Kink’s Armory Club Will Stay Put Amid Sale

The Armory Club, a bar and lounge lovechild of the city’s departing BDSM film studio Kink.com, vows to stay put at 1799 Mission Street and keep the drinks and kinky action coming. “While production [at Kink] has moved on, and the company has taken new offices, we’re glad to be able to keep that spirit alive in San Francisco,” manager Jason Humberstone tells Eater SF.

Opened in 2012 during the heyday of Kink’s tenure at the SF Armory, a building across the street that it sold early this year, the Armory Club has served as a de facto Kink studio clubhouse, bearing its devilish K insignia and hosting studio employees and performers alongside neighborhood locals. It’s still owned by Kink’s founder and CEO Peter Acworth, but is unaffected by the Armory’s sale.

While Kink sells its naughty furnishings at an estate sale this weekend — auctioning off items like an examination table and a human hamster wheel — The Armory club is busy adding naughty events to its calendar, include polyamory workshops, bondage classes, and demonstrations dedicated to fetish accoutrements hosted by local sex educators.

“It’s a bit more modest, of course, than what you might have seen in the Armory,” Humberstone says, “but in keeping with our heritage just the same.”

In reality, “the Kink-era Armory was as much as fantasy as a real place,” Humberstone says. The studio’s louche presence behind the thick walls of its military castle offered vague titillation rather than specific benefits to most neighbors.

”The Armory Club has benefited from being part of the Kink family, but our success never rested on that, ”Humberstone adds. “Over the years, we built up a dedicated clientele by providing well-made, creative cocktails in a unique and liberated setting. There wasn’t anything like it when we opened, and there’s still nothing like it.”