Word: schrager
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What do you do when you wake up one morning convinced that the intangible hipness on which you based your enormous professional success no longer exists? If you're hotel impresario Ian Schrager, you replace the proverbial velvet rope with a comfy velvet cushion...
Perhaps that's logical for a 60-year-old and for a nation that's going to be teeming with them. Schrager, who revolutionized the hotel industry in the 1990s with his highly designed boutique properties like the Delano in Miami, is back in business and looking to launch yet another lifestyle revolution with his idiosyncratic Gramercy Park Hotel, opening this week at that fabled Manhattan location. Schrager wants to restore the celebrity of that address with a $200 million, 185-room hotel and adjacent condominium property...
This time Schrager is selling a completely different look, one he calls the antithesis of hip. The sleek modernism he pioneered with French designer Philippe Starck has been replaced by an opulent interior designed by the artist Julian Schnabel. The idea is to create a space that looks like an artist's studio. Instead of three-legged stools and linoleum floors, there are deep velvet sofas, stuccoed walls and Giacometti-style cast-bronze doorknobs...
...Schrager calls it eclectic bohemian, a very personal response to what he sees as an overdesigned, overbranded and perhaps overaccessible idea of luxury. "There's going to be a backlash against all this branding," Schrager said on a recent tour of the lobby. "Everything hip is now immediately co-opted by the mainstream. I wanted to make something very individualized and unique...
Checking In for A Recovery The U.K. housing market is cooling off, but the hotel sector seems to be heating up. Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is in talks to buy London 's Savoy Hotel for at least $360 million. Ian Schrager has FOR SALE signs up at two London sites, the swanky Sanderson and the St. Martins Lane Hotel. Stelios Haji-Ioannou's easyGroup is launching a chain of no-frills easyHotels in early 2005. And Simon Woodroffe - the man behind the YO! Sushi conveyor-belt eateries - is opening Yotel, cramming luxury into tiny, 10-sq-m rooms...