds that define Pure Love.

This marks the transformation of Lux, which on July 5 celebrates its first year as a spinoff of the adjacent restaurant, DC3.

Though a scene that mixes an after-dinner crowd with ear-warping beats seems hard to believe, it works. Lux managers did their nightclub homework when they merged elements of two popular underground theme nights--Roxbury’s upscale Pure Love on Fridays and Blak and Bloo’s psychedelic Sunday Love--that complement Lux’s scene-conscious, upscale clientele.

Lux’s Friday-night hybrid is less than two months old and accompanies a fresh line-up of theme clubs that manager Stasia Langford, who came to Lux from Dallas in January, brought to the spot. Thursday nights feature comedians and The Rhythm Lounge with jazz, blues and house music. Saturday nights, it’s Barbarella, an evening of ‘70s, house and top-40 dance music.

Langford says Lux’s managers originally wanted the club to be “a pricey kind of let’s hang out and smoke a cigarette and listen to music place.”

“It was a nice concept, but a little dated,” she says. “It lacked energy--and the Westside needed energy.”

Indeed, currents flow through Lux as twentysomething and thirtysomething patrons push the 299 capacity by midnight’s peak, fill the domed dance floor and mingle at candle-lit tables surrounded by big chairs, beveled mirrors and burgundy drapes.

“I was a little bit apprehensive about what the reaction to Sunday Love would be,” says Langford, who wears all black and does her hair in a neo-beehive. “But business has been growing and growing.”

Name: Pure Love, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Fridays at Club Lux, 2800 Donald Douglas Loop North, Santa Monica. For information, call (213) 969-2545.

Cover: $10. Only 21 and up admitted.

Drinks: Beer starts at $3, mixed drinks at $4.

Door Policy: Polite. These guys must be waiters by day. And although the club was packed, the line moved swiftly into the hard-working elevator.