Guru

Sean MacPherson is one of an elite group of nightlife creatives who brings instant credibility to any project he's working on. Along with Ian Schrager, André Balazs and Jason Pomeranc, MacPherson (with his frequent business partner Eric Goode) has been defining and refining the concept of the club-hotel that has come to dominate the nightlife scene. With each new undertaking -- from his restaurants in Los Angeles to his successes in New York with the Park, the Maritime, the Bowery Hotel and now the Jane -- MacPherson's brand of cool California urbanism continues to resonate.

MacPherson was born in New Zealand and grew up "all over the place," including in California, Mexico and Sun Valley, Idaho. A Cali skater kid in the '70s, a hip-hop fan in the '80s, but always "attracted to the vitality of social life," he studied philosophy and business.

As tastemaker-in-chief of all his projects, he has his nose in every corner of the building, from the overall design to the choice of doorknobs. (The financing usually comes from savvy investors who prefer to let the creative take the lead.) His sense of space, design, proportion and comfort work perfectly, yet don't call attention to themselves -- like MacPherson himself. While the word hotelier is frequently bandied about to describe his role, MacPherson's hands-on design credentials put him in the camp of the indiepreneur, one who oversees both art and commerce.

David Hershkovits: You recently attained pop culture status by playing yourself -- or at least a facsimile of yourself -- on Gossip Girl in a scene that was shot in a power office with a power view of Manhattan. Now that you've reached the pinnacle of your career, where do you go from here?

Sean MacPherson: Oh yeah, exactly. I call it maybe the nadir of my existence, certainly my New York existence. I once read this Gore Vidal quote, "Never miss a chance to have sex or be on television." So I decided to take Gore's advice on this particular one.

Dh: According to the< show, everyone's coming at you pitching their vision of the future. How true to life is that?

SM: Probably a little less so since the meltdown. To be honest, I generally like it. People bring things all the time, so I'm always interested.

DH: Are the projects you do in L.A. different from those you do in New York?

SM: I've been wanting to do a hotel in L.A. for a long time, and I've been not quite able to find the right location. I have Swingers in Hollywood and Santa Monica, El Carmen, Good Luck Bar, Jones, Bar Lubitsch. We opened a new place called The Roger Room, and we're about to open a new, yet untitled, Italian restaurant.

DH: How do you describe what you do?

SM: I like this idea where the line between work and pleasure is very, very blurry -- so that I'm never working but never not working. It's part of the same continuum. And I think that I've been lucky enough that everything I do is in some form a reflection or an expression of myself. And what I'm most passionate about is the design-build part and the concept part. I started out in the '80s around the same time as Milky Way and Pay Day were going on in New York City. I was doing a hip-hop club in L.A. called Funky Reggae when I was 23 years old. Then I did a bar, then a restaurant and a hotel, and the point is that what I've done has evolved with my age. I would like to continue to build places that speak to me, but I don't necessarily view it as something that has to be a restaurant or a hotel or a nightclub.

DH: Like a TV show, like a magazine, like a website? Is it media?

SM: All of that stuff is interesting to me. I sold a TV show to NBC, and they bought it and ended up not making it. I've worked on some movie projects and I've sort of dabbled in a lot of other things very much as sort of a dilettante.

DH: Are you building a brand or just a lot of different entities?

SM: I'm not specifically building a brand. If I were focused on making a billion dollars or something, that's something I might be working towards. I've had opportunities to do that but it doesn't excite me that much.

DH: What prompted you to move to New York? Was it just for a change of scenery or was it the opportunities?

SM: I didn't have a specific reason to be in New York. It seems that you need to be working on something to be in New York. It's the city of ambition. I sort of reached the point where I had done a number of places in L.A., and I wanted to do something else. I was actually going to move to New York to write a screenplay, but I knew in my heart that I would allow myself to get sucked back to L.A. if I was trying to live here and write. I was looking for some excuse, and Eric [Goode] had the opportunity to do the Park and was looking for someone to do it with. We'd already known each other but we met up, discussed it, did it and just got caught in a whirlwind of the boom years. One thing led to another, led to another. New York also has weight, a framework of history. Whereas L.A., to me, has the most incredible intellectual elbow room. There's no grid one has to operate on, and in that way, there's really an opportunity to dream.

DH: You referred to the economy, "the boom years" and the "meltdown." How has that affected your thinking about what you might be doing in the future or about things that you already had in the works?

SM: We opened the Jane Hotel with rooms for under $100 a night as the economy melted down. So it looks like we anticipated the economy, but it just turned out that it was a unique building that I lived next door to and fell in love with. When I was 20 years old, that's the place where I wish I could have stayed. In terms of the economy, it's nice to have all the fluff of the boom years. They were fun. But on the other hand, I like the idea that people have to roll up their sleeves and be a little more inventive and create real value. I don't mean value as in offering cheap products, but offering products that are more interesting. You can't just slap a designer label on things. I think that's ultimately a good thing -- and certainly a good thing for this country and the role we play in the world -- because we were just getting fat and lazy.

DH: One of the recent developments in the nightlife scene is the arrival of the club-hotel.

SM: There's this tremendous history of hotels being a social nexus, dating back probably to the first hotel. I think Ian Schrager was instrumental in drawing attention to that: that hotels have a history of playing that role. I think [club-hotels] have become more and more popular because there is a romance and a civility to hotels. There's an optimiSM for the future in a hotel, and that maybe whatever it is that you long for could in fact happen at a hotel.

DH: That's true. I don't really hear about big fights breaking out in club-hotels. I'm sure it happens once in a while, but it's definitely not the norm.

SM: There's a civility, a formality, and a history. And there's also -- not always, but sort of -- a legitimacy in being in a hotel as opposed to a disposable bar. There's a safety. For example, when the blackout occurred in 2002, we were still working on the Maritime, but all my friends came over, and we had a generator and it genuinely felt safe. If you think about war-time places that all the journalists used to gather around -- whether it be Graham Greene types or whatever -- they always gathered around the big hotel and felt safe and comforted there.

DH: The Jane Hotel. I know you're having all this neighborhood opposition about the noise. The question becomes, is it worth it? You obviously didn't know that was going to happen, but if you did know, would it have changed your mind about doing it?

SM: Human beings resist change, so -- whether it be at the Jane Hotel, or this hotel or that hotel, the Bowery, the Waverly -- anytime that a new place opens and the city changes, people tend to resist it. And certain battles turn out to be bigger battles than other battles, and they're really the least pleasant part of the experience and also the least rational part of the experience. But it does come with the territory, and if you want to do something, you always encounter different brands of resistance. We work very hard to be good neighbors, and in the long run, with all of our places, I think we have very good relationships with our neighbors. But in the short run, there's always this kind of resistance. Another thing about New York is that basically, every decade, it's an entirely different city. So the notion that anyone believes that the New York that they are familiar with is the one that's meant to last forever is really not founded.

DH: Do you think the Internet has turned the heat up in terms of people protesting the Jane?

SM: I don't know. I love the Internet and all those mass media tools in the end, so I won't speak poorly of them, but we are at a particular moment that's crazy at the Jane. If you notice, I haven't been quoted anywhere. There's so much misinformation. I'm sort of sitting on my hands, waiting for the press, for people to see what the real story is. There are complaints, but the question is -- how many are founded?

DH: Your direction has been towards working on preexisting structures. Are you interested in the starchitect approach?

SM: Places like the Jane, the Waverly, the Maritime, all had this architectural history that we had to honor. And so I would say that a lot of the projects we've done have felt nostalgic, certainly. And I'd like to break out of that a bit. New York didn't have these brand-name architects building residential buildings until the Richard Meier buildings on the West Side Highway. In Los Angeles, because we have this history of residential architecture, with pretty good stuff, with Neutra and Gehry and Lautner, we're sort of less taken with brand name and more taken with the architecture. And here people got sucked up into this brand-name stuff, and not all of these architects delivered great buildings. Just putting a label on it is the last thing I'm interested in. Any big designer can make great clothing or items, but a lot of what's sold is just things with their brand on them. That's not that interesting. It's like separating the fire from the firefly. "I've never studied design formally," he says over tea at Gemma, the Italian restaurant at the Bowery Hotel. "I did study art, and more than that, I was always attracted to the idea of having an alternate universe that was not part of the universe. That's sort of what I'm always seeking out, is this ideal world. All of that comes out of a deep dissatisfaction with reality, and the idea that, whether it be in nightlife or hotels or restaurants, there's a fantasy of your ideal existence that can break through in a fleeting moment."