Boutique Hotelier Ian Schrager and Marriott Join Forces
There are almost 300 framed photographs on the walls of Berners Tavern, the restaurant in Marriott International’s new Edition hotel on Berners Street in Central London. Mounted in rococo gilt frames and crowded edge-to-edge into every corner of the bar’s taupe walls, each image is one of bland good taste: a landscape, an animal, a piece of fruit, the artfully lit interior of a large country house. Some are large, some small; some are black and white, others are in color. Barely a single one is worth a second look, yet their combined effect, hanging over luxuriously upholstered banquettes, is dramatic, that of the world’s most inviting, stately home. “It’s a visceral thing,” says Ian Schrager, who individually approved every picture, decided where each should hang, and—before the hotel’s grand opening last September—mounted a stepladder to adjust the spotlights himself. “Anything in interior design is not about a detail. It’s about the forest, not the tree.”
At a small table near the bar, Schrager, 67, nurses a black coffee. Having just arrived from New York, wearing a baggy blue fisherman’s sweater, his cheeks dusted with white stubble, he looks worn out. Although Schrager trained as a real estate lawyer, he speaks with a lisp and communicates with the Brooklyn accent and body language used in movies to make offers you can’t refuse. (It’s often been reported that his father, Louis, was a leading member of Meyer Lansky’s crime syndicate, but Ian has always denied it. “Bulls---,” he says. “He was a coat manufacturer in New Jersey.”)His gaze wanders across the room. “I approved everything here: the colors, the finishes of the paint, the fixtures on the ceiling, the wattages of the lightbulbs,” he says. Still, the color of the ceiling continues to trouble him. “A little chalky for me. I would have preferred more ivory.” If it were his hotel, he says he’d have had it repainted before a single guest had a chance to see it. But the London Edition is the booming flagship of a new enterprise in which Schrager has become partners with Marriott, a behemoth with 19 brands, 3,800 properties, and 2012 revenue of almost $12 billion. The inventor of the boutique hotel has joined forces with his former nemesis, the global lodging chain. And he knows in the corporate world that you don’t delay the opening of a hotel just because the dining room ceiling is the wrong shade of white. “I have to choose my battles. I’m doing something with Marriott because I wanted to do something on a really big scale,” Schrager says. “You know, if you want to do it on a big scale, well—you got to play by the big-boy rules.”
Schrager’s relationship with rules is complicated. At the peak of his success as co-owner of the legendary disco Studio 54, he drove around Manhattan with millions of dollars in cash stuffed into the trunk of his blue Mercedes 450SL. After word reached the IRS that he and his business partner, Steve Rubell, were taking a generous skim from the nightly receipts, agents raided the club. In 1980 the pair were sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison. When they emerged 13 months later, stripped of most of their assets and unable to get a liquor license, hotels seemed a good way to go. “It’s a hospitality business,” says Schrager. “More civilized than a nightclub.”