Garden gnomes, gold teeth as stools, celluloid fish, girls in grey satin ballerina frocks, TV screens pulsing out vapid images, Dali chairs and Louis XV repro. If ever there was a collection of things extraneous to the living of everyday life, these would be among them. Only Philippe Starck would want to put them all in the same space.
More incredible still is that many people want to be in that space. Since 's new London hotel, St Martin's Lane, opened its outsized yellow glass doors (said to be the largest in Europe - a statistic almost as absurd and meaningless as a garden gnome seat) in September, they've barely stopped revolving. What seduces visitors first is undoubtedly the reputation of its older siblings, as well as its Alice in Wonderland allure. Morgans, the Royalton and the Paramount in New York, the Delano in Miami, the Mondrian in Los Angeles - Schrager's places are, in product terms, on a par with MAC, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. A certain set knows exactly what it's going to get. Even when Morgans was just a little bit out of favour, or the Delano's popularity was slightly threatened when its beach club was eradicated in an arson attack, if you said you were staying there, everyone would still want to know what it's like - a little like they do if you say you've met a celebrity. Indeed St Martin's Lane and co are the celebrities, the supermodels, the popstars of the hotel world. There are others more famous, more grand, more clever by far (The Savoy, the George V, the Pierre...). But none so instantly glamorous.
Owner is not instantly glamorous. He's a chunky New Yorker with a Brooklyn accent thick as jam that gets stuck in my tape recorder. He wears washed out jeans and a black nylon windcheater (probably Prada, but who'd ever know). He did his first hotel with Starck, the Royalton, in 1987 and now it seems unthinkable that he could work with anyone else. Yet he is fascinated by other, greater architects and interviews them and talks about them incessantly. Herzog & de Meuron are current favourites, but he also raves about Foster and Gehry.
Schrager, who trained as a lawyer, firmly believes in the relationship between art and commerce: or more specifically that art is good provided it is the sort that makes you money. "If you want to go outside the box," he says, "if you don't make money the first time, then you don't get the chance to be adventuresome again."
To anyone who has ever criticized the dimensions of Schrager's accommodation (the Paramount's 600 rooms are famously minuscule), learn from this. If you want to be somewhere outside the box, the box like size of your room is the price you pay. Starck's art has made great commercial sense so far. The time that would have to be invested in developing a similar relationship with anyone else would scarcely look good on the balance sheet. "With Philippe," says Schrager, "I have body language, I have sign language and we both know what each other means. With anyone else, there'd be the recycling of ideas they'd used before, the being commonplace, ideas not bubbling up like they should do." There is also the fact that Schrager, in the accepted style of the powerful, is walled by a phalanx of long termers, who have worked with him since the mid 1980s. There is Anda Andrei his terrifyingly stylish Romanian director of design who helps shuffle Starck's mad fancies into a buildable reality. There is Nathalie Moar, the steely Australian public relations person whom no journalist would ever wish to cross. And there is Michael Overington who first served Schrager as a bus boy at Studio 54 (the now legendary nightclub that Schrager ran with Steve Rubell in 1970s New York) and who now manages the building projects. Schrager and co put on a great show.
Discussion of Schrager projects is peppered - saturated even - with the word design. But Mr. Schrager, well, he has a little problem with that. "Design? It's PART of the idea; it's not the CENTRAL idea. That's why I bristle when people say this is a designer hotel. It's not about design. It's an emotional thing. A hotel must manifest something about the fabric of a city. About popular culture. To say it's designer, that's like saying it's special effects that make a film good. It must have content too."
Funnily enough, it is special effects that make St Martin's Lane good, and not design in its single-style, rule bound form. "It's not about a look," he continues, his accent gathering mass as his discussion gains momentum. "It's about an attitude. I don't think you can label what Philippe does. You can't say it's minimal. It's not Art Deco [pronounced ah-decoe]. It's not Baroque [bear-oke]. It's not really Post Modern. It's not really anything. It's random. It's freeform! It's hotel as theatre!"
The theatre of the guest rooms is their dainty whiteness and their simplicity, plus the architectural tour de force of a floor to ceiling window. The special effect is the mood light by the bed, which you can customize to any colour of the rainbow. The main expense is the bathroom, a luxurious limestone box with sandblasted glass doors for the shower and WC. The joke is the picture of the crown jewels inside the safe. The cuteness is the Do Not Disturb sign in the form of a fabric daisy chain. The larger rooms have white Eames La Chaise loungers and all the entertainment essentials - mini bar, hi-fi, etc. - stored in a cupboard in the shape of a cross, like a medicine chest. It's the first-aid cabinet of our times. They have begonias growing in pots attached to the wall, a nod to a certain kind of Englishness.
If the lobby is the hotel's main stage - it's certainly all lights and action - then the bedrooms are the behind the scenes, the territory of the privileged few (there are 204). "The lobby is to excite you. The rooms are to calm you down," says Schrager. But to go up is to know you have really arrived. To pad down the corridors past the pretty staff, and the equally pretty guests, to know that among the uniform blue doors are odd ones in coral, that room numbers are picked out on the carpet, that a red light on the door knob means vacant and green means engaged, these are the secrets of the place. To descend again and re-enter the lobby is like hitting a busy street on a hot day - the energy assails you. "There is," says Schrager, "electricity in the air."
Schrager's reputation as a hotelier has been in part founded on his reintroduction of lobby culture. To be dynamic, it has to be big and full of people; it's the equivalent of a grand station concourse for those who simply never travel by train. At St Martin's the lobby is huge. It might not he beautiful, and it certainly isn't architectural pleasing. It's suffused with yellow from an acidically painted curved wall - "Yellow is the colour of the millennium," according to Starck - and it is full of those ridiculous surprises, all those idiotic artefacts seeking attention. But it's done with such zest that you want to be taken along for the ride. "We are," avers Schrager, "in the entertainment business. You see all these unlikely pieces together and it tickles you." "Do you know what design is?" he says later. "It's a marketing tool. It helps us to get noticed. People see it, they want to write about it, they to come to see it. It communicates the idea that things are changing, the idea of difference, of movement. What is so exciting about Gehry did in Bilbao is the way he created this gigantic sculpture, and he used different techniques and he didn't use right angles, and you said, wait a minute, what's going on here and you got excited about it. We don't even know why we get excited about it."
Schrager's own excitement comes, you suspect, from setting himself ever higher goals, each one a small bid to change the culture. He's currently working on ten projects. The Henry Hudson, a hostel style set up in New York, will offer rooms at just $75 a night. The Miramar in Santa Barbara is a 15-acre resort "of a kind that has never been done before". The Sanderson in Berners Street, London - far larger and more glamorous than St Martin's Lane - will open in January 2000. The 1960s office building already comes with a terrific architectural pedigree (Grade II*, with intact John Piper stained glass), but Schrager's taken things one stage further by tracking down one of the original design team and showing him the plans. How thoughtful; how very very smart. For its guests, however, the unique selling point will be its urban spa. Come to London, shop, see friends, do business, and regenerate a mind and body laid low by the excesses of being rich and fashionable. "I want it to be the first, the best, I don't want anyone to take our idea." How can they, when he has so clearly got there first. That surely is the greatest of successes, to be competing against yourself.
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