New York Magazine | October 31, 1988

STARCK REALITY

The Cutting-Edge Style Of The Royalton Hotel

Philippe Starck, the peripatetic French designer, has created a masterpiece on West 44th Street: the Royalton Hotel. Owned by Steve Rubell and , the Royalton has a breathtaking $10-million, Starck-designed interior. The lobby features horn-shaped lamps, curved mahogany walls, and checkers sets. "It is a hotel, of course, but it is an imaginary world," says Starck. "It is not the future or the past. When you arrive, you cannot know what time it is."

By Phil Patton

Secreted in locations around the world - in Milan, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Paris, and New York-half a dozen identical sleek, black Harley-Davidson Sportster 1000 motorcycles sit waiting for the twist of a single key.

That key jingles now in the worn-jeans pocket of French design star Philippe Starck, fresh off the Concorde, as he walks up 44th Street toward his latest creation, the Royalton Hotel. Opposite the Algonquin, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the Royalton was a run-down, second-rate residential hotel until Steve Rubell, , and their partner Philip Pilevsky bought it for $30 million and hired Starck to direct a $10-million renovation.

In black jacket, white T-shirt, and blue beret-an overweight, French-film version of a Gallic biker-he broods. Philippe Starck hates to walk. He is walking because a city bus has dragged his bike off a curb; it is now-in serious but stable condition-under the care of a mechanic. He would prefer to be riding-slicing through the New York atmosphere, which sometimes seems to him a great gray-green aquarium, sometimes a set out of one of his favorite films, Blade Runner, based on a novel by his favorite writer, sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick. Dodging taxis, he can feel the edge in the wind, almost taste steel. New York, for Starck, is a city "with a blade in the air."

Wherever he is, Starck must keep moving, must at regular intervals feel the air rushing over him and the images of a fresh city flashing by. Only on his bike, he claims, can he soak up the mood of a city; without that mood, he cannot design. Bikeless, Starck is on edge. "Starck without a bike is a drama," says his wife, Brigitte.

He travels with spare jeans, spare T-shirt, his portable fax machine-from which he is famous for dispatching dozens of memos and sketches daily-and not much else. He constantly jolts from Europe to the U.S. to Japan. He is just in from Milan, where he reveled in his success at the annual furniture show.

At 39, Philippe Starck has designed clubs and restaurants, computers and sailboats. In Milan, he introduced new furniture collections for the Italian firms Driade and Kartell and for the French one XO. Like Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, and Richard Sapper, he is doing a teapot for Alessi. But his "boiler," Starck gleefully boasts, will sell best of all: "It is a new style, a new concept, and cheaper." Furniture bearing Starck's name, says Michael Steinberg of Furniture of the Twentieth Century, who represents three of the companies for which Starck designs, sells quickly and expensively.

In Milan, he was stopped in traffic for his autograph and picture. Remembering the scene there temporarily brightens his mood: "People now become crazy. Four thousand people come to the opening to see a chair-it is like a concert or the movies. Le Corbusier was a star, but nobody stopped him to ask for his autograph in the streets. When the car stops in the city, girls come up: 'Ah, the peecture' The girls, the girls, the girls. And you can imagine it is not for my physique."

That physique is, as always, in uniform. Today, he has added a piratical scarf-printed with a skull-and-crossbones pattern, like a sheet of outlaw stamps. A scruffy beard struggles to obscure acne scars from an adolescence he describes as profoundly lonely. He boasts he was kicked out of virtually every good private school in Paris.

This is not shaping up to be a good day. The Royalton's lobby is still thick with plaster dust and the sound of saws, only days before its doors will finally open in mid-October. The furniture is late. The mirrors in the penthouse, with its view east to the Chrysler Building, west to the swirling street culture of Times Square, are still being etched.

Rubell and Schrager are not worried. They have been through this before-with Morgans, with the Palladium, with Studio. They can see through the dust.

The lobby right now is like some sort of archaeological site-excavation in progress. From under the drop cloths, something emerges suggesting a thirties version of the future: an ocean liner, a railroad car, a railroad station. It is not a grand, soaring space but low and long, with a trick curved-wall perspective that adds depth to a row of columns thicker at their tops. Brown-red mahogany veneer, finished to a high sheen, peeps through its covering.

Wading through the dust, pulling back edges of the Homasote covering the veneer, Rubell and Schrager become animated with their vision of the lobby, which they have been talking about for three years now as a new center for communications people and media powers.

"This mahogany just got finished last week; it came from France," says Schrager.

"So did the workers," says Rubell.

"See the columns?" says Schrager. "We had to bring in 50 tons of Adriatic sand for the plaster. And this stone? The streets of Florence are paved with it."

On the lobby's east wall, set down a couple of steps, are chess- and checkerboards. On the west wall in front is a "library" with a long table that will be covered with books and magazines. "A kind of mini-Rizzoli will be happening over there," Rubell says.

"Well call this our sushi bar without sushi, a kind of tapas thing," adds Schrager. The Royalton Grill, a 100-seat restaurant being developed by Jeffrey Chodorow of the China Grill, will not open until early next year, but Rubell points out the area near the Grill where Larry Forgione will soon be serving breakfast and lunch.

Tilted mirrors along the wall seem to expand the width of the space. The green marble bars and counters angle out into space. Along the tops, strips of inset lighting give off a kind of radioactive luminescence.

A row of folding mahogany doors lines one curved wall. "They're taken from the Japanese bullet train," says Schrager. "The whole lobby is images from transportation."

In the men's room, the urinal is a stainless-steel wall fronted by a waterfall. Because of city conservation regulations, the waterfall cannot run all the time. So Starck devised an electric-eye system that turns on the water as soon as the user steps up. Unfortunately, the activating solenoids have yet to arrive. But the lobby is something different for Starck. To walk into it is to enter Starck's dreamworld, to get inside his head. He claims not to be interested in finished products, in the physical realities of his creations, but in the symbolism, the dreams that lie behind them, the souls with which he has invested them.

"It is a hotel, of course, but it is an imaginary world. It is part of dreams. It is not the future or the past. When you arrive, you cannot know what time it is," he says.

"Bullet train?" he adds. "The bullet train is bulls---. I don't think Ian has ever been on the bullet train. For me, all those doors that open-cha, cha, cha-are like a corridor in a dream when you are running and opening one door after another.

"This lobby - it is a sort of concrete warehouse with the prototype of a strange wing, a giant wing made of mahogany, like a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine.

"Some incredible project is at hand. It is about the spirit of invention," he says, "a place where" - he stops and ponders-"a place where there is a crazy professor working on a wooden spaceship to travel through the ages."

But what first catches the eye is a row of horn-shaped lamps, glowing softly in succession like, says Starck, "the nails of an animal trying to go through the wall."

The horn is a wonderfully ambiguous symbol. It makes you think of "communications," all right-of a musical instrument or an old-fashioned phonograph speaker-but also of power and virility.

Off the main lobby, as if sneaked in, is a small, round room with sky-blue banquettes and a little mirrored bar no larger than a coat-check area. A dome in its ceiling may eventually be frescoed. It is the secret, mock-sacred heart of the place, a response to the Algonquin Round Table and a literal power circle, unmarked, unnamed, and virtually hidden. "It is based on Hemingway's favorite bar, the Ritz," says Rubell. The boys plan high-powered lunches and dinners for this space. "If you don't know where it is, then you don't belong there," says Rubell.

To Starck, however, "the round room is the center of the conspiracy-the secret room in the airship." We go in. It is small, silent. You have an opening to another world-the painting.

"Here," says Starck, "you prepare the next revolution."

But Starck worries. He has just heard that the hotel will not be ready in time for his great patron, FranÁois Mitterrand, the president of France, the man who gave him his key break. Mitterrand, his wife, Danielle, and his cultural minister, Jack Lang - Starck's second-biggest booster - Starck's second-biggest booster - are paying a visit to the United States and want to stop by. But they must have an answer today: Will things be ready-

"We must say today, yes or no," Starck says. "For security reasons. If he comes here, they must have all the police everywhere and la la la."

"We'll work day and night," says . He begins to loudly hum the "Mareillaise."

"No," says Starck mournfully. "I cannot guarantee it."

"What would you say, Philippe, 80/20?" asks Steve Rubell.

"Eh?"

"Eighty percent chance we will be ready?"

"No, no, it is imposseeble."

"If he'll come," says Schrager, "we'll do whatever it takes to get ready, but I want to know. I don't want to have Jack Lang walk in and say"-he drops into Brooklynese-" 'Well, Frankie don' come. Frankie and Danny aren't heah.'"

"But we must tell today," says Starck.

Someone reminds him that the furniture for the lobby is still in its warehouse. Starck looks down at a blueprint dotted with odd swatches of the blue and orange fabrics representing the chairs he has designed. It is hopeless.

"No, we cannot."

He emits a long, modulated groan.

Starck's reputation began in the night world, but he emerged into the day world with the 1984 opening of Café Costes, whose pissoir consisted of a wall size waterfall like that at the Royalton, and the infamous three-legged chairs. Starck described the place as "beautiful and sad, like the railway station in Prague," then admitted he had never been to Prague. He claimed the absence of a fourth leg for the chairs was not simple design willfulness but removed a potential hazard for the waiters.

Café Costes was hailed by Le Monde as a revolutionary rethinking of the traditional French café. It was explicated in structuralist effusions by Le Nouvel Observateur ("Starck's workÖis the deciphering and transmitting of signs"). He was compared to the film directors of the Nouvelle Vague: If furniture was "the new couture" for him, interior design was mise en scËne. And like Truffaut and Godard, he has brought France international respect. When the French start to talk about semiology and cinema, you know they are serious. Starck himself began to talk that way. He explained the semantics and the "lectures," or levels of reading, in his cafÈs and teapots. He referred to his Richard III chair as "a dialectical analysis" of the traditional club chair.

Starck's success in Frances led him to Mitterrand and to commissions all over the world-like the Starck Club in Dallas, a brewery converted into a nightspot, and the Manin restaurant in Tokyo, an underground space Starck visited briefly, then designed entirely via fax and phone.

Mitterrand takes an almost paternal pride in him: He is, after all, the designer who upstaged the Italians, restored France to leadership in design for the first time since the twenties and Art Deco. He made Jack Lang's chauvinist boosting of French culture seem a little less grandiose.

Still, Starck can't resist taking a bit of a bite from the patron's hand. He delights in telling the story of how when Mitterrand asked for a "chic" storage cabinet for his office, he offered him a piece from his collection for Les Trois Suisses, the French equivalent of Sears.

He is very proud of the work for Trois Suisses, in whose 5 million catalogues his furniture is sandwiched between electric drills and inexpensive sportswear. "I know that when someone buys one of my products there, he is a good person," he says; he could not bear to design expensive hotels if he did not also work for the popular mail-order merchant.

Despite his patronage, Starck does not like being tagged as a French designer. His cultural background, he argues, is not really French but a dream of America: "It was the dream that American invention and technology was going to resolve all of humanity's problems.

"French design," he says, "is too influenced by fashion. Everyone in Paris is a designer. When French designers are of the quality of Mitterrand and Lang, then I will be a French designer. Now I am an international designer, I make my work alone. I am Philippe Starck."

Starck not only denies being a French designer, he denies that he is a designer at all. He aspires to a role as cultural figure, prophet, artist, and media star. "I have no interest in architecture, furniture design, industrial design, or interior design in themselves," he says, even though he practices them all. "They are just means of expressing myself, of saying what I want." Starck could, he tells you, be as happy expressing himself as a novelist, a songwriter, an aerospace engineer. "My job is to put soul into things."

He rankled other designers by boasting of how easily he tossed off three or four chairs a day, a building a week. He showed up in a suit of armor when he was made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters. He went so far as to exhibit a stool designed, he said, by his nine-year-old daughter, Ara. His new lamp collection for the Italian firm Flos includes a lamp shaped like the horn that is the Royalton's leitmotiv, perched on a tilted chrome stand like one that might support an airplane model. It is named Ara; Starck says she designed it while sitting beside him in an airplane. "I just reworked it a little."

"Sure, in he press he comes off as arrogant," admits , "but he's not. He is a down-to-earth, low-key guy. He is flamboyant, but he is not weird.

"You should see his home," Schrager says of Starck. "His house is so unassuming and so arty and so lovely. He has such a wonderful life with his wife and his kids. It is so charming."

"Ian came back," says Rubell. "He was getting married the next day."

"He had a big dinner party," Schrager goes on. "You know what he had on the table- He had sushi, French food, frankfurters, fruit and strawberries, lamb-we had some Polish dishes. It was all international."

"He had Pepsi-Cola," marvels Rubell. "He knew I love Pepsi-Cola. It was very thoughtful."

More than three years ago, Starck was hired by Rubell and Schrager. They had seen only pictures of his work and were intrigued by the Café Costes, in particular its bathrooms, above whose triangular sinks the management found it necessary to post a sign: NE PAS URINER.

But there was something more important: Starck, like Rubell and Schrager, had begun with nightclubs-and, like them, had left the night world behind. Rubell will speak today of someone he knows "from the night." In Starck, they also chose a man who had come in from the night.

In Paris, he was "the king of the night." He designed clubs-first the baths called Les-Bains Douches, then the club Main Bleu-and he spent plenty of time in them. "Stoned, drunk, I nearly died," he recalls. "Now, no more. I changed my life. In Paris, it was every night at Les-Bains Douches." More and more, work-the intercontinental, portable-fax, dynamic world of his work-has taken over.

"Drugs were interesting, but you can do that when you are young and strong. Acid is very, very good when you are young. Grass is always interesting. I don't take cocaine, because I am speedier than cocaine."

Five years ago, Starck moved from Paris to suburban Montfort-l'Amaury, 30 miles west of the city and once home to the likes of Victor Hugo, Ravel, Colette, and Guerlain. There, in a 25-room mansion, he lives with his wife and daughter.

"Now I work like a junkie. The work is like a drug. I live like a spider in my web, only with my tribe of friends. I am like a bionic machine to make ideas, not more. I am like one of those Japanese toy robots, with Brigitte at the controls. I am entirely out of touch with the real world."

Rubell and Schrager handed Starck a set of specs that began with a theory: Throughout history, there have been certain gathering places characteristic of their time. Schrager lists them: candy stores (back when he was growing up in Brooklyn), bowling alleys, coffeehouses, malls, discos, nightclubs, restaurants. And now, in late eighties New York, the hotel lobby.

"There are certain human urges that never change-the urge to mate, to socialize, to converse," Schrager says. "They've taken a different form, that's all. The form now is not loud music where you don't hear and don't communicate; it's where you converse."

"In the sixties, it was the rock stars," says Rubell. "In the early seventies, fashion designers. Then it was young artists. Now our gut tells us that the communications people are the group of the moment.

"Nothing," says Rubell, "sums it up better than this. I was in a restaurant, and the maitre d' said to me, 'Jay McInerney and Anna Wintour would be sitting at the same table where Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer were sitting five years ago.'

"The communications people-they could include a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist or somebody starting a fourth network-are the stars of the moment. We pick up on things like that. It's something we fell in the air. This is the group we are going after in the room."

With Morgans, the boys were attempting to get back in business and regain respectability after doing time in a minimum-security prison. The accent was on service, calm, and all-American faces. Now they are back in show biz.

"We have tried to bring entertainment, show business, to the hotel business," says Rubell. "It's like, we have air and how do we fill it-"

For answers, they look to Jay Gatsby's Long Island mansion, filled with guests of a mysterious and absent owner, but also to the lobbies of Catskills family hotels of the Dirty Dancing era, and the Plaza and tea, and the nearby Harvard and Yale and yacht clubs. The great model, of course, is the Algonquin, across the street, and its Round Table. But the Royalton plays more as parody than homage. It is, if anything, an anti-Algonquin.

It was a close but not always easy collaboration. "It is very treacherous to work with a foreign designer," Schrager is saying in the boys' office at their next project, the Century Paramount.

Those horn-shaped lights, for instance: Starck measured them one way and the construction people measured them another way. Nothing fit. He designed the bathroom makeup counters at 36 inches-but the American standard is 33 inches. The plumbing had to be imported. All the furniture had to be made in France and Italy.

"I believe there is an inverse relationship between practicality and talent," says Schrager. "The difficulty was he had too many ideas. Too many ideas is as bad as too few ideas. You have to have someone to take ideas and make them work. We had nine prototype chairs, and we sat in them to make sure which were most comfortable."

"I had to sleep on a hundred pillows," Rubell says. "It's like, we gave Philippe a script, and he made a great movie."

"Philippe is ecstatic," says Schrager. "This is his masterpiece, he says."

"I don't like building it up too much," says Rubell. "Let people decide for themselves."

"Steven is right," Schrager says. "I get a little bit too enthusiastic."

Low-key-that is Rubell and Schrager's mode now. There was no grand opening for the Royalton-it is not, after all, a nightclub-just a quiet opening of the doors.

"I never thought it would take so long," says Starck a few minutes after discarding an "unspeakably ugly" basket for the Royalton bathrooms.

"We have designed ten hotels to make this one. We will make a book of all the drawings. It is a roman.

"When you design a chair," Starck says, "you realize 95 percent of the dream. But with interior design, you can only get 45 percent of perfection.

"That is why it can be depressing to make interior design when you are a maniac. Because you dream, you dream, you work, you work, and at the end, you have the spoon and not the caviar." He breaks into laughter.

Starck began by spending a night each in ten of New York's best hotels and keeping elaborate notes. In one, he commented on the "depressing halls." In another, the ambience seemed like a hospital's.

Along the way, there were disagreements. Starck wanted to represent "the hidden, dark side of New York, the rats, the slums." He wanted to use the imagery of the snake-the snake in the garden of the Big Apple. "Ian was afraid," he says. "We argued for six months. That is why there is no more snake. It is all right; I think he was right."

But the snake did survive: the curving stair rails at the entrance and in the lobby. Starck unwraps a sample awaiting installation and shows the face. It is modeled after a Japanese architect, he says; but if so, the architect looks a lot like the extraterrestrials from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: long-necked, benevolent, and dreamy of expression.

Instead of the snake, Starck came up with that horn, which he uses everywhere. The horn is an appropriate and witty image for the place: a symbol at once futuristic and primitive.

But there is an edge too. You think of the bull dances at Knossos, of snake and bull cults, of vaulting bare-breasted women nearly impaled. It is Starck's latest version of implicit danger, of edge, the bare blade that has always been present in his work.

The handle of the knife in the flatware set he did for Sasaki looks as sharp as the blade, almost dangerous to touch. His three-legged chairs threaten to throw their sitters; the complex legs of his folding tables appear on the edge of collapse. One critic wrote that a Starck chair "has the sleek sharpness of a basking shark." The characteristic aluminum legs of Starck's furniture suggest spiked heels.

These edges began as wings-a legacy of those childhood years under the drawing table. And they carry the sense that the streamlined modern world of the thirties-the aerodynamic line of progress with which Starck grew up, the world as imagined from beneath his father's drawing board-is no less distant now than the palace at Knossos or at Versailles.

The future now is no longer sleek and chromed and impossibly romantic, but something precarious.

No wonder Starck's favorite writer is Philip K. Dick, whose tawdry, polyglot future worlds, like that in Blade Runner, tremble with paranoia. Starck named many of his furniture designs after characters in Dick's novel Ubik-people who are in suspended animation but believe they are living real and mobile lives, people who can imagine that they are everywhere when, in fact, they are nowhere at all. In Ubik, eternity is a product that comes in a spray can. The reader never knows whether the events and phenomena of Dick's novel are "real" or a vast and malign simulacrum in the mind of a narrator.

Starck does the same thing to aerodynamic and streamlined clichÈs as Dick does to utopian sci-fi clichés: He reveals them as dreams that verge on nightmares. Streamline becomes dreamline.

Rooms at the Royalton are entered from dreamy dark corridors, whose walls are painted "Yves Klein blue," after the French artist who rolled nude female models in blue paint. The carpet is the same color, edged with a pattern of swirling, cartoon-like ghosts drawn by Brigitte. "We broke the rules by making the hallways dark; hotel people say that is wrong," Schrager says. "But we thought it would be great-you come into your room and are sort of elevated."

"For the traveler," Starck says, "the room is your home, your harbor, your egg. It must be warm, secure. The room is made to feel solid and serious, like a Mercedes."

In a quiet fourth-floor suite-almost glowing in green-gray stone, mahogany, and stainless steel-Starck, at least, feels at home. He peels off his pirate scarf, then his black coat, and settles back into a little navy-blue easy chair, one of two chairs he designed for the room. This one is blocky, slightly reared back, but done up like a cocktail dress or a velvet evening jacket-and just as comfortable. The other is a relative of the Costes chair, a diagonally sliced cylinder of wood with three legs.

The room is a combination of thirties travel luxe and practicality. The beds are tucked a couple of feet into mahogany headboards reminiscent of Pullman cars and ocean liners. Portholes on either side hold lamps and vases. The phones are set in the wall next to the bed alcoves, with cords whose lengths have been carefully calculated to reach any point in the room. The room-service tables roll on little casters. Each room has a thirteen-inch Sony Trinitron television, set atop a special Starck-designed stand containing a remote-controlled stereo boom box and VCR.

Fifty of the 205 rooms, whose prices range from $190 for singles to $1,200 for a night in the penthouse suite, have fireplaces. The mantels are great flat arches of green-gray slate, accessorized with andirons that pick up the horn shape of the door pulls. Hanging from each mantel is a poker, a wavy snake/stake like a monumental twisted hatpin. The bathrooms include Starck's triangular sinks, along with beveled mirrors and huge, round bathtubs.

Each room sports a single candleholder set atop a strange wall sculpture, a shape somewhere between a wing and a horn. "Without fire," Starck says, fondling the icon, "there is no room, there is no life."

Three times each day, a new art-museum postcard will be placed behind the candle. The device is a sort of mock votary to art-"it is not art but information about art," Starck explains-and it takes the place of pictures on the walls.

"I don't believe in art on the walls. If the room is well designed, you don't need it. But this is very cheap and very elegant "

To find a wall color that would work with the slate, the reddish mahogany, and the steel parts of the furniture, brought in a paint expert who works on installations at the Metropolitan Museum. It took 36 paint jobs to satisfy Schrager.

"I wanted," Starck says, "to give the spirit and style of New York." The three main materials symbolize Starck's vision of New York: The gray slate is the same color as the rocks in Central Park. The mahogany recalls for him wooden ships in old New York harbor. And the stainless steel of the tables, chair legs, and bathroom stools (which had softened with terrycloth covers) stands for the edge, the blade he feels in the air.

"The form, the colors, the materials give a spirit: They are the letters and the words with which I speak to people," Starck says. "My job is to try to give soul to the product, to give the essence and some poÈsie. If we give the maximum of soul to the product, then the product will give us love, give us tenderness."

Now, he says, "I want to be classique. When you want to be timeless, you are obliged to mix times and places. Then you can be free."

After a few days in New York, Starck is feeling better. His bike is fixed-no permanent damage. But he must go-he is due in Seoul, then Tokyo. He has a meeting with Vuitton, then with the chairman of Asahi Shimbun. He consults a little sheet of fax paper listing his commissions and itinerary: a restaurant, an opera, a museum installation. Athens, Barcelona. But he is most interested in his own project. The onetime roi de la nuit is building himself a palace: a huge crystalline house, with walls of sheer glass and columns "from Brancusi" set in a vast checkerboard of pavement.

The house, near his present one, will be "like an airplane on the tarmac, and you are about to board," he says.

"I love the feel of the porte d'avion. There is a special wind there." Even at home, he wants to feel he is about to leave for somewhere else.

By the time the furniture finally arrives in the lobby, he is far away. When the hotel opens, Starck is gone, dashing to appointments on the Harley Sportster in his Tokyo office. It sounds strange, but in the lobby and its furniture Starck has done something close to traveling in time and culture. You don't know whether you are in 2500 B.C. or A.D. 2500.

Starck's strange furniture sits with surprising dignity in the lobby-radiating calme et luxe. Horn-shaped vases, filled with flowers, hang like amphorae from the wall, and Siamese fighting fish are happily ensconced in four fishbowls nearby. The shapes of the new, perhaps mellowed, classique Starck are a sort of surrealist neo-Baroque. "The furniture," Starck says, "is classique with a twist."

Beneath the bulbous seats of the chairs and stools, all soft oranges and blues, yellows and whites, the ancient-régime cabriole legs seem to be coming alive, turning into another variant on the horn or, like an aerodynamic nightmare, into twisted and nearly writhing shapes-insect legs wriggling their way out of Dali. Other chairs wear slipcovers like leather miniskirts. The edge is still there.

If he has managed to put a soul in the place, it is his own. If Starck has his way, the secret star of the Royalton's spaces-regardless of who occupies them-will always be Starck.