The Herald | December 3, 1995

ABSOLUTELY DELANO

The Rules Are Different At The World's Most Fabulous Hotel, Where Cool Is So Unreal It's Real.

By Lydia Martin, Herald Staff Writer

A high hedge ensconcing an unpretentious blue door is all that divides the vernacular from the surreal on Collins Avenue.

It begs for a warning sign: Abandon all ties to reality, ye who enter here.

Step off the sidewalk and you are seized. In a South Beach second you are free-falling into the urgent chic of the stark white Delano.

It might well be the hippest hotel on earth, there at the end of unrefined 16th Street. On one side of the hedge is the humble 35-cent cafecito, the tourist shops that hawk flower-print bathing suits. On the other, an ethereal place shrouded in gauze-white curtains where the absolutely fabulous meet the wannabes.

Side-by-side with celebs

In this place, you could find yourself chomping granola next to k.d. lang at the faux kitchen counter one day, slathering cream cheese on bagels alongside Kate Moss the next (noting that: wow, the waif can wolf it down).

One day you're locking eyes with Jack Nicholson as he passes through the dim lobby, the next you're making small talk in "orchard" with David Geffen (as in Geffen Records, as in one of the first to console Yoko after John's murder.)

Suspending disbelief is the only line of defense for a mere mortal entering the theater of the Delano, the newest installment by haute hotelier . This is, after all, the man who gave us Studio 54 as the quintessence of the '70s disco-induced hedonism.

He still has a knack for the now.

In the continuum of space and time, there is sometimes a critical juncture, a synchronism that yields the sublime place at the sublime moment. It is the Delano, this second.

Reincarnated Deco tower

This 238-room Deco tower, built in 1947 and named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has been reincarnated-for $22 million-as the essence of the 1990s. It is self-indulgence kept in check by morning-after sobriety. This place reminds: It's been a long time since Studio 54 closed and Schrager did time for tax evasion.

The drink of choice at the Delano is Evian, the first order of the day a workout in the David Barton gym. This place would not dream of placing chocolate on your pillow at turn-down time. Instead, it supplies a fresh green apple each day, perched on a silver sconce.

Guests loiter with studied disaffection. It's like a sanitarium where noise is banned and emotion is kept on ice. Interaction among the patients seems to be discouraged. You can spend six hours by the pool and never even hear a splash.

Only the uncool would talk about this place while they're in it, or gape at the celebs, or comment about the small portions on the dinner plates.

"The Delano is the kind of place where nobody is going to walk up to Demi Moore and ask her for an autograph," says manager David Miskit.

In fact, she is in the hotel right now. But she hasn't made any appearances.

Meet designer Douglas.

It is in this milieu that we encounter Douglas Somerville, 37, an interior designer from Vancouver who can make things happen with a flash of his designer smile. Where the pearly-whites fail him, the Platinum card kicks in.

He is at the Delano doing the thing Delano people do best.

He is working it.

He has agreed to meet us for an afternoon cocktail at the spot Delano designer Philippe Starck calls his salon d'eau, as in, the water salon, as in, the pool. It is a 150-foot sheet of flat blue water that perpetually brims over, one inch deep in the shallowest end, five feet at the deepest. It is intended to dissuade anything as prosaic as laps-the idea is to luxuriate in wetness. Under the surface there are strains of classical music. Not that anyone who first encounters it will look surprised.

Today there is a chorus line of perfect boys sunbathing in the neat row of lounges that fringes the salon. Most are bronzing for the White Party. None of them is Douglas. Douglas, we cannot find.

We make our way to the poolside bar, on the verge of aborting this mission when he peers from around a wall. He is on a mercifully hidden pay phone, massaging clients in Canada.

Working all the timeIt might seem onerous to be doing business while on vacation, but Douglas Somerville is most certainly not on vacation. Don't let the skimpy swimsuit fool you. He is working every contact and every party, and getting about three hours of sleep each night.

"I don't ever need any more than that," he announces triumphantly.

He excuses himself once he's had his frozen strawberry daiquiri, disappearing behind the wall again.

We meet the following evening, at the Calvin and Kelly Klein event-of-the-season. Of course, the party could unfold only in one setting: the Delano "orchard."

Under 80 skyscraping Washingtonian palms, you find a madcap green where full-length mirrors lean against tree trunks, indoor lamps swing from branches, a marble kitchen table with mismatched chairs stands over an area rug made of tiles. There are curtained cabanas where your entire party can sprawl, harem-style. And giant lawn chess.

If Lewis Carroll were alive, this is where he'd winter.

Today it is spilling over with people draped in understated black chic. You can tell the hotel's handpicked staff of pretties because they are in white, head to toe. In fact, don't ever get caught wearing white at this place. Someone will ask you for towels.

Queen on a throne

It is a celebrity wonderland tonight, the very-divine mingling with the very-impressed while Kelly Klein autographs copies of her new underwear book. She is in a sleeveless seafoam mini that perfectly matches the pool-chair-for-two where she spends the entire night. Beside her throne is a bottle of Evian, chilling in a silver ice bucket.

Here comes Calvin, in a faded gray T-shirt and rumpled khakis. (Dressing up at the Delano would be gauche. It is a place that lives by a restrained aesthetic, a philosophy that only those who don't have it flaunt it.)

We ask Calvin what he thinks of the place.

"I'm going to give you one sentence," he warns. "It is the best hotel in the world."

Really? What makes it?

"One sentence. It is the best hotel in the world." With that, he marches off.

His wife, Kelly: "It is like Havana in the '40s. Very sexy and elegant."

David Geffen: "I think it's very stylish. But I'm looking for some friends. Excuse me."

Young actor Stephen Dorff: "I love it. It's like I'm in a different era. But some people are looking for me. Sorry."

Madonna: OK, so we don't talk to Madonna. But she is here, in a prim black-and-white flecked Chanel suit. She arrives at the height of the night, an entourage of muscle-men keeping the frenzied paparazzi at bay. (The camera-toters have been quite subdued, until she shows up.) She strolls the length of the green to grant a lingering photo-op at Kelly's side.

Then she retires to dinner on the terrace of the hotel's Blue Door restaurant, which she, of course, co-owns.

In the spirit of nothing-more-to-see-here, the party instantly dies.

A private party

Douglas invites us up to his room for a pre-disco cocktail. A small selection of people he has just met are already up there, decoratively draped across post-modern furniture, sipping vodka and cranberry juice out of martini glasses.

Room 915 is just like every other room in the Delano. Blinding white.

The floors are clinic white. The bed is on a white platform, dressed in white linens. A cushy white window seat runs the length of one white wall. A white orchid rises from a white pot. The TV, the stereo, the fridge, all white. The Euro-bathroomÖ

The whiteness makes the dozen pairs of brand-new shoes lined up beside the white writing table in Douglas' room stand out like, well, like Baby Ruth bars floating in a pool.

Douglas has packed a total of 20 pairs of shoes for a week-and-a-half stay. The pairs in the middle of the room are spillover from a stuffed closet. He showed up at the Delano with eight pieces of luggage.

"I grew up very poor, on a farm. I didn't have my first pair of new shoes until I was 13." He retells this story to anybody who brings up the shoe thing.

His own ice bucket.

Douglas loves to entertain, whether he is at home in his Vancouver penthouse, or in a hotel. (By the way, he happens to have with him a 1991 Canadian interior design magazine that features his pad.) One of his suitcases is strictly for the caviar dishes, the silver ice bucket, the martini glasses, the gourmet coffee maker, the table linens.

The whole time he's been at the Delano, he's been fighting with housekeeping, which keeps confusing his prized possessions for hotel stock. Each time they clean his room, they take something. He hasn't seen his etched wine glasses in days.

"Sometimes you just want something nicer than whatever the hotel can bring up," says Douglas, who says he made his money on furniture stores. He says he closed them this year to devote more time to designing, and to open a new company, Simply Egg Whites. As in, bottled egg whites for the health-conscious. He keeps two bottles on ice in his room.

By Day Two, you have become part of Douglas' inner circle. He has invited you to spend time at his place in Vancouver.

"I have a Filipino housekeeper who makes the most wonderful food," he tells you.

He has confided in hushed tones about the only woman he ever loved.

"She is still a good friend," he says.

It seems natural to be discussing intimacies with a man you don't know. It is the way here, a place where artifice warps into truth and truth swells out of proportion.

Nothing surprises

This is the kind of place where waiters who probably can't afford the $175 to $450 rooms frown on anyone who dares order tap water. A place where the gift-shop clerk doesn't bat an eye when a woman asks for a Cuban cigar.

She simply takes your credit card and hands you a clipper to cut off the end.

Aren't Cuban cigars illegal, you ask?

"Yes. Of course," she responds dryly. As in, we have a humidor stuffed with Monte Cristos and Cohibas-you think we're, like, worried?

The rules, indeed, are different here.

Even the lobby furniture challenges you to drop conventional notions. Near the entrance is a metal bed draped in a faux fur, where free-thinkers sprawl while they wait for whatever. Resting against a far wall is an oversize sofa with a towering winged back that makes loungers look like shrunken Alices. A gigantic lamp shade hangs over the front desk.

South Beach trumpets this place as a beacon of fresh chic that arrived, with perfect timing, to wave off the critics who would say the Beach is on the verge of losing its cool.

Only problem is, the Delano won't lay claim to South Beach.

It stands there on the edge of the Atlantic, in staunch disavowal of the Rollerbladers and the pastel pinks.

Says Schrager: "The Delano has nothing whatsoever to do with South Beach. Not because it's a rejection of what South Beach is-the scale of the whole area makes it a special place on earth, the way Venice is, the way Soho is, the way Old Havana is. But the Delano is more about southern Florida than a certain social phenomenon."

In other words, Schrager doesn't want to succumb to the fickleness of a fad. You won't find a single Rollerblader here. He reinvented the Delano as a self-contained resort that could sustain its own magic.

"Fashion is very transitory," he says. "Those things come and go. We did not conceive the Delano as part of South Beach."

Perhaps that is why the blue door at the front of the hotel does not open.

"It's just for show," shrugs a valet who obviously retains perspective.