New York - Ian Schrager is sitting across a table from me waving a copy of The New York Times above his head. We are in his office in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, two days after the opening of his latest hotel, the New York Edition, and the reason he is trailing the paper through the air like a sky sign-writer is an article on page 9.
“Love it,” he says, intoning the words in his Goodfellas accent and giving the paper another wiggle.
“I came in and saw it and then bought two more. And then I sent the driver to buy two more. I showed it to my wife. It gives a real impre-s-s-i-o-n,” he says with his Brooklyn burr.
It seems almost incredible that Schrager, the man who co-founded the epoch-making nightclub Studio 54 and pretty much single-handedly created the boutique hotel genre, would be so pleased by a little press, even if it is in The New York Times, the US’s organ of note.
His life, after all, has been played out across countless column centimetres. The 1998 film 54, starring Ryan Phillippe, was based on his life and career – and what times they have been. He has lived a life in pursuit of amusement – not simply his own, but other people’s. The pre-eminent creator of fun places of the past four decades, Schrager possesses an alchemical genius for making people enjoy themselves.
I see this for myself when I arrive at the New York Edition on opening night, just as he is leaving at about 11.45pm. Champagne flows like a river in spring. David Schwimmer is here, as are Alexa Chung and Daisy Lowe, who earlier had dinner with Rosario Dawson and Grayson Perry. And over there – is that Leonardo DiCaprio? Oh, so it is.
The 41-floor, 273-room hotel on Madison Avenue feels like some vast Grecian pleasure palace, only with a pounding sound system and lashings of Gucci. The general consensus is that this is the best party since Schrager last threw a party.
He has some experience with parties. You see that in Technicolor when you flick through the new pictorial autobiography he has produced with the publisher Rizzoli. The book starts out with his nightclubs (he also opened the ill-fated Palladium in 1985) and runs through to the present day. It takes in the creation of the Morgans Hotel Group in 1984 (also with Rubell) and his work as a sometime property developer, culminating in his launch of a chain of “accessible luxury” hotels called Public (the first opened in Chicago in 2011), and his partnership with Marriott hotels and the creation of the Edition brand.
It is, by anyone's reckoning, a diverse CV – so much so that I wonder what he primarily sees himself as. Hotelier? Developer? Club owner? Designer? “I am not a designer. I cringe when I am called that. I would say I am a producer. I have an idea, and I try and meld the ingredients together.”
It started with the club, of course, which was the night-time hangout of the likes of Debbie Harry, Truman Capote, Woody Allen and Bianca Jagger. He says that for a long time he wanted to forget about Studio 54 altogether, though now he feels a sort of grudging ambivalence.
“It was Steve (Rubell) who coined the term ‘boutique’ hotels to differentiate us from the big ‘department store’ chains. Back then, the hotel market was a barren wasteland,” something he puts down to the real estate men’s influence on hotel-keeping. “We changed the market.”
Three decades after he opened the first “boutique hotel”, he says the concept has been hollowed out.
“Today it is about simplifying things. Our process with Edition is to edit, to not go over the top, to be restrained in design. That way you create something that discriminating people will respond to.”
One of the things he laments, he says, is that while his influence has been big, his footprint has not. This, in no small part, explains his partnership with Marriott and the creation of Edition.
“I’d work on a hotel for two to three years, it would be disruptive, it would cause a firestorm; everyone would come, pick apart the ideas and then go off. Now, with Marriott, I can go bigger and do more.”
That model is now rolling out across the globe, like a well-dressed, high-design expeditionary force.
The Independent