Ian Schrager Goes Public: “There’s Nothing More Boring Than a Room Full of Rich People”

Ian Schrager has spent nearly half a century inventing places people remember more vividly than the things they did inside them. With his late partner Steve Rubell, the Brooklyn-bred impresario compressed a cultural epoch into Studio 54’s 33-month original run — and then, improbably, did it again in a second industry. Morgans, which he opened in 1984 in New York, is generally credited with inventing the boutique hotel; the Royalton, the Paramount, the Delano and the Mondrian followed, and with them the ideas every design-conscious hotel on earth now takes for granted: the lobby as a social ecosystem rather than a waiting room, the bar as a destination for people who aren’t staying there, the hotel as a scene. EDITION, his long partnership with Marriott, exported the formula at scale. An entire category — “lifestyle hospitality,” a phrase he’d probably hate — is essentially his invention, franchised out to competitors who have made billions from it. Related Stories Lifestyle The Top 10 Costume Design Schools in the World Lifestyle Your Favorite Hollywood Hotspot? Guess Who Owns It.

The latest chapter is PUBLIC, built around what he calls “luxury for all,” and he is bringing it to Los Angeles inside a building freighted with somebody else’s mythology. The low-slung former motel at 8300 Sunset Blvd. was The Standard, which André Balazs opened in 1999 and ran until it closed in 2021. Balazs was Schrager’s erstwhile rival, chasing the same crowd through the boutique boom, and The Standard was his loudest answer to it: Guests checking in were treated to the view of young models in underwear lounging inside a glass fish tank behind the front desk. Until Schrager swooped in, the space had been sitting dark for five years.