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The
Mercer lobby at dusk. A great hush envelops the room, as if there has been a
demand that tones are kept classy and collegial, but over the faint clink of
silverware on china, some things carry. “The most important step after this
conversation is to see Richard Serra . . . ” “The political nature of the firm
is such that you will not be able to develop those ideas autonomously . . . ”
“As it is written, this is a man who has never gotten his way in life, and we
must have someone who reflects the vulnerability of that position . . . ”
“Richard Gere!”
In a
corner nook, beneath the flattering white light of a rectangular hanging lamp,
sits André Balazs, sybarite
and businessman, the proprietor of the
Mercer and a
small empire of exceptional hotels, as well as a newly minted condo developer,
or, in his parlance, a “creator” of “residences.” You could call him Soho
royalty, and he would like that: Balazs has lived in the neighborhood since
1984, what some might call the beginning of the end, and he can tell stories of
what it was like to live above the old Dean & DeLuca, just down Prince Street
from where we’re sitting, or how, during a blizzard, he scaled a snowbank with
Calvin Klein to visit Keith McNally in the semi-constructed Pravda, the three of
them underground in the storm’s dead silence.
André
Balazs is a small man and very handsome. This is his real name, though he is not
French, as you might fairly assume. At 48, his face is barely creased with age,
and there is nothing about him that is blemished—the shave is close, hair
freshly cut, expensively understated clothes well pressed. A gray-stone pot of
tea sits in front of him, and I order one as well.
“That’s
good,” he says. “That’s good.”
It’s a
compliment, I suppose, because Balazs is one of the city’s great authorities on
sophisticated living. Creator, though it sounds silly, is perhaps the best
description of what he does. He does not aggressively finance and acquire
properties, and his forte is not managing properties or being a real-estate
investor. He is a performer: Much like a nightclub impresario, his own
investment is secondary to his ability to bring money and architecture together
to create a significant hotel experience, and more than any other hotelier
today, he has proved himself able to keep the cool people when they come.
The
Raleigh in South Beach, the Sunset Strip’s
Chateau Marmont,
Sunset Beach on
Shelter Island, L.A.’s two Standard hotels,
Hotel QT in Times Square—these are
all his. Each provides a socially salubrious experience, a kind of swishy Club
Med for young urban tastemakers. The obvious comparison is Ian Schrager and his
battalion of boutique hotels, but Balazs’s hotels are far more unique and
eclectically designed. He does a little advertising, and the press has been
almost universally kind to him and his properties.
As
careful as a politician in his speech, Balazs is quick to say that his hotels
and new condos, Richard Gluckman’s One Kenmare Square and Jean Nouvel’s
40
Mercer Residences, are “not for everyone, but they appeal in a strong way to a
very select group.” Very clever, Mr. Balazs, for who can resist when the select
group has traditionally included movie stars, like his current girlfriend, Uma
Thurman, or Russell Crowe, he of the telephone toss at a Mercer desk clerk this
summer, or, perhaps, Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng, who stayed in the
Mercer for
months before they purchased their Soho apartment, now on sale for $28 million.
The Murdochs commissioned Paris-based furniture and interior designer Christian
Liaigre, designer of the
Mercer, to design their entire apartment, “soup to
nuts,” says Balazs. This morning, the “House & Home” section of the New York
Times quoted Deng on her vision for her apartment. “We just thought we want
something like that style [of the
Mercer],” she said. “But better.”
“Ah,”
Balazs says uneasily, sipping his tea. “That’s very, very sweet.”
alazs’s
hotels are wonderful, frivolous, artistically free, as true to the spirit of
boutique-hotel godfather Morris Lapidus as good-time icons like the Paramount or
Balthazar or the Maritime, but none of them will necessarily be landmarked
buildings—they are about temporal experience, and some are only as good as the
guests housed within. Today, Balazs wants to compete in a bigger game.
One
Kenmare Square, whose 53 apartments all sold before the interiors went into the
building, was the initial gambit, and not everybody thinks it’s a masterpiece.
“It’s a unique solution to the problem of the site,” says Balazs. The building
has a wave in it like a modern Finnish vase and is set on a sorry excuse for a
“square” on Lafayette Street below Spring. “If there was one thing I’d do
differently, I don’t think the windows, the glass, is light enough—the darkness
did surprise me,” says Balazs. “It gives it a slightly ominous look.”
Creating
a building even better than the
Mercer is Balazs’s current fixation as he enters
the façade-finishing phase of construction on 40 Mercer Street, a fifteen-story
condo building between Broadway and Mercer on Grand, to be completed by next
August. Prices range from $2.3 million for 1,222 square feet to $12.5 million
for a duplex with a private pool. Twenty of the 40 apartments are sold. It is
the first residential project in the U.S. by the neo-modernist Nouvel, known for
wearing black every day of the year except during the month he summers in
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, when he wears only white. It is glass, like everything that
is new at the tippy-top of the market today, all these voyeurs hovering in their
pseudo-case-study apartments up in the downtown sky.
“The
challenge is, how do you build an unabashedly modern building in a historical
neighborhood?” says Balazs. “Do you do something like the Tribeca Grand and try
to pretend the building was built a hundred years ago? Or do you probe deep and
try to find the essence and build something new but appropriate? To me, the
Disney-esque approach of doing a faux building was just repulsive. To me,
it violated the very Soho that I’ve known for 25 years. Soho is a gritty former
mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois
neighborhood in New York. If the reason this district is landmarked is because
at one time it embraced a tremendous modernism of the time, then the most
authentic thing is to approach it anew.”
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It was a
sunny day indeed when Herbert Muschamp wrote his review of the building upon its
approval by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2001, calling the decision
of “breathtaking importance for the future of architecture in New York.” In one
of Muschamp’s greater flights of fancy, he wrote that the building was “made for
Moody’s ‘Mood for Love’ as performed by King Pleasure, on a rainy weekday
afternoon, downtown. . . . Not least, this design is about sex.”
One
rainy day, Balazs looks up at the great concrete skeleton of his building from
in front of the sex-aids dispensary Toys in Babeland. “This is everything I
wished I could have had at the lofts in Soho I’ve lived in, everything I loved
having at the
Mercer, and everything I wished I could have at the
Mercer,” says Balazs. He realizes where he is standing and chuckles.
It
certainly sounds nice to have in-house parking and a concierge and a pool, and
to be able to move the seventeen-by-twenty-foot sheets of glass that are your
windows with an electronic button. There is a shared bathhouse, including a
sauna and steam room—“for birthday parties!” says Balazs, who seems to have made
it a personal mission to bring shvitzing to the elite; he is a patron of the
Tenth Street Baths, his downscale Hotel QT in Times Square has a sauna and steam
room, and the new Standard in Miami is more a spa than a hotel, including a
large hammam. Baden-Baden was the first hotel Balazs visited as a kid. “A
spectacle,” he says. “I remember it was everything.”
The
notion is that at 40 Mercer, with a buyer’s brochure that includes a children’s
book about two Soho dogs who fall in love and move into the building, you can
live as though you are at a fabulous
André Balazs hotel every day. On the
building’s top floor, a view of the spires of downtown spread at his feet, and
romantically enhanced by the rare graffitied water tower, Balazs wades his Prada
shoes through the construction crew’s cigarette butts and Pepsi cans floating in
deep puddles. “I don’t know if I’ll move in here,” he says, a smile spreading
over his face. “I haven’t decided.”
alazs
is in the enviable position of having his celebrity precede him these days. To
have Uma Thurman as a girlfriend could provide mystique to Michael Bloomberg.
There is not a hint of the striver about Balazs, though his voice bears traces
of a Boston accent. The son of educated Hungarian immigrants who left their
country during World War II, resettling in Sweden and then Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Balazs grew up in a Swedish-Danish-designed home. “My parents
always kid that the things I’m into today are the same things they had back
then,” he says. His father taught at Harvard Medical School, and his mother is a
psychologist. Balazs went to prep school and doesn’t have particularly fond
memories of Cambridge. “It’s surprisingly close-minded,” he says. “It’s scared.
There’s a fearfulness there. To me, the most charming quality of New York is its
open-mindedness.” At Cornell University, he studied humanities and wrote short
stories with Harold Brodkey, a mentor and friend, and started a Playbill-type
publication for upstate New York rock concerts. After college, he attended a
joint journalism-and-business master’s program at Columbia University.
“For my
thesis, I checked into the Bowery Mission,” he says. “I lived there for a week,
as though I were homeless. There was one guy who had been an accountant, became
an alcoholic, and his very bourgeois and seemingly secure life changed into
complete abandonment and loss. Despite everything that the shelter could
offer—shelter, food, clothing—all people wanted was a woman, a place of their
own, and a job, in that sequence.”
Balazs
decided against journalism, though he worked briefly for David Garth on Bess
Myerson’s Senate campaign. Then father and son founded Biomatrix, a Ridgefield,
New Jersey–based biotech company, and Balazs was able to secure his nest egg. It
was the mid-eighties, and he was living in a fifth-floor loft in a Greene Street
building otherwise occupied by rag merchants. He went to nightclubs. He met Eric
Goode, who was founding the legendary M.K. “Eric approached me and said, ‘Do you
want to do a nightclub? We need more money,’ ” says Balazs. “There was a big
dichotomy between the life I was leading in New Jersey and everything I was
interested in. I had a desire to merge the work and private life.”
Today,
sitting in a red chair in his jewel of an office in the Puck Building, Balazs is
surrounded by well-thumbed design books and mementos, like a candid photo of
Helmut and June Newton (Balazs was at the hospital when Newton passed away,
after a car accident outside the Chateau Marmont). A faux–Egon Schiele
drawing leans against a wall: Balazs had it commissioned as a lark,
collaborating with a group of artists to produce a show of fake masters at a
gallery in Japan. It was performance art—they estimated the cost of materials to
make the painting, an hourly wage for the artist, and expenses like the cost of
a six-pack of beer, then calculated the difference of a real Schiele. Balazs
calls this spread the “fetish value.”
“It’s
sad, in some ways, what happened to Soho,” says Balazs. “It is still the most
complete and yet most unique neighborhood in the city. It is missing the art
world. That’s one of the sad and inevitable evolutions. But it is an evolution,
and instead of it comes something else.”
Earlier,
in the bustle of Mercer Street, with its new cobblestones and aging bistros,
high-stepping models and sauntering tourists, Sunglass Hut and Yohji Yamamoto,
he says, “I like to think of 40 Mercer as the last artwork in this
neighborhood.”
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