Macho Chic > Julian Schnabel's NYC Boutique Hotel

[Brookside]

excerpts from 2 very different opinions on 80's art-star Julian Schnabel's foray into interior design.
Hey, it's August, it's hot, and there's no news on the "2"...

MACHO CHIC > Bring Out the Stuffed Moosehead!
It's a Guy Thing...You Got a Problem With That?


The foyer of the newly renovated Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan-a truck-tarp painting by Julian Schnabel hangs in the back room.


FROM afar — say across the plastic-shrouded expanse of a Manhattan hotel lobby, under construction and crowded with architects, builders, photographers, a documentary film crew and associated hangers-on — Julian Schnabel looks a lot like Philippe Starck. He moves the same way, parting the crowd with a brooding glance when in private thought, or drawing it to him (and then dispatching it with new purpose) when he has a point to make. Mr. Schnabel, the painter, sculptor, director of films and creator of music, shares an impatient intensity, a commanding bulk and a guru’s ineffable charisma with Mr. Starck, the legendary French designer of everything from ear swabs to spaceports. They even have the same wild hair.The work that recently brought Mr. Schnabel to the chaotic center of the lobby in question marks another point of overlap with Mr. Starck: both have now designed the design-intensive interiors of Ian Schrager hotels.

Mr. Starck, of course, has done numerous hotels for Mr. Schrager, the developer and onetime nightlife impresario, including iconic interiors for the Paramount and Royalton in New York and the Delano in Miami Beach — jet-set destinations, in their 1990’s prime, that pioneered a style imitated endlessly around the world and cemented Mr. Schrager’s success as a hotelier and an arbiter of taste. Mr. Schnabel has now completed his first Schrager project, the newly renovated Gramercy Park Hotel at the bottom of Lexington Avenue, which will open on Tuesday amid healthy buzz, including some speculation as to whether Mr. Schrager’s new look will prove as influential as his last.

With an old-fashioned luxury inflected by modern art, the hotel is an abrupt departure from the slicker, more impersonal, often sci-fi chic that Mr. Schrager and Mr. Starck developed in their projects together over nearly 20 years.“The Schrager-Starck hotels reshaped the landscape of the small urban hotel,” said Mayer Rus, design editor of House & Garden magazine, who has followed developments in Mr. Schrager’s empire for many years. “Now, in 2006, the world is littered with the hell-spawn of that marriage: every city has cheesy boutique hotels that primp and strain to convey their hipness in different, disagreeable ways,” he added, many characterized by “poor service, pointy furniture and poseurs galore.”

Mr. Schrager, never one to be caught too long off trend, agrees. “Those hotels are over,” he said, referring both to the imitators and the originals, which he no longer owns.

The selection of Mr. Schnabel — who has done only small interior projects for friends, as well as his own houses in Greenwich Village and Montauk — seems to serve Mr. Schrager’s need to put forward a new of-the-moment look. “The great genius of Ian Schrager is his ability to read — and ride — contemporary culture,” Mr. Rus said. “If you look around at the culture today, art is what’s hot, and there’s no greater decorator in the art world than Julian Schnabel.” Still, with only a few outsiders having been through the hotel so far, whether Mr. Schrager has succeeded this time remains to be seen.

I don’t really feel like talking about this,” Mr. Schnabel said one recent morning at the hotel, again evoking the often evasive Mr. Starck. He was pacing the crowded lobby in sneakers, baggy shorts and a Western checked shirt, waiting for the delivery of the hotel’s estimable collection of plus-size art (much of it his own), adjusting the placement of the chairs and side tables (also heavy on the Schnabels) and generally helping to put the finishing touches on the $200 million project that has transformed the old Gramercy Park from a bastion of musty authenticity with wall-to-wall carpeting and Swedish meatballs in the bar.

Ever the rebel, Mr. Schnabel rejects the obvious term for someone who does what he has just done at the Gramercy Park Hotel. “I’m not a designer, but I’ve always built things,” he said. “Basically I’m a painter, and this is something that really isn’t that hard to do.”
NYT/Guy Trebay



The Boutique Hotel Gone Wrong

By JAMES GARDNER
NewYorkSun
August 8, 2006
The world is full of people who possess not the slightest measure of visual tact. As long they decide to become accountants, riveters, or matadors, this makes no difference to their lives or those of the people around them. The problems start, however, when they presume to take up, say, painting. And, of course, all hell breaks loose when they imagine they are interior designers.

And then you have Julian Schnabel, who fancies himself both a painter and an interior designer. In truth, he is neither the one nor the other.As if any further proof were needed beyond his most recent show at Gagosian, visit the newly renovated Gramercy Park Hotel, which opens today, in its grand pre-war structure, on Lexington Avenue and 21st Street. Ian Schrager, the famed hotelier and merchandiser of lifestyles, thought it would be adorable to give Mr. Schnabel the free run of the place, to allow him to be as "visual," as "rebellious," as "Julian" as he wanted to be. The result is a catastrophic amateurism that, until this morning, had never been seen before in a first-world hotel.

As you enter the lobby, the place is chock-a-block with all manner of dopey incongruities and clashing asymmetries that look as if they'd been created in conformity with a sitcom's notion of how crazy contemporary art behaves. The first thing you notice is a massive chandelier fit for the Paris opera. But the effect is abruptly ruined by the ugly pillars that surround it, clad as they are in the unvarnished wood of a ski-lodge. Over checkered floors are the halves of two very mismatched carpets, and throughout the hotel, in the curtains and upholstery, are those lengths of velvet Mr. Schnabel has used in his paintings and which he apparently imagines to be his signature. In one of the bars, more unvarnished wood gets the chance to clash with a Renaissance-style fireplace and, in another room, with pea-green walls and blue velvet stools fringed with gold braid. As for the bedrooms, I sense that Mr. Schrager thought them too important to be left in Mr. Schnabel's wayward hands and so consigned them to grown-ups, who worked in accordance with Mr. Schnabel's "daring" taste. These do look a little better, a little more sober, and are probably pleasant enough to wake up in. More materially, their views of Gramercy Park are worth whatever is being charged.



But even with that admission, this debacle is especially startling and regrettable, given that Mr. Schrager virtually invented the idea of the boutique hotel with the help of the great Philippe Starck.The Hudson, which opened five years ago at Ninth Avenue and 58th Street, is a supreme example of the art form. A summa of sumptuous good taste, its every subatomic particle has been charged with that unerring visual power that makes Mr. Starck one of the foremost designers of the age. The Gramercy Park Hotel is not so different in conception from the Hudson — except that it is lousy rather than good. You find here the same sort of jauntily themed bars, the same displays of art books and designer tables and lamps, the same obligatory flat-screen televisions and sparse bathrooms. But to compare Mr. Starck to Mr. Schnabel, even allowing that they belong to the same species, is like comparing Hyperion to a satyr or, to quote the architectural critic Henry Reed, Pegasus to a Percheron. In Mr. Starck everything is intelligence and understatement. Even the opulent overstatement of some of his unanticipated accents has an understated afterglow that flares in the mind a second or so after it is encountered. With Mr. Schnabel, by contrast, everything is braying, spluttering bombast, especially in those moments where he thinks he is being subtle.

Mr. Schrager apparently decided to engage Mr. Schnabel because he is so very contemporary and cutting edge. In fact, the entire Gramercy Park Hotel feels weirdly like a mid-1980s time warp, for that was the instant of Mr. Schnabel's fleeting spasm of cultural relevance. Not only is he an artifact of that vanished age (who has not progressed artistically since then) but the artists he has put up on the walls of the hotel — himself, his late friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the inevitable Warhol — have long since acquired a dreary "blue-chip" stodginess.

What is really depressing here is that by the time the beau monde begins to swamp the place sometime this evening (and especially after the hotel's restaurant opens in the fall) it may be doubted whether any of them, even if sober on arrival, will recognize just how graceless the premises are. All they will understand is the force of that fugitive "nowness" that somehow attaches to everything Mr. Schrager does.