hospitalitystyle.com

(May 2011) posted on Thu May 26, 2011 EDT

The visionary behind Morgans rolls out his anti-design hotel brand.

By Mary Scoviak

Whether you like or loathe Ian Schrager, you can’t deny he’s passionate about anything he does. I’ve had the chance to interview him several times and, whether he was talking about his own company, his deal with Marriott International  to launch EDITION  or his career, the one thing that always came through was his real love of the hotels. Maybe that’s why he could never leave the industry for long and why he could never leave hotel concepts alone.

His new brand, PUBLIC, seems to be his personal vent at all the lifestyle/boutique hotels that followed the lead of Morgans, which he created with design visionary Andrée Putman. As always, he has a clear outline for the story he wants PUBLIC to tell. Here’s his take.

With typical bravado or braggadocio (you decide), he says, “This endeavor will represent the revitalization of the hotel concept itself and be another wakeup call for the industry.”  He says PUBLIC will be a new breed of hotel with accessible luxury where service matters most.  In Schrager’s estimation, design hotels have morphed into a monster of “Frankensteinian” proportions which no longer connect with guests. “PUBLIC  is confident, self-assured, genuine and free of tricks and gimmicks; driving the hotel industry in a new direction.”

Schrager, who is now anti-design and anti-flash, suspicious of the “wow factor” and completely “sick of slick,” has pared down and edited the design for the brand’s debut, PUBLIC Chicago (formerly the Ambassador East). The brand is the hotel industry’s answer to the “cross-shopping” phenomenon that has exploded in the retail marketplace.  “In today’s world, the bargain hunter elite seek out value and affordability when purchasing a quality product, while traditional budget conscious consumers are trading up for that same great quality product. PUBLIC, appealing to both types of consumers will have an unexpected new mix of guests and hit the market’s bull’s-eye,” he says. 

With PUBLIC, Schrager says he’s responding to what he feels is “a stagnated, anachronistic and sleepy hotel industry that has become predictable, banal, conformist, marbleized and computerized.  It has lost touch with its customers, again. Its traditions and formulas have become outdated. This is a huge opportunity to create a new genre of hotel that is not pigeonholed into a specific and traditional business classification.”  

Additionally, in Schrager’s estimation, boutique/lifestyle hotels have become trivialized in their explosive growth.  “The idea behind the boutique, as I saw it, was meant to touch people emotionally and viscerally and offer guests a truly unique experience.  The idea has been lost with the huge number of watered down versions.  I want to bring it back in an updated version and elevate it to a cultural experience for the modern day traveler.  These travelers now expect truly unique experiences and not merely a place to sleep.  PUBLIC will punctuate this with great value and service as well,” he says.   

Helping him realize that vision will be Michelin-starred Chef Jean-Georges Vongericthen  and his long-time design team headed by Anda Andrei. “My hotels were never about design.  They were about an attitude, an approach and an experience.  It’s something the industry never understood,” says Schrager.  Having seen far too many over-designed and overly self-conscious hotels currently saturating the marketplace, Schrager says he’s going for a restrained, refined and classically cool approach to PUBLIC’s design.  “It’s a new simplicity. It’s a new chic, a sincere chic,” he says.  “It is a really personal, authentic, confident style and authenticity can’t be faked.  Genuine, understated good taste is a universal language, yet hard to find. We are trying not to be hip, we are in fact anti-hip, and therefore by definition, we are.” Hopefully, the experience will be less convoluted.

If you’ve stayed in a fair number of “accessible luxury” hotels, you know he’s at least partially right. Nothing is more off-putting than being checked in by someone who’s sure he/she is way cooler than you are and is being “of service” to the most minimal extent possible since, in their view, you’re not hip enough to worry about. But, if you travel frequently, you’re also aware that there’s a solid contingent of boutique hotels that are fun to stay in, fun to look at and informed by a proactive and attentive service approach that makes you feel utterly spoiled. Consumers, designers and hoteliers will see how well Schrager delivers when the hotel opens in October.