Ian Schrager’s Newest Creation: 100 Marriotts

Any fan of luxury boutique hotels knows the history of Ian Schrager and his past company, the Morgans Hotel Group. Coming out of the world of Studio 54 and 70s-80s New York, Ian Schrager focused his attention (thanks a bunch!) on the hotel industry and laid the groundwork for hotels worldwide to rise above the notion that a hotel only needs to be a place to rest your head at night. In 2005, he broke away from Morgans and founded his own company, appropriately named Ian Schrager Company.

Just a few hotels that reflect his aesthetics include:

Gramercy Park and Royalton in New York

Clift in San Francisco

Delano and The Shore Club in Miami

St. Martin’s Lane and Sanderson in London

40 Bond in New York – new luxury residential condos in collaboration with Swiss architects, Herzog & de Meuron

But this is now the biggest endeavor yet as Marriott has announced a partnership to create a new brand of as many as 100 hotels that will “combine the personal, intimate, individualized and unique lodging experience that Mr. Schrager created with Marriott’s operational expertise on a global scale.”

Here are some details – and now excuse me as I have to go start planning my round-the-world adventure.

“People today are sophisticated and they understand good design, quality, originality and commitment to excellence,” says Schrager. “They will not accept something derivative and they want the ethos and soul of a hotel to be authentic and have character. They also expect and deserve impeccable, modern and gracious personalized service that is at the same time luxurious yet down to earth.”

The initial list of markets to be explored includes New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Boston, and Las Vegas in the U.S.; London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan and Rome in Europe; and Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangkok, Seoul and Tokyo in Asia.

With an average size of 150-200 rooms, each of the hotels will reflect the best of the cultural and social milieu of its location and of the time. A diverse set of world-renowned architects and designers will be recruited to create one-of-a-kind buildings spanning the complete range of project types, from new construction, to conversions, to dramatic renovations. The partners expect these hotels to be not just the most aesthetically pleasing in their markets but to be the most environmentally responsible as well.

You can find a number of Morgans Hotel Group and Ian Schrager hotels on Perfect Escapes.

Related Posts:

Wiki Hotel Experiment Part 2 – Clift Hotel San Francisco
Gramercy Park Hotel Offers
What Would Shaq and Marriott Do With $1 Billion?

Recent San Diego excursion: Hyatt Regency La Jolla, Tower23, Salk Institute, and The Keating

I spent 24 hours in San Diego over Cinco de Mayo weekend, which is the unofficial holiday of the city, much like Halloween is for San Francisco. At this time of year, San Diego life just explodes. If you think spring is when life renews in nature, summer is the calling of the beach town. I’ve been to San Diego a number of times over the years and I always really enjoy it but this time, I looked at it with a slightly different eye.

Hyatt Regency La Jolla – I stayed at the Hyatt in La Jolla. This could be one of the largest hotel complexes I’ve ever stayed and I’ve spent a good amount of time in Texas, which can’t even compete. The hotel itself is around 20 stories but any hotel where I have problems figuring out how to get “into the parking lot is usually a bit too large for me. To get from the underground parking lot to my room, I took three elevators. Three! I’m not a fan of business hotels in large parks like this, but the room was actually much nicer than I was expecting and the bed was Hyatt deluxe. And being so close to La Jolla and the University of California, San Diego campus was good for exploring the upscale neighborhood and the architecture splendor of the Salk Institute.

Tower 23 – Now this hotel is much more my style and it will cost you as well. Named after the lifeguard station on the beach, Tower23’s architecture and sleek design makes the hotel a nice end to a walk on the bike path, past the surfers at Pacific Beach and the afternoon beach crowd. The bar is open with just a glass barrier between the patrons and the view of the San Diego ocean. But a walk through the lobby of the hotel and into the bar and restaurant shows off what I like to call “inside-outside” architecture – where there is no hard boundary between the interior and exterior space. Brunch on a the weekend was packed with beautiful people and, granted it was Cinco De Mayo, but I have a feeling that isn’t the only reason why the bar was so filled at 2pm on a Saturday either.

Salk Institute – The Salk Institute was established in the 1960s by Jonas Salk, M.D., the developer of the polio vaccine. Salk selected the world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn as the person who could design the facility that he envisioned.

“Kahn’s creation consists of two mirror-image structures that flank a grand courtyard. Each building is six stories tall. Three floors contain laboratories and the three levels above the laboratory floors provide access to utilities. Protruding into the courtyard are separate towers that provide space for individual professorial studies. The towers at the east end of the buildings contain heating, ventilating, and other support systems. At the west end are six floors of offices overlooking the ocean. Together, there are 29 separate structures joined together to form the Institute.

You can see the impact of Kahn’s architecture in the courtyard. Important to note are Kahn’s imaginative use of space and his high regard for natural light. In response to Salk’s request that the Institute provide a welcoming and inspiring environment for scientific research, Kahn flooded the laboratories with daylight. He built all four outer walls of the laboratory levels out of large, double-strength glass panes, producing an open, airy work environment. Local zoning codes restricted the height of the buildings so that the first two stories had to be underground. This did not, however, prevent the architect from bringing in daylight: he designed a series of light wells 40 feet long and 25 feet wide on both sides of each building to bring daylight into the lowest level.”

The Keating – Located in the historic Gaslamp Quarter, the brand new Keating Hotel is bringing a little bit of Italy to California. If you like red and modern and Italian (no, not talking about Ferraris). From their web site:

“The Keating is a statement of our time, combining the highest level of expressive Italian Design with sophisticated and personalized service. In the Pininfarina tradition, the environment is characterized by pure, clean, ergonomic design, where breathtaking form meets function in every possible detail. What remains is the essential, but not the minimal. The use of materials, colors and lighting combine to give a warm welcoming atmosphere to all of our guests. Modern Italian Design is punctuated by the use of historical details. The Keating hotel project was designed by Pininfarina Extra, a division of the Pininfarina Group, and is their first foray into the world of hotel design.”

Ever Choose a Hotel Based on the Bathroom?

I’ve stayed at countless hotels over the years throughout the United States and in numerous other countries. And I have three features that I look for that help me figure out on first glance whether I am really going to like this hotel or not, whether it even has a fighting chance:

• The bed, of course. Give me a big king-size, nice thread count any day of the week. Even better if I feel like I need to climb into it.
• The view. I’m a sucker for a good view.
• The bathroom. Oh yes, the bathroom more than anything else.

Here are a few of my most memorable, whether that is good or bad:

A hotel in London in Bayswater where the room was small and quaint, but the bathroom was so small that I couldn’t bend at the waist without having parts of my body bust out the door and into the hallway.

A hotel in Paris in the Latin Quarter where the bathroom had a flickering, hanging, naked light bulb, which thrust me completely into a Terry Gilliam movie.

The Four Seasons in Kona where I had an outdoor shower and the biggest bathtub I had ever seen. That was pretty good.

The Righa Royal in New York City where the bathroom in a suite was larger than my old studio apartment in San Francisco.

The Avalon Grand Panama in Panama City where geckos fell from the ceiling while taking a shower.

The Angeleno in Los Angeles where everything appeared so fantastic about the bathroom, from the sliding door to the nice water pressure but there were no towel hooks. And that drove me crazy.

Hotel Zaza in Dallas – ok, I just loved this room completely and the bathroom was nice but I can’t really remember much about it.

So when I see articles talking about hotels updating their bathrooms, I get a little excited. I get even more excited when I read about Hotel Puerta America in Madrid recruiting some of the top architects to make a statement by handing over a different floor to a different architect.

Are any of the following names familiar? – Sir Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, Ron Arad, Javier Mariscal, Arata Isozaki, Kathryn Findlay or Victorio & Lucchino.

If you said yes to any of them (even if you didn’t), you have to be intrigued by the hotel’s ambitious attempt. The end result is a unique hotel where you’re experience is completely different depending on what floor you stay on. If that isn’t a reason to keep going back, I can’t think of a good one.

Oh and just to throw it in there: I love the Hotel Bathrooms Exposed that Hotelsbycity.net publishes. A blog of endless joy.

Wiki-Hotel Description Experiment Part 4: Hotel Zoso, Palm Springs

Thanks to the number of people who participated in the first three wiki experiments for the Four Seasons New York, The Clift Hotel San Francisco, and Wynn Hotel and Casino Las Vegas.

I want to try it again and see if we can have more people contribute or feel free to go back to any of the earlier three. I’d also like to see people who have issues with other’s comments offer a re-write or an update. If you want to re-write someone else’s comment, do so in your posted comment and I’ll take that and make the change in the post.

This time, we’re going to try to do it with the swanky in the desert, Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs.

Here is the current description (latest addition is bolded):

Hotel Zoso is located in the heart of downtown Palm Springs. The hotel features beautiful guestrooms in a modern décor, featuring 42-in. plasma tvs, wifi internet access, triple-sheeted premium frette linens and down comforters, in-room safes, robes, and slippers. Some rooms feature a balcony or patio. Also onsite is a full service spa, outdoor swimming pool with pool bar and fire pit. Dining options include casual dining, fine dining, and 24-hour room service.

Now I know we can do better than that.

What I want:

Did you eat at eatz. at the desert Did you like it?
Did you like your bedsheets?
What about the service of the hotel?
Did they know your name when you walked around?
Some feature that only you are obsessed by in hotels?
How was the pool and the pool bar?
Close to downtown Palm Springs? Did you feel like leaving the hotel?

Keep checking back and eventually, maybe we’ll be able to use these kind of postings on the Perfect Escapes site. For now, they will reside here but I’m curious to see how helpful a community can be.

If you have an idea for another hotel to try or any ideas in whether or not you think wiki hotel descriptions would be a useful tool in deciding how to choose a luxury hotel, send me some comments.

Social Bookmarks: