Word: starck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Starck spent $10 million, so it is claimed, and the visitor in the torn trench coat has to admit that what Schrager and Rubell got for this bundle is momentarily, at any rate, the least boring public building in Manhattan. Some of it works; some of it doesn't; that is what is interesting. The chairs are, perhaps, too lively. Not just the ones that stab you -- also the ones made of mahogany laminate that have two normal legs on the front but only one stainless-steel leg at the rear, so that anyone who tilts backward rolls over abruptly...
...There were new owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the Merry-Andrews who ran the wildly successful disco Studio 54 a decade before (and shared a cell in federal prison for evading taxes on the disco's income). To reinvent everything from door knobs to plumbing, they hired Philippe Starck, a Euro-glitz wild man usually described as a French biker-designer (he is French, rides a big motorcycle and designs things...
...best bold stroke was to hollow out the Royalton's long, block-through, columned lobby and bring it alive. People sit here and talk nonsense to one another, order tea -- a liquor license is still to come -- wait for somebody to tilt a chair back, argue about what Starck did right and wrong. (Right: a bar, made of dark marble, with a lovely, sinuous stainless-steel footrest, and a thin strip of glowing blue glass set into the top. Wrong: tacky purple ropes with tassels, holding up enormous mirrors...