ABSTRACT
When the New York entrepreneurs Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, founders of the famous Studio 54 nightclub, decided to create hotels, one of their stated ambitions was to provide urban interiors, extensions of the city, where culture could happen. The pair had set quite different standards for hotels: with Morgans, whose interiors were designed by Andrée Puttman (1985), and the Royalton hotel, with interiors designed by Philippe Starck (1988). Morgans was a refuge of chic, delivered cheaply and acquired at a bargain; Royalton (all the hotels were known by a single name, redolent more of a club than a hotel) was to revive the idea of a literary gathering place, in the manner of the famous Algonquin Hotel (‘home’ to Dorothy Parker’s set) situated across the street from it. Royalton differed significantly from the Algonquin. Rather than invoking a salon, its lobby assumed the form of a catwalk, gawped at by a lounge set a few steps below, along its entire length. The catwalk was an invitation to glamour and spectacle, essential ingredients to all Schrager–Rubell projects, beginning with the nightclubs: Studio 54 (1977) and its reincarnation, the Palladium (1983).
