Guru: Andre Balazs
Checking in with hotel king Andre Balazs.
By David Hershkovits
Photographed by Douglas Friedman
Andre Balazs is one of the few hoteliers who can be credited with changing the way we think about nightlife -- transforming hotels from stodgy lodgings to glamorous destinations where the champagne flows, the kitchen hums and the cash registers are kept busy. His leading-man good looks, social connections, cultural curations and 25 years of experience have made brand "Balazs" into the gold standard at the nexus of fashion, design and nightlife.
For the moment, The Standard on the High Line stands as the most sparkling jewel in his crown. Since ac- quiring his first hotel in 1990 (a rundown Hollywood property famous for its seedy celebrity shenanigans), he has burnished his image, not only through his transformation of the Chateau Marmont into the preferred domicile of everyone from Helmut Newton to Lindsay Lohan, but also as a gossip-worthy personality who has made headlines with his marriage to Katie Ford, his post-divorce entangle-ment with Uma Thurman and a recent who-knows-what with Courtney Love.
Born and raised in Boston, Balazs is a rarity among hoteliers with his joint masters degree in journalism and business from Columbia University. After college, he worked on a senate campaign and later founded a biotech company with his father before he began investing in clubs and restaurants in the late '80s, which proved to be just the right training for his eventual move to a hotel industry that was morphing into a hospitality-cum-entertainment hub. For his second act, he performed a similar transformation on the Raleigh in Miami (which he sold in 2009). Today there are four Standards (two in L.A., one each in New York and Miami), The Mercer, Sunset Beach on Shelter Island and high-end residences like 40 Mercer, William Beaver House and One Kenmare Square. London is next, with Paris and Asia in the offing. Having recently launched two mega-popular nightlife haunts at the Standard New York--Le Bain over the summer and the Boom Boom Room last year -- Balazs is now in the enviable position of having to worry about crowd control. Over the sum- mer there were reports that the Boom Boom Room would turn into a membership only club, but Balazs is quick to put those rumors aside, saying the club will remain open to the public.
DAVID HERSHKOVITS: When we first met back in the '80s, you had begun investing in clubs and restaurants. What initially attracted you to this world?
ANDRE BALAZS: I'm an entrepreneur; I've always liked starting businesses and creating something from nothing. I'd also had a passion when I was younger for sculpture. I always liked three- dimensionality. All of those elements somehow came together when I first started investing in what I like to think of as real estate-based entertainment businesses.
DH: Back then a hotel was a quiet lobby where people didn't have fun.
AB: I think good hotels have always had a social element to them. My
personal hero has always been Cesar Ritz. He was really the first person who created an environment, in Paris and then London, where the upper classes would consider entertaining outside their homes and in a public venue. Then it was continued here in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, which did the same thing, socially speaking. Ritz partnered with Escoffier the chef. It was the first time in an urban fabric that people would go outside their homes and entertain.
DH: Did reading about Ritz give you the idea to open a hotel?
AB: Well, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager sort of picked up on that theme and brought a much more nightlife version of it to Morgans. Cleverly, Steve dubbed them
"boutique hotels." But frankly, a boutique hotel is nothing but what a great, classic hotel has always been.
DH: We grew up in the age of chain hotels.
AB: In America, after the Second World War, the hotel business got hijacked by these big corporate entities--the Hyatts, the Hiltons, the Marriotts -- all of which were operating under the premise that the best surprise is no surprise. So if you went to a hotel in Boston, it was the same as the hotel you went to in Berlin. That was seen as a positive thing. The American hotel companies took it from a hospitality business to a lodging business, just building rooms that all looked the same. I'm only interested in the hospitality business; I have no interest in lodging. Business became homogenous, and that affected everything from the Second World War until probably ten years ago, when The Mercer opened. It was that and the Morgans and the Royalton.
DH: Your movement into hotels coincided with the economic boom. More people had access to a lifestyle that had been very exclusive before that, which helped you grow your business. Do you feel that's a requirement or a coincidence?
AB: I think what's happened is that people have gotten much, much more sophisticated. One of the reasons I started The Standard roughly 10 or 12 years ago was that I felt, up until that time, all the boutique hotels -- or hotels that have a lot of what I call "content," meaning someone thought through everything--seemed to be at the high end of the spectrum. By definition, they were somewhat limited to older people, people who were more established. Ironically, the people that are most in tune with culture and what's going on in art, music and fashion are young people. So I think what's happened in our business is that people just expect more, as they should. In every aspect. It's true in restaurants, it's true in art, it's true in hotels and it's true in fashion. We're certainly not in the business of just letting rooms. We're kind of in the business of providing a center for cultural exchange.
DH: You chose to start your first hotel in L.A. The Chateau Marmont then wasn't like the Chateau of today.
AB: No, it was a completely different thing. I fell in love with it. I was out there because we were working on a nightclub at the time. I learned a lot from that. What happened is that it got so much publicity and hype before it even opened that we failed to get our liquor license. There was such an uproar over it. I lived and learned. It was 25 years ago. It was a fascinating building that was about to be torn down. Bob Woodward had just written that book, Wired, about John Belushi. In the book, he famously described the Chateau as a dump. The then-owners of the Chateau actually had the temerity to sue Woodward for libel. Of course, they lost the case because I think it was rather accurate.
DH: It took you a long time to bring that up to where it is today.
AB: With the Chateau, it's always a work in progress. But I find with hotels in general, they have played a very interesting role in society. They have always been the introduction point for new ways of living. For example, when indoor plumbing was introduced, it was introduced in hotels first. When air conditioning was brought in, it was brought into hotels. When we built The Mercer, we were very much inspired by its location--the downtown New York loft community. So the idea of putting in big open bathrooms, like I had in all my lofts, was just a function of living in a warehouse space. How do people use a bedroom versus the way they use a lobby? What do they expect out of the front desk? These are all things that keep shifting. You see residues. You go up to the St. Regis, you see livery guys with white gloves, and the fact is, very few people today know how " to react to that. You can't be a Steve Jobs and feel comfortable with guys in white gloves opening the door for you. Those guys are from a time when people traveled with 15 pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage. Now only Karl Lagerfeld travels that way.
DH: Do you ever go to other hotels and just check in?
AB: All the time. People always ask me what my favorite hotel in the world is. There's no one place. It's always elements of places that I like. It could be the fact that I kind of like having to go up two or three steps to go into the lobby. It's a quirky thing and I bring it up because I was just in Claridge's in London and I love that hotel. It just reminds me that there's a psychology to stepping up. It's interesting.
DH: Yeah, if you look at monuments like the Lincoln Memorial, where people have to go up to reach it.
AB: Look at altars. You know, there's a progression. I.M. Pei said every step you go up, you hear the cash register go ca-ching, ca-ching.
DH: How does it feel to see competition moving into your turf, sometimes from people you have mentored, like Alex Calderwood and the Ace Hotel?
AB: I think it's great. I don't have the attitude that a lot of people who come out of nightlife have. There's kind of a psychology in nightlife, that regardless of the fact that 10,000 or 20,000 people go out on any single night in New York, if you don't have the place where 100 of these particular people show up, you're finished. I don't view this business that way.
There's plenty of room. All of these businesses are thriving compared to 99 percent of the industry because they work together. Everybody you mention plus another 20 could be doing it exactly right, and there'd still be tons of business for everybody. And there'd still be 99 percent of the industry that would be clueless.
DH: Haven't celebrities come to play a bigger role in the business of nightlife?
AB: I think that attracting those people and keeping them happy has become an obsession of our culture. These days I think you see LVMH just as obsessed in attracting celebrity clientele as you see in a nightclub. I think that our whole culture has gone crazy that way. It used to be that you saw that more focused in clubs; now every clothing company in the world is obsessed by it. I don't know if that's changed, really. Even when Andy Warhol was a local -- not a national or media -- celebrity, everyone was interested in having him at a venue. It's always been important in any nightlife venue, big or small, to have what it considers its ideal clientele.
DH: The Standard here in New York is the hotel you built from scratch.
AB: I've started twice to build hotels from scratch. The original Standard was going to be the building that's at 1 Kenmare Square and then 9/11 happened. We had all the permits for that and for another building at 40 Mercer, the Jean Nouvel building -- one was supposed to be a Standard, the other a super-luxury hotel. When 9/11 happened the pessimism of financial institutions about Lower Manhattan was so extreme--people thought that tourism would completely die -- all construction financing evaporated for hotels. So we converted them into residential projects. The New York Standard is the third building we designed as a hotel but the first that we completed.
DH: With amazing results. Sometimes it's better to wait.
AB: You learn all the time. I'm particularly proud of that building because it's an extraordinary example of what happens when the end-user of a building actually designs the building as well. Because of the way the business works, there are developers who basically finish a building and turn it over to someone who's going to operate it or sell it off. Take Condé Nast, for example. The building was developed by a different group of people and Condé Nast was brought in as a tenant at the end, but the building never reflected its goals and objectives. Unlike the Seagram building, which was built by a family. There are subtle little things. The logo type used for the elevator buttons are the same as the logo type for the corporation. It's very hard to think of a newly built hotel where the operator of the hotel built the building.
DH: With the arrival of the Standard and the High Line, the Meatpacking District has officially undergone a complete transformation from seedy to luxe.
AB: I was an early member of Friends of the High Line because I knew a lot of architects and urbanists who thought it was a cool idea, but frankly I thought it was a pipe dream that the High Line would become a park. When I bought the land and started planning the hotel, the High Line was still owned by a railroad company. There were no city guidelines on how to deal with it. Things like how do you build over it, how close do you come to it, how do you incorporate the building's structure into it -- these things had to all be informally worked out with the mayor's office and the building department because they had no legal jurisdiction over the High Line at that point. The hotel, neighborhood, the High Line all kind of grew together in a very organic way. It was very fortuitous and remarkable how it came together.
DH: Are you looking to expand into more cities?
AB: We're not doing anything in any sort of detail. We'd like to be in London and we've begun work on one project there, which is a very small conversion of a late 19th-Century firehouse in Marylebone. We're converting it into a small hotel and restaurant -- under 40 rooms. We'd love to do a Standard in London but it's in the early stages. Nothing is confirmed.
DH: You sold the Raleigh in Miami. Has the Miami moment passed?
AB: There's a tremendous downward pressure on room rates down there. At the last Art Basel, the Fontainebleau was literally giving away rooms. And that was at the time when every property looks to get their highest rate. And that hasn't stopped. It's still like that. It's a function of Miami's perennial boom-and-bust cycle. It just doesn't change.
DH: What other cities would you consider?
AB: I think we're really focused on overseas. We'd like to be where people we'd like to know want to be.
DH: So do you have any temptations to roll it out on a bigger platform? Like how Ian Schrager hooked up with the Marriott?
AB: I think if you do it right -- maintaining the culture, integrity and spirit -- one can do a lot, especially in other cities as well.
DH: So is that something you're considering?
AB: Yeah, we're looking at it.
DH: What about TV? Any reality shows in the works?
AB: Alek Keshishian and I are working on a scripted show loosely based on hotel life in general. He's writing it and co- producing it. It's in its early stage. It's not a reality show. It's a serious endeavor, but not a very time consuming thing.
DH: Who will play you?
AB: Someday we'll get to that -- don't know.
DH: George Clooney?
AB: Thank you for the compliment.
For the moment, The Standard on the High Line stands as the most sparkling jewel in his crown. Since ac- quiring his first hotel in 1990 (a rundown Hollywood property famous for its seedy celebrity shenanigans), he has burnished his image, not only through his transformation of the Chateau Marmont into the preferred domicile of everyone from Helmut Newton to Lindsay Lohan, but also as a gossip-worthy personality who has made headlines with his marriage to Katie Ford, his post-divorce entangle-ment with Uma Thurman and a recent who-knows-what with Courtney Love.
Born and raised in Boston, Balazs is a rarity among hoteliers with his joint masters degree in journalism and business from Columbia University. After college, he worked on a senate campaign and later founded a biotech company with his father before he began investing in clubs and restaurants in the late '80s, which proved to be just the right training for his eventual move to a hotel industry that was morphing into a hospitality-cum-entertainment hub. For his second act, he performed a similar transformation on the Raleigh in Miami (which he sold in 2009). Today there are four Standards (two in L.A., one each in New York and Miami), The Mercer, Sunset Beach on Shelter Island and high-end residences like 40 Mercer, William Beaver House and One Kenmare Square. London is next, with Paris and Asia in the offing. Having recently launched two mega-popular nightlife haunts at the Standard New York--Le Bain over the summer and the Boom Boom Room last year -- Balazs is now in the enviable position of having to worry about crowd control. Over the sum- mer there were reports that the Boom Boom Room would turn into a membership only club, but Balazs is quick to put those rumors aside, saying the club will remain open to the public.
DAVID HERSHKOVITS: When we first met back in the '80s, you had begun investing in clubs and restaurants. What initially attracted you to this world?
ANDRE BALAZS: I'm an entrepreneur; I've always liked starting businesses and creating something from nothing. I'd also had a passion when I was younger for sculpture. I always liked three- dimensionality. All of those elements somehow came together when I first started investing in what I like to think of as real estate-based entertainment businesses.
DH: Back then a hotel was a quiet lobby where people didn't have fun.
AB: I think good hotels have always had a social element to them. My
personal hero has always been Cesar Ritz. He was really the first person who created an environment, in Paris and then London, where the upper classes would consider entertaining outside their homes and in a public venue. Then it was continued here in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, which did the same thing, socially speaking. Ritz partnered with Escoffier the chef. It was the first time in an urban fabric that people would go outside their homes and entertain.
DH: Did reading about Ritz give you the idea to open a hotel?
AB: Well, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager sort of picked up on that theme and brought a much more nightlife version of it to Morgans. Cleverly, Steve dubbed them
"boutique hotels." But frankly, a boutique hotel is nothing but what a great, classic hotel has always been.
DH: We grew up in the age of chain hotels.
AB: In America, after the Second World War, the hotel business got hijacked by these big corporate entities--the Hyatts, the Hiltons, the Marriotts -- all of which were operating under the premise that the best surprise is no surprise. So if you went to a hotel in Boston, it was the same as the hotel you went to in Berlin. That was seen as a positive thing. The American hotel companies took it from a hospitality business to a lodging business, just building rooms that all looked the same. I'm only interested in the hospitality business; I have no interest in lodging. Business became homogenous, and that affected everything from the Second World War until probably ten years ago, when The Mercer opened. It was that and the Morgans and the Royalton.
DH: Your movement into hotels coincided with the economic boom. More people had access to a lifestyle that had been very exclusive before that, which helped you grow your business. Do you feel that's a requirement or a coincidence?
AB: I think what's happened is that people have gotten much, much more sophisticated. One of the reasons I started The Standard roughly 10 or 12 years ago was that I felt, up until that time, all the boutique hotels -- or hotels that have a lot of what I call "content," meaning someone thought through everything--seemed to be at the high end of the spectrum. By definition, they were somewhat limited to older people, people who were more established. Ironically, the people that are most in tune with culture and what's going on in art, music and fashion are young people. So I think what's happened in our business is that people just expect more, as they should. In every aspect. It's true in restaurants, it's true in art, it's true in hotels and it's true in fashion. We're certainly not in the business of just letting rooms. We're kind of in the business of providing a center for cultural exchange.
DH: You chose to start your first hotel in L.A. The Chateau Marmont then wasn't like the Chateau of today.
AB: No, it was a completely different thing. I fell in love with it. I was out there because we were working on a nightclub at the time. I learned a lot from that. What happened is that it got so much publicity and hype before it even opened that we failed to get our liquor license. There was such an uproar over it. I lived and learned. It was 25 years ago. It was a fascinating building that was about to be torn down. Bob Woodward had just written that book, Wired, about John Belushi. In the book, he famously described the Chateau as a dump. The then-owners of the Chateau actually had the temerity to sue Woodward for libel. Of course, they lost the case because I think it was rather accurate.
DH: It took you a long time to bring that up to where it is today.
AB: With the Chateau, it's always a work in progress. But I find with hotels in general, they have played a very interesting role in society. They have always been the introduction point for new ways of living. For example, when indoor plumbing was introduced, it was introduced in hotels first. When air conditioning was brought in, it was brought into hotels. When we built The Mercer, we were very much inspired by its location--the downtown New York loft community. So the idea of putting in big open bathrooms, like I had in all my lofts, was just a function of living in a warehouse space. How do people use a bedroom versus the way they use a lobby? What do they expect out of the front desk? These are all things that keep shifting. You see residues. You go up to the St. Regis, you see livery guys with white gloves, and the fact is, very few people today know how " to react to that. You can't be a Steve Jobs and feel comfortable with guys in white gloves opening the door for you. Those guys are from a time when people traveled with 15 pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage. Now only Karl Lagerfeld travels that way.
DH: Do you ever go to other hotels and just check in?
AB: All the time. People always ask me what my favorite hotel in the world is. There's no one place. It's always elements of places that I like. It could be the fact that I kind of like having to go up two or three steps to go into the lobby. It's a quirky thing and I bring it up because I was just in Claridge's in London and I love that hotel. It just reminds me that there's a psychology to stepping up. It's interesting.
DH: Yeah, if you look at monuments like the Lincoln Memorial, where people have to go up to reach it.
AB: Look at altars. You know, there's a progression. I.M. Pei said every step you go up, you hear the cash register go ca-ching, ca-ching.
DH: How does it feel to see competition moving into your turf, sometimes from people you have mentored, like Alex Calderwood and the Ace Hotel?
AB: I think it's great. I don't have the attitude that a lot of people who come out of nightlife have. There's kind of a psychology in nightlife, that regardless of the fact that 10,000 or 20,000 people go out on any single night in New York, if you don't have the place where 100 of these particular people show up, you're finished. I don't view this business that way.
There's plenty of room. All of these businesses are thriving compared to 99 percent of the industry because they work together. Everybody you mention plus another 20 could be doing it exactly right, and there'd still be tons of business for everybody. And there'd still be 99 percent of the industry that would be clueless.
DH: Haven't celebrities come to play a bigger role in the business of nightlife?
AB: I think that attracting those people and keeping them happy has become an obsession of our culture. These days I think you see LVMH just as obsessed in attracting celebrity clientele as you see in a nightclub. I think that our whole culture has gone crazy that way. It used to be that you saw that more focused in clubs; now every clothing company in the world is obsessed by it. I don't know if that's changed, really. Even when Andy Warhol was a local -- not a national or media -- celebrity, everyone was interested in having him at a venue. It's always been important in any nightlife venue, big or small, to have what it considers its ideal clientele.
DH: The Standard here in New York is the hotel you built from scratch.
AB: I've started twice to build hotels from scratch. The original Standard was going to be the building that's at 1 Kenmare Square and then 9/11 happened. We had all the permits for that and for another building at 40 Mercer, the Jean Nouvel building -- one was supposed to be a Standard, the other a super-luxury hotel. When 9/11 happened the pessimism of financial institutions about Lower Manhattan was so extreme--people thought that tourism would completely die -- all construction financing evaporated for hotels. So we converted them into residential projects. The New York Standard is the third building we designed as a hotel but the first that we completed.
DH: With amazing results. Sometimes it's better to wait.
AB: You learn all the time. I'm particularly proud of that building because it's an extraordinary example of what happens when the end-user of a building actually designs the building as well. Because of the way the business works, there are developers who basically finish a building and turn it over to someone who's going to operate it or sell it off. Take Condé Nast, for example. The building was developed by a different group of people and Condé Nast was brought in as a tenant at the end, but the building never reflected its goals and objectives. Unlike the Seagram building, which was built by a family. There are subtle little things. The logo type used for the elevator buttons are the same as the logo type for the corporation. It's very hard to think of a newly built hotel where the operator of the hotel built the building.
DH: With the arrival of the Standard and the High Line, the Meatpacking District has officially undergone a complete transformation from seedy to luxe.
AB: I was an early member of Friends of the High Line because I knew a lot of architects and urbanists who thought it was a cool idea, but frankly I thought it was a pipe dream that the High Line would become a park. When I bought the land and started planning the hotel, the High Line was still owned by a railroad company. There were no city guidelines on how to deal with it. Things like how do you build over it, how close do you come to it, how do you incorporate the building's structure into it -- these things had to all be informally worked out with the mayor's office and the building department because they had no legal jurisdiction over the High Line at that point. The hotel, neighborhood, the High Line all kind of grew together in a very organic way. It was very fortuitous and remarkable how it came together.
DH: Are you looking to expand into more cities?
AB: We're not doing anything in any sort of detail. We'd like to be in London and we've begun work on one project there, which is a very small conversion of a late 19th-Century firehouse in Marylebone. We're converting it into a small hotel and restaurant -- under 40 rooms. We'd love to do a Standard in London but it's in the early stages. Nothing is confirmed.
DH: You sold the Raleigh in Miami. Has the Miami moment passed?
AB: There's a tremendous downward pressure on room rates down there. At the last Art Basel, the Fontainebleau was literally giving away rooms. And that was at the time when every property looks to get their highest rate. And that hasn't stopped. It's still like that. It's a function of Miami's perennial boom-and-bust cycle. It just doesn't change.
DH: What other cities would you consider?
AB: I think we're really focused on overseas. We'd like to be where people we'd like to know want to be.
DH: So do you have any temptations to roll it out on a bigger platform? Like how Ian Schrager hooked up with the Marriott?
AB: I think if you do it right -- maintaining the culture, integrity and spirit -- one can do a lot, especially in other cities as well.
DH: So is that something you're considering?
AB: Yeah, we're looking at it.
DH: What about TV? Any reality shows in the works?
AB: Alek Keshishian and I are working on a scripted show loosely based on hotel life in general. He's writing it and co- producing it. It's in its early stage. It's not a reality show. It's a serious endeavor, but not a very time consuming thing.
DH: Who will play you?
AB: Someday we'll get to that -- don't know.
DH: George Clooney?
AB: Thank you for the compliment.
Your Comment