Hospitality Design - October 2017 - 56

perspectives

interview scott gerber
2. Collaborating with
Brooklyn firm Crème, Mr.
Purple's stellar views of
the New York City skyline
enhance the Lower East
Side-inspired design of
cement floors, timber
beams, and street art.
3. The Roman and
Williams-designed
Kingside, located in
the Viceroy New York,
embraces a casual
interior with a black and
white graphic palette
juxtaposing caramel
leather banquettes and
rich red barstools.

2
3

with Philippe Starck and David Rockwell, and
he basically coached us on how to do this bar
and helped curate it with us.
We opened the doors to the Whiskey as a
900-square-foot bar, and people who used to
hang out at Studio 54 were coming to this cool
little bar. Neither of us were married at the
time, and we figured if worse comes to worst,
we'd be drinking for free. We weren't thinking
about the money we were investing. We did it,
and it was a huge success.

Do you miss those days?

we opened with Ian Schrager, the Whiskey [in
the Paramount Hotel]. That was the start of the
cool bar in a hotel [trend]. Before that, nobody
was going to bars in hotels unless you really
needed a drink and were staying in that hotel.
We did SkyBar in LA with [Ian], and that's how
we ended up in LA. We did the Sunset Marquis
in LA, and in my prior life, I was a real estate
broker for Giorgio Armani. He had restaurants
in his boutiques that were in Boston, San
Francisco, Orange County, California, and
New York, and so we took over management
of all those. With W, it was really about Barry
Sternlicht coming and saying, 'Do you want to
partner with us and do this?' And then he just
started banging out hotels all over the place:

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October 2017 hospitalitydesign.com

New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago-we were
opening three or four a year.

How did your relationship with Schrager
begin?

My brother Rande followed me into [real estate]
and one of his clients was Ian. Rande was the
broker for the Paramount Hotel, and at the time
[nearly three decades ago], Ian was looking for
a bar to open, and so my brother brought him to
every cool bar in New York. Ian knew he didn't
want [to run] another bar in his property, so he
said, 'You guys seem like good guys, why don't
you do the bar, and I'll show you how to do it. I
can't own it, but I'll tell you how to do it, and I'll
bring in the designers.' That's how we ended up

A little bit. I was on a plane basically every
week, but it was fun. There was a time where
we had 40 bars, and it's like having too many
kids: You can't spend enough time with all of
them. Now we're more focused on making sure
the opportunities we decide to do are things
that we can dive into and that will be really
successful. We are making more now with
fewer bars and restaurants than when we had
more. We want to focus on what we really enjoy.

What's your secret to success?

At the end of the day, the differentiating factor
has to be the people who work with you, and
we've been fortunate to have great people that
have worked with us for a long time. I have
barbacks and bussers who have worked with
us since day one, whose kids work with me
now. That's a great testament. I look at work as
family. We treat everybody as family and as we
want to be treated. That's been the key: being
able to retain a lot of great people in a business
that typically is hard to retain people. hd
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