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moon looks fuller
somehow when it shines on Miami. At least it seemed so on a recent visit to the
Raleigh Hotel in South Beach. Gauzy
blue moonlight, as if ordered up on cue, flooded the pool, the palm fronds and
the patio dining area where the Raleigh's owner,
André Balazs, held forth in
the best corner banquette, with only a lazy fan stirring the warm off-season
air.
A waiter dressed in the
old-school livery of a crisp white jacket delivered a pair of tall, pale
Camparis that Mr. Balazs quietly but firmly rejected: "They should be two-thirds
red."
"Somebody served André
Balazs watered-down drinks?" a former business associate said incredulously when
told of the incident, a seeming faux pas in the presence of the man who himself
is emerging as one of the most influential forces in the hotel business.
Since 1990, when he
rejuvenated the fabled but louche
Chateau Marmont, where Barrymore drank and Belushi overdosed, Mr. Balazs has
gone on to turn a vacant warehouse in SoHo into the
Mercer, home base for the
intellectually chic, and launched a midpriced chain, the
Standard (two in Los
Angeles; many more on the way) for penny-wise sophisticates kicky enough to
appreciate such details as a performance artist enclosed in a display case
behind the check-in desk. His hotels are considered a safe harbor for
celebrities and other undercover scene seekers.
Last winter, he raised
the bar, literally, when he took over the Raleigh, a cosmopolitan South Beach
relic, adding six feet of sand to the garden to give guests gathered at the
famous Esther-Williams-dived-here pool better ocean views.
"Like César Ritz and the
other great hoteliers, Balazs understands that hotels are great public living
rooms where the combustion of celebrity, drinking, the sexiness of seeing and
being seen can be very theatrical," said Donald Albrecht, the author of "New
Hotels for Global Nomads," a book based on a 2002 exhibition at the
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. "Basically, he's a tastemaker
building a nexus out of his own life. In a world with a million things coming at
you and especially in the United States where there's no aristocratic class, the
tastemaker sitting at your side telling you 'Yes, do that. No, not that way,'
can be a very powerful person."
The Balazs formula for
success combines the demure discretion of an old European grande dame with
insouciant playboy flippancy, a description that suits as well the 47-year-old
Mr. Balazs, who wore what looked to be Prada's best orthodontic line, a white
short-sleeved shirt, beige slacks and sock-free loafers.
Formerly married to
Katie Ford of the Ford Modeling Agency, and now linked to Uma Thurman, Mr.
Balazs is fast attaining the name recognition of that other scene-making
hotelier, Ian Schrager, the man who brought almost impossible levels of chic to
boutique hotels in the 90's. With the help of the French designer Philippe
Starck, Mr. Schrager made hotels like the Royalton in New York and the Delano in
Miami as hot as catwalks. Both Mr. Schrager and Mr. Balazs rule over hospitality
empires with cachet that depends more on style and attitude than on the
predictable functionality of more established brands, like Marriott, Hilton or
Hyatt. "Balazs is in the forefront when it comes to creativity and attention to
detail in design," said Michael Adams, the editor in chief of Hospitality Design
magazine. "Whatever he does is kind of revolutionary. He's terrific at not
repeating himself."
This winter, two more
Balazs hotels are scheduled to make their debut. In Miami, the Standard
(formerly the Lido) on Biscayne Bay aims to introduce the pleasures of taking
the waters and other spa treatments, long cherished as a social ritual, to a new
generation of Rishi tea-drinking health enthusiasts.
In the Times Square
area, a new venture called QT that Mr. Balazs jokingly referred to as "the
sub-Standard" will offer rooms at lower prices than the QT line, including
a hostel-style room with four bunks (not to panic, each bunk has its very own
flat screen television) where a few friends would only have to ante up $50 each.
Anyone under 25 gets 25 percent off.
With its A.T.M.-style
check-in kiosk, QT may be bare-bones but there's no skimping on unexpected high
jinks. The 22-foot swimming pool in the lobby has a peep show-inspired window
looking in from the bar. "It's incredibly compressed," said Lindy Roy, the
Manhattan architect working with Mr. Balazs on the hotel. "Maximum experience in
a minimum space."
Mr. Balazs has recently
chosen an architect to build his first hotel from the ground up in the
meatpacking district of Manhattan; the abandoned rail viaduct known as the High
Line will run right through it. More new properties and locations, from
Chicago's riverfront to an undisclosed location in London, may soon get the
Balazs treatment.
Mr. Balazs says he
doesn't dictate so much as orchestrate. "I like the term hotelier," he said over
a recent dinner, as he ordered a bottle of Domaine Ott, a rosé from Provence
that has made a cameo appearance in more than a few articles about him. "
'Hotelier' captures everything I understand the responsibilities of the business
to be, which is to be a host, a proprietor and the one who takes care of every
aspect of the experience."
Mr. Balazs's first
property,
Chateau Marmont, could be described as the Gloria Swanson of hotels.
Like the QT, it's geared for a higher-paying, nostalgia-sensitive
clientele. The two QTs - one on Sunset Boulevard, the other in downtown
Los Angeles - have a very different vibe. With waterbed snuggeries in the
rooftop bar at one and a tattoo parlor off the lobby of the other, the QTs
have become magnets for sybarites in training.
A Balazs hotel is
generally small and intensely managed. Each has a creative director who operates
as a kind of continuity expert, for instance, catching such lapses as mixed
light bulb brands in the hallways. At the QT, there is even a cultural
attaché, Manije Mir, whose credentials include being an assistant to the former
Empress of Iran. She arranges poetry readings in her role as guardian of the
right ambience.
But ambience isn't
everything. "The idea of the style-conscious hotel is still appealing as long as
it comes with appropriate service," said Cheryl Boyer, an analyst with
PricewaterhouseCoopers, adding that a reputation for putting style over
substance has plagued some boutique hotels with their tendency to hire leggy
models rather than seasoned professionals.
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It's a message that Mr.
Balazs has apparently taken to heart, especially in South Beach where in recent
years poor service at the hands of spectacularly turned-out staff has turned
into a dependable joke. (Nice touches, like a complimentary bottle of sparkling
French lemonade, often greet return guests at the QT and went a long way
toward placating recent guests who got accounts receivable on the phone every
time they tried to call for room service.)
Though Mr. Balazs is
poised to expand the brand, he seems determined to do it in his own fashion.
Building gigantic hotels with thousands of beds turned down each night is not
his style; he prefers to catch the moment and attract like-minded enthusiasts to
share his vision. His hotels are small enough - the Mercer has 75 rooms, while
the largest, the Standard in downtown Los Angeles, has 207 - not only to stay
ahead of the curve but also shape it.
From the man who claims
to have set off trends such as wenge wood and bathrooms that outsize their
bedrooms, the newest ventures are his boldest attempts yet at tapping the
zeitgeist.
QT and the QTs in
Manhattan and Miami are what could be called urban spas. But Mr. Balazs is
dismissive of the one-hour facial-and-massage meaning of the word. Instead, he
wants to revive traditional bathhouse cultures from around the world, as in the
hamams in Turkey, Korean scrubs, Swedish saunas and the Russian shvitz, and more
particularly their traditions of very relaxed socializing.
Mention of the 10th
Street Baths, a grouty but thoroughly authentic bathhouse on the Lower East Side
where in the 80's cigar-chomping Russians mingled and steamed with models and
Wall Street brokers, sends Mr. Balazs into raptures. "My Holy Grail is to get
the 10th Street spa right," he said. "People whose eyes light up when you
mention the 10th Street Baths are my kind of people."
The Standard in Miami
Beach is the prototype. The splay-winged building with its 50's motel flavor and
Morris Lapidus addition has, in fact, been a spa since the 40's. Everything but
the five-foot gold lamé lettering on the facade that spells out the hotel's
former name, the Lido, has had a makeover. The idea is to allow guests to
customize their spa treatments and even to encourage local people to think of
the hotel as a place to hang out while taking the waters.
The hydrotherapy
treatments can be taken privately in the rooms or together with friends. An
outdoor pool loaded with water-massage features overlooks the bay. Inside, the
largest communal space will be the hamam, a comfortably warm room with banked
seating lined in radiant-heated Carrara marble, splash buckets at the ready. In
another room is the Wall of Sound shower. There, healing sound and lighting
effects plus water falling from five large spouts "create a sensory fun room,"
according to one of the spa directors, Jason Harler, a 34-year-old from Seattle
whose torso appeared to be tattooed entirely with flowering chrysanthemums.
The Standard in
Manhattan will include many of the same social spa features, and even QT will
have both a sauna and a steam room attached to hamam-type stone bleachers
alongside the pool and bar.
Mr. Balazs did not start
out wanting to make a name in the hotel business. "I have nothing but disdain,"
he said, for such professional training grounds as the Cornell University School
of Hotel Administration. His route was far more circuitous, including stints at
the Columbia School of Journalism ("I couldn't write fast enough"), where he got
a master's degree, and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he discovered an
interest in contemporary furniture design and briefly contemplated becoming a
sculptor.
The son of Hungarian
émigrés who left Hungary in 1944 and then taught at Harvard, Mr. Balazs sees
himself as the thinking person's hotelier. Friends envy his library; he claims
the poet and writer Harold Brodkey as a close friend and early mentor.
But it was
entrepreneurship, not the contemplative life, that called the restless Mr.
Balazs. In 1980, he founded a company, Biomatrix, with his father, Dr. Endre A.
Balazs, a pioneering ophthalmologist. Biomatrix developed and manufactured
products based on a collagenlike substance used for a wide variety of medical
treatments, including burn treatments and cataracts. Mr. Balazs, who talked as
easily about chemical molecules as towel bars, recalled spending one summer
collecting umbilical cords to help his father's research.
The business made them
both rich but did not entirely satisfy Mr. Balazs's creative yearnings.
Nightclubs apparently did and, in 1988, along with Eric Goode (of Area fame) and
others, he opened M.K. in Manhattan. "I think what was interesting about the
clubs is that they were environments," Mr. Balazs said. But, he added: "They're
pretty simple. You're usually only dealing with a few hours and often with a
person sitting in one place."
Hotels were something
very different, opening up far more ambitious realms for stage setting. "The
most important thing is to make people feel comfortable," he said, warming to
his favorite theory of the good hotel. "If you are at ease, you let your guard
down, and that's when a certain magic takes place."
Mr. Balazs established
his niche quickly and is even quicker to distinguish his brand from the
high-profile properties of Ian Schrager. "He did some great stuff with Steve,"
Mr. Balazs said, referring to Steve Rubell. "They brought a nightclub savvy to
hotels that was very fresh and innovative, and it took the Marriotts and Hiltons
by surprise. Doing very large hotels with a nightclub sensibility has served him
pretty well. But that's not what we do."
How far Mr. Balazs plans
to go remains to be seen. While he spoke of "seeing a Standard in every major
city, even every secondary city," he demurred when asked if he had an empire in
mind. "I never would have thought at the start that I'd be a hotelier," he said.
"I somewhat intuitively stumbled into it and I do it well. You can't do anything
well unless you love it and give it all your attention."
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