The Washington Post | October 13, 1988

SUPERSTAR STARCK'S HIGH-STYLE HOTEL: STARCK DESIGNS AT THE ROYALTON HOTEL

Five years ago French architect and furniture designer Philippe Starck, 39, was well known only to the avant-garde design community when President François Mitterrand selected one of his chairs for the private quarters of the Elysée Palace and then commissioned additional pieces from him. Today Starck is the reigning superstar of French design, with commissions all over the world. With the reopening this week of the totally remodeled and refurbished Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, Starck's furniture and interior architecture will find a new audience-the style-conscious New York hotel guest.

By Judith Weinraub

If Philippe Starck, the 39-year-old reigning superstar of French design had his way, the 18th-century decor at the White House would be tossed out-banished as a relic of times gone by, a remembrance of things past.

"I think it's a shame to see la maison blanche with all that old decoration, and for everyone to be so proud of it," exclaims Starck with disbelief. "It shows a conservative spirit. If people live in a contemporary way, they will think in a more lively manner and understand what's happening today."

Starck ought to know. With the reopening Monday of the totally remodeled and refurbished Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, Starck's furniture and interior architecture (he prefers the term to interior design) will find a new audience-the style-conscious New York hotel guest.

As redesigned by Starck, the Royalton has been conceived along the lines of an enormous private house, with places to hang out-a restaurant, a library, a bar, a snack bar (a sushi bar without sushi, say the owners) and a well-equipped game room-on the ground floor, and bedrooms upstairs.

Necessities like a check-in desk and beyond state-of-the-art public restrooms have been discreetly tucked away.

The hotel is owned by Steve Rubell, , Philip Pilevsky and Arthur Cohen. Like Ruben and Schrager's first hotel venture, Morgans, which opened four years ago with decor by the internationally acclaimed interior designer Andrée Putman, the Royalton was imagined as a high-style home away from home.

"What we did here was to try to create this mansion in New York City," says Schrager. "The idea behind it was to get closer and closer and closer to being like a residence rather than a hotel. When you walk in, it doesn't even look like a hotel lobby."

"We'll even offer homemade hot chocolate to make you feel comfortable," adds Rubell.

Just as they did at Morgans, for the new Royalton, Schrager and Rubell looked through books and design magazines to find a designer who could capture the current moment. Starck was the one whose work they were attracted to. He had created immensely popular looks for clubs and cafes (La Main Bleue, Les Bain-Douches and the CafÈ Costes in Paris, and the Starck Club in Dallas), but had no hotels to his credit.

At least none that you could see.

In fact, he had designed a hotel over a decade ago in Beirut, but it survived for less than 24 hours. "The day it was finished, the Syrian Army arrived and occupied the hotel," says Starck wistfully. "That same night it was destroyed, but it was the most beautiful hotel in Lebanon."

Visitors to the Royalton will not be disappointed. Although the hotel has been reworked with 14 different room configurations, they will be unified by Starck's beautifully modulated color scheme, furniture and furnishings: bisque walls, pale gray-beige carpeting and upholstered banquettes, gray-green slate, midnight blue armchairs, mahogany bed enclosures and furniture, white woodwork, and steel and glass accents.

Many of his decisions about the choice of materials relate directly to what he sees as the New York situation. To ground the visitor on the island of Manhattan, for example, he has employed the gray-green slate of Central Park in the bedrooms. The walls of the room stand on that slate trim, not on the carpet.

"You are alone in New York. You need a shelter," says Starck. "New York is not easy. You need a home. That is why the center of the room is the bed, but a bed enclosed by the mahogany wall because there you are inside your own shell. The wood is thick and strong."

With that same romantic reasoning, Starck wanted a fireplace in as many rooms as possible. "There is one main axis-the bed and the fireplace," he explains. "There is no life in a home without a fire."

Above the fireplace is a small horn-shaped shelf that supports a candle and an art postcard that be changed twice a day (and which will be part of the design of every room, even ones that do not have a fireplace).

Although the entire room has been assembled like a sculptural stage set, apart from Starck's furniture-the armchair, a mahogany desk/vanity with a table that swings away from it for dining, a matching chair with three legs, one of them steel, a mahogany and steel occasional table, and the tightly upholstered banquettes-the postcard will be the only "art" in the room.

I want people to look at the postcard and say, 'Oh, what is this,' says Starck, who has selected 5,000 of them for display. "If they like it they can keep it, or send it to a friend."

"But the room must be strong enough to be seen as a piece of art in itself. And the architecture is in the bathrooms."

The bathrooms, many equipped with circular tubs, are indeed unlike ordinary or even luxurious hotel bathrooms. Fitted out with multiple mirrored walls and built-in glass countered vanity tables and stainless steel sinks, they are likely to satisfy the most demanding bathroom connoisseur.

A master marketer of himself and his own designs, Starck has achieved about the closest you can come to star status in the design world. Nonetheless, he scorns work that smacks of passing trends, and prefers doing public commercial spaces to private ones. He also likes sharing his furniture designs with a large audience-not just French presidents or people of privilege.

To that end, he designs three products each year for 3 Suisses, a mass-market French home furnishings mail-order catalogue. One of them was a desk like Danielle Mittertand's. "She is a writer who works at home," explains Starck. "If she needs it, many other people who work at home need something. Why not use her intuition for everybody."

His self-image, after all, somehow fits with the Socialist president who gave his work more prominence, and to whom he gives full credit for revitalizing French design.

"If I could make a résumé of what I am, it would be a democratic dreamer," Starck explains. "I don't dream to help 10 beautiful people. I work for everybody."

And would he be interested in dreaming up a few designs for the new president of the United States?

"With pleasure," he says. "Immediately."