LONDON — In a low-ceilinged room in the basement of the Chiltern Firehousehotel, down the hall from the restrooms and smoking alcove, 12 reservationists work the phones full time, mainly saying “no.”
“No” is not a word that the hotelier André Balazs likes. “Never to say ‘no,’ it’s an absolute mantra,” said Mr. Balazs, crisply dressed in a white shirt and slacks custom-made by his New York tailor, Hisham Oumlil, with whom he credits his election to Vanity Fair’s best-dressed list. “Part of the culture of the company is always to say, ‘Let me try.’ ”
That’s easier said than done when your establishment, the latest of André Balazs Properties, is one of the most talked-about and impossible-to-book spots in London. The hotel itself, in London’s Marylebone neighborhood, is only now opening, but since February, its 120-seat restaurant has hosted celebrities like Kate Moss, Adele, Bill Clinton, Chris Martin, David Beckham, and David and Samantha Cameron.
Mere mortals trying to book a table have faced interminable waits. Mr. Balazs estimates that the restaurant has fielded 2,000 calls a day since opening. The principal job of his reservationists, he said, is “politely dealing with the reality of how many seats we have.”
André Balazs’s Latest Hideaway: Chiltern Firehouse
The new Chiltern Firehouse in London is a formula of clubby English country house combined with New York-style dazzle.
David Azia for The New York Times
David Azia for The New York Times
Londoners have taken note of the American hotelier who has upended their carefully calibrated social order. Spotted-at-the-Chiltern stories have glutted the English tabloids. “What’s all the fuss about the Chiltern Firehouse?” The Telegraph asked in June. “Fully booked?” ran the plaintive headline in The Guardian, under photos of famous diners exiting. “Even the table by the toilet?”
“There hadn’t been anything in London that created the same buzz since the 1990s,” said Dylan Jones, the editor in chief of British GQ and the chairman of London’s biannual men’s fashion week. “I have a friend of mine, a pop star, who called me one Sunday morning and said, without a great deal of irony, ‘Who do I have to sleep with to get a table at the Firehouse?’ And so I told her.”
That answer, of course, is Mr. Balazs, who has an uncanny ability to generate heat wherever he goes. He is a social connector par excellence, traveling comfortably among the elite who frequent his boutique of trendy hotels, including the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and the Mercer in New York.
And as the 26 rooms of the hotel officially open Sunday, with London Fashion Week in full swing, a new set of V.I.P. players is ready to join the “friends and family” who have already made it their playground.
Its impact, whether loved or loathed, has been significant. As Mr. Jones put it, the Firehouse is “a little bit of New York in Marylebone that’s managed to tilt the social axis.”
A visit to the Chiltern Firehouse is a circumscribed, choreographed affair. Paparazzi stand sentry at the gates most nights, waiting for the inevitable celebrity contingent. A doorman in coat and tie guards the entrance, allowing passage only to those on the reservation rolls. Those who gain entry are handed off to no fewer than three attendants on the way to the maître d’hôtel.
Mr. Balazs insists on privacy, discouraging cellphone pictures by guests. Employees surrender their phones during working hours and submit to “the most draconian sort of confidentiality agreements,” he said.
A recent breach at Mr. Balazs’s Standard, High Line in New York — the leak of a video of Jay Z and Solange Knowles fighting in an elevator — heightened the need for such measures. Mr. Balazs said that the employee who leaked the video was fired within 24 hours, and that he and Jay Z are considering legal action.
It is not hard to imagine him and Jay Z in a tête-à-tête. It cannot be incidental to his success that Mr. Balazs inhabits the milieu he serves. Though quiet, deliberate and unflamboyant, with a compressed, low-frequency hum of seriousness and purpose, he is anything but aloof.
Making the rounds on an unusually balmy and clear-skied London day, Mr. Balazs had a greeting for every employee who crossed his path. When the hotel’s lobby bar — the pinnacle of its exclusivity, unnamed, unreservable and open only to hotel guests, according to a spokeswoman — is full, he can be seen shoulder-deep in the crowd, shaking hands, kissing cheeks.
As one powerful Londoner put it, “He doesn’t make enemies, he makes friends.” Indeed, Mr. Balazs does not want for them, especially not the kind that generate buzz. Some friends, like the public-relations baron Matthew Freud, who represents the hotel, generate it professionally.
Still, there is the question of what it means to be an American crashing through London’s strictly guarded gates. Mr. Balazs admitted he had been more concerned about the London opening than his previous ones because of the complexities of English society. In a social scene largely defined by private member’s clubs, the hotel isn’t one — quite.
“It didn’t feel natural as an American to do that,” Mr. Balazs said. “But then, of course, it evolves into a club anyway.”
According to Elizabeth Saltzman, a stylist and fellow American in London, “The difference between this and a Loulou’s or an Annabel’s” — two of the more headline-grabbing member’s clubs — “is that this is an outsider coming in.”
Rather than molding the Chiltern Firehouse in London’s image, or importing a hot spot in the American vein, Mr. Balazs ended up somewhere in between: a place with a clubby country-house atmosphere and a New York-style frenzy of buzz. The buzz aspect is not without its critics.
“People who maybe aspire to and like that part of New York night life, they like it in New York,” said Tyler Brûlé, another Balazs friend, whose media company, Monocle, operates a coffee shop just opposite the hotel, and who is an investor in two men’s shops on the block. “I don’t think they necessarily always like it here.”
But as much as Mr. Balazs wants to appeal to the natives, the hotel and restaurant, helmed by the Michelin-starred chef Nuno Mendes, seem designed to cater to members of the creative classes who frequent his other hotels, and their stepped-up globe-trotting.
“The jet set has morphed into something more like a nomadic tribe,” he said. “Say, ‘Let’s have dinner’ — you’re just as likely to have dinner in London or L.A. as in New York. It seems to be growing, that endless caravan.”
For most of the past year, Mr. Balazs has been living at the Firehouse. “I’m delighted to call this my new home,” he said, accepting an award as one of British GQ’s Men of the Year this month.
Living here has allowed him to ingratiate himself into the local social scene, which some say has been crucial to its success. But it also allows him to make sure each of the hotel’s rooms is up to his demanding specifications. For Mr. Balazs, the hotel should offer “the service you’d expect out of an extremely well-managed country home, or a super-yacht,” and no decision is too small to involve him personally.
He is known to deliberate over the finer points of lighting the dining room at 10 a.m. versus 10 p.m., and rhapsodize over the vintage magazines stocked in lobby reception. He has ensured that guest rooms have a reading light by every bathtub, that a custom scent with top notes of black moss, leather and tea wafts through the halls, and that a turret is set up with a table for two, which can be reserved for romantic assignations.
“He is so fabulously detail-oriented that it could drive some people crazy,” said Ms. Saltzman, whom Mr. Balazs consulted on the staff uniforms.
Mr. Balazs is not without peers, but few of his fellow celebrity hoteliers — a small fraternity that includes Ian Schrager, Sean MacPherson and Jeff Klein — can match the control he exerts over each property, including almost every component and concession on-site.
Though he is evangelical about the social value of hotels, there is the benefit of a tidy profit to be made. At the Firehouse, Mr. Balazs expects revenue from food and drink to eclipse that of the rooms. Yet the Firehouse is not merely a restaurant or bar, either. It would be truer to call it an entertainment. Mr. Balazs compared it to a movie or a play, with himself as a director and producer. “What we try to create are experiences,” he said. “It’s the experience, ultimately, that is the product.”
Each of his hotels is designed to suit its own “narrative,” as Mr. Balazs is fond of saying, which includes the neighborhood it inhabits. He seems to have a special talent for divining when an area is about to emerge.
SoHo was still shaking off its scruffiness when he bought the building that would become the Mercer in 1990. Sunset Boulevard was no better when Mr. Balazs acquired the Chateau Marmont, a fabled Hollywood hangout gone to seed, the same year. The Raleigh in Miami, which Mr. Balazs has since sold, was seen as pivotal to the comeback of South Beach when he bought it in 2002. And the Standard, High Line, which opened in 2009, appeared just as the High Line itself was turning the meatpacking district into a commercial playground.
(Mr. Balazs sold a majority stake in the Standard Hotels, his chain of larger, less-expensive hotels, in 2013, though he remains chairman. A long-planned Standard London is projected to open in Camden in 2017.)
“He’s right there, usually, where he needs to be,” said David Hershkovits, a founder of Paper magazine. “It always seems natural.”
Marylebone had none of the grit of SoHo or the meatpacking district. It was more sleepy than edgy. The Firehouse itself was a dormant relic: one of London’s first purpose-built firehouses, dating to 1889, but sitting vacant when Mr. Balazs and his partners acquired it in 2011. (Mr. Balazs also owns a corner pub, Bok Bar, which will be renamed and overhauled this winter. A bakery, to serve both the hotel and the neighborhood, will follow.)
Before he arrived, the street’s retail offerings consisted primarily of musical instruments, wedding dresses and big-and-tall ladies’ clothing. Now there are fashion labels like Sunspel and Prism, and luxury condo construction sites. In an effort to retain some of the street’s longstanding stores, Mr. Balazs has invested in two: Mario’s Gents Hairdressers and Shreeji, a newsstand that will provide the hotel with papers and obscure fashion magazines.
“As usual, whenever we do something, real estate prices have gone up 80 percent since we opened,” he said. “It’s crazy, but it happens all the time. You create a unique anchor, and it changes the neighborhood. You can argue for better or for worse, but it certainly moves the needle.”
The neighborhood has not welcomed him unconditionally. The idling of Range Rovers and the constant flashing of cameras outside has rankled many residents, including Mr. Balazs himself. “It looks like the Fourth of July out there sometimes,” he said. “I understand why it’s irritating as hell.”
Mr. Balazs instituted several changes to hotel protocol to address complaints, including a back-alley exit used after 11 p.m. His supporters point out that the Chiltern Firehouse has raised its neighbors’ property values considerably.
Then there is the question of how long the Chiltern Firehouse can maintain its position, which seems almost rude to raise considering the hotel’s official opening was just this weekend.
“How do you keep the heat up now and keep it interesting and what do you become 36 months from now?” Mr. Brûlé said. “Because you’re not going to be hot like that forever.”
Already, some guests complain about its changing demographics. “The launch of the Firehouse has been faultless, although I’d like to see a few judiciously chosen empty tables rather than Essex Girls or the wrong kind of bankers,” Mr. Jones said, referring to the stars of “The Only Way Is Essex,” English reality TV’s answer to “Jersey Shore.”
Mr. Balazs seemed unfazed by the challenge of keeping up the momentum, though after the Firehouse’s official debut, he plans to draw back from London and return to New York.
“There’s always the glow of newness and then there’s the longevity of attentiveness,” he said. “Keeping it good is not easy. It has to be freshened up all the time.”
There is, as yet, no rest for the weary reservationists, whose phones keep ringing. But tables are not quite as impossible a get as they once were.
A member of hoi polloi, calling last Thursday, was granted a 9 p.m. reservation for two a month from now. On a Sunday. At the back bar.
View the original article here
No comments :
Post a Comment