Salon enables productions to book Europe’s heritage sites

Europe has no shortage of extraordinary locations. Museums, galleries, libraries, historic houses, and cultural institutions occupy some of Europe's most distinctive buildings. Finding them, accessing them and securing them for a production is another matter.

For producers, these venues offer something difficult to manufacture in a studio: a genuine sense of place. 

Salon Ventures believes there is an opportunity to make it easier for production companies to discover which spaces are available and navigate the booking process. Developed within EIT Culture & Creativity and co-funded by the European Union, the Netherlands-based venture has created a curated marketplace to open cultural and heritage venues to professional events, productions, and brand experiences.

Now live in the Netherlands, Salon is opening the platform more directly to the production and media sector, with photo shoots, film shoots, and content activations already among its most requested use cases.

According to Salon, enquiries are already coming from creative agencies looking for film and photo-shoot locations, as well as music labels seeking distinctive venues for events around Amsterdam Dance Event.

The premise is simple: productions continually need distinctive locations, while cultural institutions have remarkable spaces that may be available outside normal visitor or programming hours. What has been missing is an efficient way to connect the two.

Salon enables producers and organisers to discover venues, communicate directly with them, and submit booking requests. Cultural institutions set their own pricing and conditions and retain control over which bookings they accept. Contracts and payments are handled through the platform.

For producers, Salon offers a curated pool of cultural venues already open to considering professional bookings, while institutions retain control over who uses their spaces and for what purpose.

“The demand exists, the supply exists, and no infrastructure connects them,” says Tamas Egei, Managing Director of Salon Ventures. “What held venues back was not reluctance but risk. Once we solved trust, doors opened.”

Salon addresses that through screened organisers, contracts, secure payments, and individual approval of each booking. The opportunity extends beyond shoots to screenings, programme launches, live formats, and brand experiences, while giving cultural institutions an additional source of income from spaces they already operate. 

From locations to production-ready spaces

A distinctive venue, however, is not necessarily a production-ready one.

Historic and cultural buildings may lack the AV, connectivity, capture, streaming, audio, lighting, and other infrastructure available in purpose-built production and event environments.

Salon therefore has a services layer on its roadmap, potentially connecting bookings with AV, production, transport, catering, and other specialist suppliers.

According to EIT Culture & Creativity, that creates an interesting longer-term proposition for the IBC community. If more cultural venues become accessible for productions and media events, there is also a requirement to equip those spaces with the technology and services needed to use them professionally.

Salon is initially concentrating on building its venue network and demonstrating demand in the Netherlands, before planned expansion into other European markets.

The bigger opportunity is the network itself. Europe already has an extraordinary supply of locations with architecture, history, and identity that cannot easily be replicated elsewhere.

The challenge is making them easier for the production community to find and use.

If that can be achieved, some of Europe's most interesting future production locations may turn out to be places that have been there all along.

Salon Ventures will be at IBC2026 on the EIT Culture & Creativity stand, 14.A47, where visitors can explore the platform and discuss its plans for the production and media market.

Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf recently revealed that it will present an immersive digital reconstruction of a little-known site associated with Auschwitz at IBC2026, as part of EIT Culture & Creativity's first major presence at the show. Discover more here.