What was Suede?
The big clubs get the obituaries. Suede was the small one, and it lasted longer than most of them.
It opened in 2001 at 7333 E Indian Plaza, directly across the street from Axis-Radius, and it belonged to the same people: Les and Diane Corieri, whose Evening Entertainment Group ran the block. The origin story, as DJ Dave Rajput told it, was a partner who wanted a little lounge across the street from the big room. What they built was 3,500 square feet of plush padded walls, sleek cherry wood and two bars lit with teardrop lights and neon ice strips, with a sound system Phoenix New Times called state-of-the-art and a roster of resident DJs to use it. Corieri’s own name for it was simpler: our ultra lounge.
It opened the same year as SIX on Stetson, when the district was discovering that a small, expensive, design-forward room could draw as well as a dance floor, and it outlived SIX by three years. For more than a decade it was the quieter half of a night that started at Axis-Radius, and once a year, on Halloween, it was the loudest thing on the block, with its Ghost Ball street party.
It ended with its neighbor. In April 2012 the City Council approved a pool-and-nightclub project on the block between Indian Plaza and Shoeman Lane, which meant Suede and Myst. Both closed on May 15, 2012 and were torn down, and Maya opened on the ground in April 2013. Maya has Suede’s address now. The honest verdict: Suede was the best-run small room the Corieris ever had, and it was demolished for being in the right place.
The lounge across the street
It was built for the DJ, not the floor. Suede’s whole pitch was sound in a room small enough to hear it. Where Radius put a DJ over a two-level dance floor, Suede put one over a lounge, and the resident DJs who played it, J. Alan, MCB, Freddy “Circle” Krems and Kevin Brown among them, were the draw. You came for a set you could stand near, with a drink from one of the two bars, and the padded walls kept the room from sounding like a warehouse.
It was the second stop. The Corieris owned both sides of Indian Plaza, and the natural night was Axis-Radius first, Suede after, or Suede first for the people who did not want to dance. By 2004, when they reopened the former Sanctuary next door as Myst, the family had three rooms within a hundred yards of each other and could move a crowd between them. That is the bottle-service district’s business model, written small: own the whole block and the customer never leaves it.
Halloween was the Ghost Ball. Suede’s annual block party was the district’s Halloween fixture, and the one night a year when the small lounge spilled into the street with the big clubs. The Old Town nightlife calendar still runs on the same dates, Halloween, Phoenix Open week and spring training, and the Ghost Ball was the early version.
What it was not. A dive. Padded walls, cherry wood and teardrop lighting put it at the expensive end of the district, with the same owners and the same door as the clubs across the street. The dives were on Brown Avenue; the lounge crowd at Suede was the one that had walked out of SIX a few years earlier looking for somewhere with a better sound system.
The block that was sold out from under it
Suede’s story is a real-estate story. The Corieris had bought the Indian Plaza land in 1996 for about $300,000, when it was empty offices, and built Axis on it; Suede, across the street, was the family’s expansion into a block that Sanctuary, from 1999, had already made valuable. Buying Sanctuary and turning it into Myst in 2004 gave Evening Entertainment Group the whole stretch between Indian Plaza and Shoeman Lane, which by the end of the 2000s was the most valuable nightlife ground in Arizona.
The Scottsdale Beach Club was first proposed elsewhere, near Stetson Drive and Wells Fargo Avenue. In April 2012 the City Council gave final approval to build it instead on the Myst and Suede block, with Triyar Companies developing and, New Times reported, Evening Entertainment Group as a partner. The announcement said both clubs would keep their regular dance nights until closing on May 15, and they did. Then the wrecking crews came. Maya opened in April 2013 as a Vegas-style day club with a pool and an indoor nightclub, and filled from the first weekend; the Corieris closed Axis-Radius across the street two months later, which tells you how fast the format had moved.
The ground has not stopped turning over. Maya passed through the Yari family’s Spellbound Entertainment Group, which merged with Riot Hospitality in 2019, and Riot rebuilt it floor to ceiling in 2025 beside the new REMI. hotel. Suede’s address, 7333 E Indian Plaza, is now the address of a 15,000-square-foot pool club with a carved wooden goddess behind the bar. Nothing of the padded room survives.
Honest assessment: Suede was a good lounge and a better business, a small room that made money for eleven years without ever being the most famous name on its own block. It belongs in the lost column of every bar and club in Scottsdale as the model for the district’s later lounges and as proof of the district’s one iron rule: when the land is worth more than the bar, the bar goes.