Blueprint | Dec/Jan 1989

FIVE STAR STARCK

From the folks that brought you Studio 54 and the Palladium comes the Royalton. Philippe Starck turned a flop house into the smart place to stay in the Big Apple.

By Jillian Burt

When you walk through the front door at and Steve Rubell's Royalton, you're entering a different realm; by the time you're in the lobby, you're practically in orbit. Philippe Starck's preoccupation with travel has surfaced in his design for the Royalton, in which the sleek silver and mahogany of a 1930s cruise liner is given a sci-fi spin; it has as much to do with the Starship Enterprise as the Queen Mary. Artificial sunshine from a fake skylight and a predominance of brilliant yet pale colours - white, green, orange and a clear, intense blue that Starck has called 'Yves Klein blue' - evoke the vision of space as a clear, designed place suggested by Star Trek. But the Royalton also embodies the notion of space as the last refuge, taken from Starck's beloved Blade Runner, since two blocks east is the filthy and visually noisy Times Square and two blocks west the Pan Am building, blocking Park Avenue like a primitive monster.

The re-fitting of what was once a seedy, low life hotel cost in the region of $10 million, since every detail was custom made. Starck flew in for a few days here and there, but his predominant form of communication with Schrager and Rubell was by fax. "It's all worth it if you get something original, and if there's one word I like more than any other, it's original," says .

Glamorous hush

With the Royalton, what Schrager and Rubell have done is to take two prevailing New York attitudes and expand them into something new. The first, the idea of calm, has been fetishised in New York, elevated to heights where it seems that it's a commodity that needs to be designed in order to exist. The Royalton has the glamorous hush to be found further downtown, suffused throughout SoHo in the Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons boutiques, the Rizzoli bookstore and the Dean and DeLuca food boutiques.

The hotel has also taken to its limits the notion that it is necessary to go out in order to experience the comforts of "home". Starting with Nell's and the Ralph Lauren retail mansion, stores and clubs in New York have begun increasingly to mimic stately homes. The most recent (and most photo real) is the club M.K., which masquerades as the home of a well read great white hunter, with girls in Rifat Ozbek dresses perching self-consciously on the rim of the bathtub or the edge of the four poster bed. The Royalton, exploiting the idea of hotel as the most obvious home from home, has been organized into abstract, open plan "rooms": the lobby staff offer to show guests to the "living room" or "games room" for tea and sandwiches.

Big backed, white Victorian chairs of a type one might find in the Adams Family house, and squat, square stools with silver snake backs that look like scurrying space aliens, are placed in the overlapping den, living room and games room. In the library is a long dining table, covered with stacks of tombstone sized design and art books from Rizzoli and surrounded by a version of Starck's Pratfall chair. Primary coloured cut flowers are arranged in modest, almost naíve, vases on tables or spill out of horn-shaped gilt and grape coloured glass vases mounted on the walls. The horn is a recurrent image throughout the hotel; there are silver horns as door handles and horn lights above the elevators which resemble sections from Viking helmets.

Yves Klein blue

The most striking and glamorous feature that flows throughout the entire hotel, however, is the Yves Klein blue carpet, designed by Brigitte Laurent, which has a border of friendly ghosts. In the corridors, the blue of the carpet appears totally to enclose you, since the walls and ceiling are painted exactly the same colour, giving the sensation of weightless space walking.

loves Philippe Starck like he's family - a family which also includes Arata Isozaki (who designed the Palladium for him) and Andrée Putman (who designed Morgans Hotel). "I have very close relationships and am very close friends with the people that I work with because it's such an act of love, it's such a passionate thing and I care about nothing but the success of the project," claims Schrager.

"I look at all the publications; it's a little bit of a hobby for me, and every month I look through all the magazines and I rip out pages, and I look at art books, and those things that stir up ideas in me I use as points of departure for every project; not that I ever copy anything, because I want more out of life than that, but you can't reinvent the wheel all the time, you just use things as points of departure for other things."

The inspiration for the hiring of Philippe Starck came from magazine photographs of the lavatories at Café Costes in Paris, says Schrager, who considers the guest bathrooms to be a pivotal marketing tool for a hotel. "When we saw those glass sinks and the mirrors and the waterfall and the fact that people didn't know what to use in the bathroom, we thought the same person that can come up with this humorous and witty way of doing a bathroom might be able to come up with a totally different kind of bathroom for a hotel."

The lobby bathrooms at the Royalton have the same inscrutable waterfalls and doors without handles, while the grandeur of the guest bathrooms - hexagonal in shape with mirrored walls and an enormous circular bath as a centerpiece - is virtually operatic. Tiny glass shelves hold silver containers of potpourri and cotton balls; the shampoo is that Yves Klein blue again.

The bedrooms mimic the state rooms of a cruise liner. The beds have recessed headboards and portholes with shelves, and a grey tasselled travelling blanket is folded into a triangle over one end. The rooms have an almost intimidating serenity - a sense of remoteness and being cast adrift that one might feel out at sea. All the things that connect you with the real world - telephone, windows, television and radio - are either hidden or extremely discreet. The flat black television (which hides the ghetto blaster and video) is something that Starck originally didn't want in the rooms, since he thinks that Americans watch too much television. The working fireplace in some of the rooms seems visually sensational rather than cosy, and the armchair doesn't invite anyone to sink into it. Covered in midnightblue lounge suit velvet, it leans so far elegantly backwards (in the pose of a 1950s mannequin) that it looks as though the people who sit in it will be ejected on to their heads. A silver stand (resembling a kooky icon) coming out from the fireplace holds an art postcard that is changed twice daily and illuminated by a candle.

Algonquin of the 1990s

Schrager and Rubell put the same ingredients into the Royalton as they did into Morgans - individuality, an anarchic disavowal of the usual management and design policies of hotels, and a streetwise feel for entertainment value - and then they added Starck. Schrager saw his role as an editor, clarifying and making sense of the tidal wave of ideas Starck had for the project. "I like to think that, brilliant a designer as Philippe is, somebody else in the hotel business couldn't have retained him and done a hotel as good as this. I hope that it's true, or else the effort wouldn't have been worth it."

The Royalton, diagonally across from the Algonquin on 44th Street, is conceived of by its owners as the "Algonquin of the 1990s" - a gathering place for thinkers, the literary crowd, a serious sort of sophisticated person. Morgans Hotel has become the preferred accommodation for the rock-and-roll millionaire class, who would feel equally at home at the Royalton. Indeed, among the first guests at the hotel were the members of UB40, in New York for a Madison Square Garden concert, who milled about in the foyer seemingly oblivious that it was their own album filtering through the muzak system.

We come from Brooklyn

A level of sophistication (or at least a familiarity with contemporary design) would appear to be necessary in order to feel comfortable there. "It's the hotel that Steve and I would like to stay in, or Philippe would like to stay in," says Schrager. Yet on the other hand, Schrager refutes the implication of elitism: "I don't want to do something that everybody doesn't get, no matter how well the critics receive it. I think if something's good, everybody understands it. Everything we do is a little bit based on snobbism, but we're really not snobs because we come from Brooklyn, and if I can like it and appreciate it, then I'm assuming that everybody else can."

and Steve Rubell are quietly amassing an impressive real estate empire, as is another boy from Brooklyn, Donald Trump, though theirs is based on a taste system that is the total antithesis of Trump's. Schrager and Rubell are guided by instinct, don't believe in marketing studies, and prefer to work with people who have no preconceived notions about the project in hand. A bonus in working with Starck was the fact that he had never done a hotel before.

The next Schrager and Rubell hotel will be the Century Paramount - intended as a low priced hotel for those who have the style sensibility but not the ready cash to stay at either Morgans or the Royalton. "It's what Holiday Inn and Ramada started to do and then forgot about," says Schrager, going on to draw a parallel between this hotel concept and what Norma Kamali, Sir Terence Conran and Laura Ashley have done with design. Philippe Starck will probably do the furniture for this project too.

After that will be the Barbizon on Central Park West and 63rd (not to be confused with the Donald Trump Barbizon), conceived of as an urban spa. Schrager and Rubell also own a landmark site on Central Park West and 105th Street, which will become a residential condominium, and will be the first new building they have erected. They are considering inviting Norman Foster to submit a proposal for the design.

"It's not just a question of getting the best property, we can't cookie cut projects. Steve and I want more out of life than that. Everything's special, every project has to be a little bit special, there has to be something sexy about it and it has to have an idea. Without the idea, then you're really just decorating."