Stardust’s Love Letter to Babylon

From the water’s edge, Amoroso rises like a half-remembered dream of Babylon. Warm stone buildings overlook a broad pool. Cushions, mattresses and secluded corners invite visitors to linger. Gardens climb through the architecture, while in the distance a monumental ziggurat dominates the skyline. It is a room made for pleasure, certainly, but also for curiosity.

“Welcome to Amoroso,” says KayleeRose as our tour begins.

As a co-founder of Stardust, the collective behind the celebrated room The Consensual, Kaylee is already associated with ambitious, sensual environments. Amoroso, however, has a character all its own. Rather than building around one central activity, she has imagined a complete world with multiple areas, different moods and plenty of reasons to wander.

“This is the main area, with the pool and bar,” she explains. “Basically where most people, I would assume, would hang out for the first time and meet.”

The space feels generous without becoming impersonal. There is room to swim, dance and socialise, but also an abundance of comfortable places where visitors can simply recline and watch the room around them.

“I was trying to make it look cosy,” Kaylee says, “and also offer enough space to lie around, relax, or dance, if that is the case.”

Amoroso will remain open as an explorable destination, in the spirit of rooms such as The Lake or Havasu. Visitors will not need to wait for a scheduled event. They will be free to arrive with friends, meet somebody new, find a romantic corner or pursue something more erotic.

Once a month, however, Kaylee plans to give the room a different rhythm by hosting a themed activity or festival, starting with a grand opening on August 22nd.

“In Babylon, each month they had a festival for a specific god,” she says. “I translated that here as well.”

The programme may move between music, romance and more openly lewd celebrations. One month might revolve around bathing; another could transform part of the room for a major party. Furniture and decorations can change with the theme, allowing Amoroso to evolve rather than settle into a single permanent form.

KayleeRose gives this history a playful nod in Amoroso’s study. There are no sheets of paper waiting on the desks.

“Of course, clay tablets,” she says.

The study is one of several spaces that reveal the amount of visual research behind the build. Reproductions of ancient artworks appear throughout Amoroso, while the furniture and arrangement of the rooms attempt to evoke how such interiors might once have felt.

Throughout the complex, cushions and mattresses suggest the legendary decadence associated with Babylon. Behind the public spaces are smaller private rooms where visitors can explore their interests away from the crowd. Each has its own design; some include baths, while others offer more specialised furniture.

“If the public rooms are too much for people, they also have several private rooms,” Kaylee explains.

Amoroso knowingly plays with that fantasy rather than claiming to reconstruct it. Kaylee calls its imagined encounters “fictional orgies”, an acknowledgement that this is Babylon refracted through legend, sensuality and the freedoms of 3DX.

Beyond the private rooms lies the main garden. Roses soften the stone architecture, vegetation spills down the buildings and natural pools give visitors more places to swim or gather. Secluded locations have been arranged for couples who want to withdraw from the wider room and feel, as Kaylee puts it, “more special.”

Above all of it stands the ziggurat.

The temple can be reached by boat, although Kaylee says an intuitive explorer may discover another way. Ladders lead upward, opening new perspectives over the palace and gardens. The higher one climbs, the more majestic the scale of Amoroso becomes.

The interior is currently closed. Kaylee intends to develop it slowly, changing its contents as the room and its festivals evolve. For the moment, the sealed door works as a promise. Amoroso is already an impressive venue, yet its most imposing structure still holds something back.

There is another presence overlooking the ziggurat: the translucent shadow of a woman, silent and otherworldly. She does not come from Babylonian history. She belongs to Kaylee’s own fiction.

“That ghostly figure is actually from my book, the lore that I am writing,” she tells me. “It is a sad story. She died there from love.”

Kaylee is developing a series of erotic and romantic short stories, and Amoroso is intertwined with that work. Its unexplained artefacts and spectral inhabitant are fragments of a larger narrative that may gradually emerge inside the room.

That fusion gives Amoroso its most distinctive quality. It is not merely an ancient-themed party venue, nor is it simply another Stardust playground. Kaylee has combined researched imagery, the popular mythology of Babylon, 3DX’s erotic possibilities and a mythology of her own.

The result is a room that can be experienced on several levels. Someone may come to dance at a festival, relax beside the pool, disappear into a private chamber or explore the architecture in search of clues. Another visitor may be content to sit at a window and watch the whole imagined kingdom unfold below.

Like the ancient city that inspired it, Amoroso exists somewhere between history and legend. KayleeRose has left enough space between the two for visitors to create legends of their own.

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