Andrew Zobler, founder and CEO, Sydell Group

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Growing up was hospitality or design part of your life? Was it something that intrigued you from an early age?

Andrew Zobler: Yes and no. So, when I was a kid, one of the things that I actually used to do a lot is draw. I don’t think I’ve ever said this in public, but one of the things that I used to do is draw maps all the time. I used to create these imaginary cities, and I figure out where the roads would go, what buildings would be where. I think I did that from age 5 or something. So I always had this interest in building things or creating things, but I think it was much later that it became focused on hotels.

When I was a kid, a couple of things stand out. I remember when I was about 8 years old or so going on vacation for the first time with my family to Miami beach back in the ’70s. I’m going to date myself. I remember staying at the Doral Hotel, which back then was really, really fashionable. I thought it was just the greatest thing in the world, that all you had to do is say what room you were in and you could have anything you wanted. So I just thought that was great. You’d go to the pool and you could sign room 1010 and you could get a cheeseburger or whatever. And I thought that was awesome. So, that started to intrigue me.

And then my grandmother was afraid to fly. So, everywhere she went, she went by boat. Every summer she would generally go to Europe on a buying trip, and I would go with her. I would stay on some in the great hotels in Europe, and that was my first exposure, and I always loved it. I love travel. But at that time in my life, I really was always thinking I was going to be in business or a real estate developer or something like that. Hotel’s really came a little bit later, and a little bit by accident almost.

I started as a lawyer. I was representing a number of people in the hotel space. And then early on, I started representing Barry Sternlicht at Starwood back before he had bought what became the Starwood the people know today before Marriott acquired it. So it was basically what they called a paired share REIT, and he was running around buying hotels. I did a lot of the acquisition work and really fell in love with that. And then Barry asked me to come work at Starwood, and that was really my first foray into the hospitality business.

So it just happened, and then of course I fell in love with it, and made a life [out of it]. It was the coming together of my fascination with putting deals together and with design and with hotels was the first time that that really married. Before they were really disparate things. I always loved design. I was always interested in art, I was always interested in antiques, and I have my business, which was about putting deals together, and they were quite different. When we did the Ace New York and the Ace Palm Springs that was really the first time when I started to really think about design and connection with making a living.

SSR: Let’s go back a little bit. With Starwood and Barry, what was it like? I mean, because you were there at the very beginning, so what was it like working with him and building this new company that was changing the landscape of it for the industry?

AZ: It was crazy. It was pretty crazy. For me personally, I basically spent the first 10 years of my life communicating with people in words. When I went to Starwood, we probably did about, literally, 100 deals that year. And I probably had, I don’t know, 10 or 12 or 14 people who were, in theory, working for me. They all communicated in numbers. So, that was the first to work. When I started thinking about numbers as basically a way to tell a story; You’re just telling a story in numbers rather than in words, it clicked, so I figured out over time how to be able to tell a story in numbers.

But Barry’s a great genius. I loved working with him. I’m still very friendly with Barry. I think he is unique in being able to have a great vision and be able to carry out that vision, and the idea of basically linking lifestyle to a large reservation system was his, and it was a brilliant idea. I was there in the room the day he made up the name W. A little bit like us, people may think that Barry sat around and said, ‘I’m going to create this brand and it’s going to have 100 hotels,’ it’s really not how it happened.

What happened was, he had bought a bunch of real estate cheap in New York. I think they were Doral Hotels, I was trying to remember. Three original W [hotels], and you had to figure out what to do with them. And that’s really where the idea of W came from. Actually, all of the original W’s were owned by the company. The first one that wasn’t owned by the company was W Union Square. I was living on 15th Street, about three blocks away and was fascinated by that building. I made that deal over a weekend. We basically didn’t sleep with Jeff Blau, who’s now the president of the Related Companies. We fought over every point and he brought it to Steve and I brought it to Barry on a Monday morning, and they signed it. And that was the first W that was not a Starwood owned, and probably it was a big catalyst for the brand. It was probably the best W early days and still a good hotel.

SSR: After working for Barry, you went and worked with André Balazs, correct?

AZ: I did. So basically, the way that happened was, Barry’s always been obsessed really with anybody who’s doing things in the lifestyle space and has probably tried to partner with or acquire just about everyone who’s any good. I’ve probably been to 100 meetings with Barry with Ian Schrager and that kind of thing. Of course, nothing ever happened.

Barry had this idea to bring in Balazs, and we were going to buy Standard at the time. I think the only two Standards were in LA. That’s right. So there’s just two of them. And André was going to run W, which at the time probably had five hotels, it was early days. Barry and I thought it was this really genius idea, and everyone else in the company thought we were insane. Because we had all these different brands, there was Westin, Sheraton, all these things, and everyone’s trying to figure out who’s doing what to who in this big company.

So the idea of creating a little tiny brand where they reported directly to Barry and didn’t go through the rest of the company, people thought it was crazy, but I did really like André, we hit it off, and then ultimately did go partner with him. And that was really where I learned probably the most, in terms of what I’ve carried on, from André on working on that, working with him. He’s a genius and not prolific, very, very much focused on every detail, hard to let go for him. I’m better at letting go and can be more prolific and do more things. But in terms of creating great spaces and really good design, he’s probably, in my eyes, the best.

I remember, one of the things that really got me excited was, I put together the deal which became the Standard in the Meatpacking District. The High Line didn’t even really exist as an organization. It was still owned by the railroad, and the city was in the process of working with a small group of people to try and make it a park. And people didn’t know if they really would make it a park or what would happen. We met with Bloomberg, and it was the early days. It was really fun.

What basically was the most intriguing is we had a model, and we kept moving up the building around the way it would sit on the High Line. So there were 10 different ways that the building could be juxtaposed against the High Line, and I thought that was just the most fascinating thing. I still believe that the way I liked it is the way it happened. I advocated like, ‘This is how it should sit.’ It was the most exciting thing to actually see it get built.

SSR: It totally transformed the Meatpacking District in New York City.

AZ: It’s funny, it did. The debate I had with André at the time, and I’m not saying who was right or who was wrong, but André really wanted the Standard to go into the Lower East Side. He was convinced that that was really more of the vibe of the Standard. I didn’t disagree with him necessarily, but I fell in love with the site. And actually this is, I can’t believe I’m going to say this in front of a big audience, but I’d say one stupid thing. Basically when André came to the site for the first time, André’s comment, most of you have probably been to the Standard, but it sits on the High Line and looks out at the Hudson River and you can see most of Midtown. And André’s first comment was, and remember, the Meatpacking District back then was basically a bunch of meatpackers. It had none of the stuff you know. André’s comment was like, ‘Who wants to look at New Jersey?’

I was like, ‘This is an amazing site.’ Ultimately, we did sin against the brand a little bit, I would say, in the sense that it was probably, because of the neighborhood and the cost of the real estate, we did something that was a little more expensive than the scrappy Standards that had preceded it. So he was right about that. I mean, ultimately it was a successful hotel. But that’s one of the lessons learned for us has been, you know, we love Freehand because it’s always going to have a really good price of entry. For a shared room, it’s always going to be affordable, so it’s always going to skew a little bit young. And I think that’s really what makes Freehand exceptional. Because most people when they get into the lifestyle space and they get any kind of reputation, the first thing they do is they start going up. The first thing is really scrappy and creative and then money finds them, they build something new. I think Freehand will always stay true to its roots, which is really why we love it.

SSR: You said you learned the most from André, are there any things that you still keep with you from working with him?

AZ: I mean, there are all kinds of things. I think one of the things that André used to say, ‘When you get in trouble, shuck and jive.’ What he meant by that was, don’t let obstacles get in your way. If you really want to do something, just figure out how to get it done. He would say bob and weave or shuck and jive, or something like that. I think it’s a great attitude. Look, hotels are hard, and they’re hard to get financed, they’re hard to get built, there are many more that people announce than actually get done. And I think the way you get them done is by not letting things get in your way and being very directed at how you’re going to do it. Problems are definitely going to come up. There’s never been a hotel that we built that didn’t, at one point, look like it was going to die or look like it wasn’t going to happen. You keep pushing.

SSR: I’ve been lucky enough to have many of these conversations with you for the magazine. In one interview you had said that the beginnings of the Sydell Group that there was no grand plan in the beginning. You’re a developer looking for the right projects. Can you talk about how you transitioned from working with André to forming the Sydell Group?

AZ: Sure. There were a couple of steps. I mean, basically at some point, André was just a very different personality. I think I really wanted to build a company of some size, and André just really plotted at his own speed, and there was nothing that you could do to get André to go at a different speed than the one he wanted to go at. So I decided I’d really rather own 100 percent of myself than 25 percent of André. I went out and I thought, well, I didn’t really think of myself at the time as either a hotel operator or a hotel designer. My expertise was really in putting deals together.

So the first thing we did was Ace New York and Ace Palm Springs both with Alex Calderwood, who is another just incredible influence on my life and a real hotel genius. Both of which had different stories and neither of which were intended for Alex, but it all worked out. The idea of the transition was basically to be a developer. And then after we did Ace New York, and I was really very much involved with Roman and Williams, with Robin and with Steven and with Alex, creating the hotel, really every detail I was involved with. I really loved that process. So when we did the NoMad, I decided really more to prove it to myself that I would be the operator and oversee the design, and then people liked it.

So, it wasn’t really a grand plan, it just was like, ‘Well, I’d like to see if I can do it.’ If I could convince people to give me money to do it, I would. For a lot of different reasons that hotel really resonated with people. It was the right thing at the right time in the right place. It’s always better to be lucky than smart, but I think we were a bit lucky and I’d like to think a bit clever, and produce something that was really good.

And then after that, I think this is a good lesson for everybody in the room who has a dream of creating hotels. I think I went to about 20 different people, institutions, to find the money for NoMad New York, and it took the better part of the year and several times I thought we would lose it. When we decided ultimately to do the NoMad in Los Angeles, I picked up the phone, I made one phone call and I had the money. So, you got to get it done once. That’s the thing. You have to persevere. The first one is always overwhelmingly the hardest.

SSR: Well, okay, so many questions out of that. But, let’s go back to the Ace New York. Did you, for all those that don’t know, hopefully you’re a little bit about the Ace New York, but it really was a gamechanger in its own right and really transforming the lobby to become a destination. Almost to the point where you couldn’t even get into the lobby because so many people wanted to be there. Can you talk a little bit about creating Ace, and what did you expect? I mean, I guess you wouldn’t expect it to have that much resonance, but were you surprised? What was your reaction to how it took off?

AZ: We expected it to be good, but we didn’t expect it to be as good as it turned out to be. I think first of all, again, a lot of these things, I’d like to think we had this great insight, that we woke up one day and said, ‘We really need to have a lobby that will function 18 hours a day and we’re going to change the world.’ What happened was, we found an old building in a premier neighborhood that was really central to New York that actually had an incredible space. There were triple-height ceilings, there was a lobby. So we said, ‘Okay, well, what are we going to do with this space?’ So we said, ‘Well, it really should be a giant living room for the neighborhood. That was the idea.

We literally, and this was a Roman and Williams thing, they found an entire apartment on Park Avenue that had been reassembled, and we actually built in and reconstructed it in the lobby. That was where the backbar was. But early days, and I remember this distinctly, a lot of people probably know Ken Friedman, probably for the wrong reasons. But Ken is actually a very smart restaurateur, not withstanding. Ken was really friendly with all of these rock ‘n’ roll stars, and we brought him into the Ace and he knew everybody in New York, especially in the music scene, so that’s why he was there.

I remember when we opened the hotel, we opened it in stages. The lobby was one of the first things done. It was before the restaurant was done, and we were sitting in the lobby, we’ve got to open the next day. It was gorgeous. Roman and Williams has done an amazing job, and Ken was like, ‘Well, who the hell wants to hang out in the lobby at 28th and Broadway?’ And I’m like, ‘Ken, that’s your job. That’s why we brought you here. Get on the phone and call everyone you know and tell them to come over.’

So, there was a U2 concert the following week, and Bono’s manager is a really good friend of Ken Friedman. So, he convinced them to have their after party that a concert that they did at Giant stadium at the Ace. And that was our de facto opening party. We literally had every rock ‘n’ roll star imaginable, came to the Ace and we’re all sitting in the lobby. I remember just pinching myself, because I was like, this kid from Long Island or whatever. It was 4 in the morning and there I was having drinks with Bono and Mick Jagger and I was like, holy shit, this actually is pretty fun. But that’s really how the Ace lobby got started.

SSR: That’s amazing. Going back to what you said about then wanting to do your own project and doing NoMad, what was the idea behind NoMad? It’s a block away from the Ace, just to give everyone perspective, in New York. What did you want to create with that hotel after the success of Ace?

AZ: Sure. First of all, people need to understand the context. So basically where the Ace was built, for a long time that neighborhood had been the center of counterfeit good activity in New York City. And there’s also a lot of drug dealers, but especially counterfeiters. The counterfeiters actually paid high rents because what they would do is they would set up a retail store and 15 or 20 of them would pay the rent. So the rent’s actually on Broadway really were high, even though they looked crummy. Basically they were paying higher rents than like Armani was paying on Fifth Avenue. And that’s one of the reasons the neighborhood had been so resistant to change.

We came in there, and the Ace was perfect because it was an outpost. It was the right response to that neighborhood. Cool kids coming to discover it. The fact that it was in a funky neighborhood meant you was self selecting, you had to know it was there, it wasn’t people wandering in. But once we did that, we said, ‘In for a penny in for a pound.’ If you’re going to create a neighborhood, one hotel is not enough. The building that became the NoMad was this really beautiful building. I think other than the Flatiron building, it’s probably the most beautiful building in the entire district.

We just fell in love with it. So we started to figure out how to acquire it, and it was only later that we figured out what to do with it. And I think their response was one to the architecture. It really looks like it’s a French-inspired building. So the building tells you that. And two, basically the thesis was, we wanted to do something that was in every way complementary to the Ace but in no way duplicative. So, where the Ace was very American, we wanted to do something European. Where the Ace was very super casual, we wanted to be a little bit more dressed up.

I think that the real moment for the NoMad was that a lot of people who had come before us in the lifestyle space, were very focused on being more actively of the moment, being cool, and being about sex. Particular André was like, ‘The Standard is all about sex.’ And for me, I’m more of, not that I’m opposed to sex, but I’m more of a romantic. I’m more romantically driven. It’s like, you send me flowers, it’s really good. So I wanted to be a little bit more about romance, and I wanted it to be a little bit more just straight up really wonderful service.

I think we were one of the first people that did our hotel that really was a straight up luxury hotel but was fun to be at. And we did it subtly, which we did it by changing the music. We did it by not putting tablecloths down. We did it by throwing up some artwork that you wouldn’t expect, and it was provocative. But these were all subtle moves, it wasn’t typical of the space before Ian Schrager. You’d come in and it was like, ‘Wow.’ The giant topiaries. These things were meant to be like, ‘I’m a cool hotel, in case you didn’t know. I’m a cool hotel.’

With the NoMad, it was just more subtle. I think what made it special is that it attracted such a wide range of people. One of the most interesting things to see was how the dining room functioned early days. So we got a great review from The New York Times early, and we were basically full from the time we opened, and we have been for six years, which is pretty great. You watch how the dining room would work. So early in the evening, around 6 o’clock, you’d see a lot of, and I call them the gray heads, which is me now. But you’d see a lot of people from Park Avenue, they’d come down, there’d be limos parked outside. They’d be having their dinner before theater, and then as the night would evolve, by 10 it was all downtown hipsters having dinner. It was great because we were serving, as you say in the restaurant business, three turns a day. Generally if you’re doing one and a half to two, you’re in good shape. We were just seating people at 6, seating people at 8, seating people at 10. You’d really see the diversity of the crowd and how the age would change over the course of the evening. It was a pretty special moment.

SSR: I remember when the hotel opened and the restaurant opened, there were all this fans who were, like, the restaurant doesn’t have its own name. The restaurant and the hotel have the same name. I think it was interesting because you brought back the hotel restaurant in LA, so can you talk a little bit about how you thought about that, and who you partnered with because they’ve gone on to be your partners for all the NoMads?

AZ: Sure. Essentially, it wasn’t that we woke up one day and we said, ‘The restaurant should have the same name.’ It was more that we were trying to search for the right food and beverage partner who would have the same passion for the hotel that we would have. It was actually somebody who was doing some kitchen design work for us. Knew Will and Daniel, and knew that they were looking to try and do something and actually made the introduction.

I remember sitting, back then I had a tiny little apartment in New York, which I love because it was probably about 500 square feet, but it was in the center of the Village and it had this terrace that wrapped all the way around the apartment, and you could see everything. It was not an apartment you could share with another human being. But as a single, it was pretty perfect. Now I have five dogs, three cats, and whatever. It’s not big enough for closet space, but it was great at the time.

In any event, we were sat in that apartment probably for, literally, eight hours. We just loved everything about each other. We had just this shared vision for what we would do. And in particular, it was a great marriage because having just developed the Ace, we were essentially trying to do something effectively fancy. And them coming from 11 Madison, they were slumming it to go to NoMad. So it was how we met in the middle to make that work and what the vision would be. So it was obvious the way that partnership was working that we should all be under the same umbrella and giving it distinct names would be challenging. So, it was just was a natural flow.

The other thing that’s interesting about that is where the name comes from. The first story that they wrote about us in The New York Times when we were developing the Ace, The New York Times described us as developing a hotel that was south of Macy’s. For those of you who don’t know New York, Macy’s is at 34th Street, and it’s Herald Square, and it’s really very pedestrian, Century 21, retail. And everything that’s really interesting in New York is really south of where the hotel is, not north of where the hotel is.

So we came up with NoMad for North and Madison Square Park, because we wanted everyone to think about where we were geographically in relationship to Madison Square Park and not in relationship to Macy’s. What’s interesting about it, it stuck, because the neighborhood was in need of a name. It was in between Flatiron and Midtown and Chelsea, but it wasn’t really defined. So, that was a fun thing.

SSR: Besides Will Guidara and chef Daniel Humm, you’ve also collaborated with Jacques Garcia on the design for not only New York, but also LA and Las Vegas, which we’ll get to, but how did you pick him and why was he also the right collaborator for you for this project?

AZ: Lots of things about Jacques Garcia, but, where do you start? First, the building was really very French. We thought we would work with someone French, and Garcia is probably the best person on the planet for classical French. But, I’ll tell you the story of how I met him because it’s a good story, and we’ve always had a great working relationship. By the way, I don’t know if anybody knows this, I don’t know why I’m feeling like I want to tell all day, but the original idea for using Garcia came from Stephen Starr.

We were talking to Stephen Starr about potentially doing the restaurant with us, which obviously we didn’t do. We were talking to a number of, or going to talk to a number of French designers, and Starr was obsessed with the idea that it would be Garcia. So the original idea sits with him, and I don’t know if he’s ever gotten public credit for, but he deserves it. In any event, we went to Paris to go meet him. His office is on the Tuileries and it’s quite grand. You go up the stair and there’s a woman sitting behind the reception desk, and she’s got hair that’s this high and she’s wearing quaffs of makeup. She has like 40 bracelets and three rings on each finger, and thinking of very, very French.

The first thing she says when—she’s a woman about 65, 70 years old—the first thing she says is, ‘Be very careful, the dog bites.’ So I’m thinking like, ‘Where else but in Paris, do you have a dog that bites in your office?’ In America, if they don’t bite, you don’t bring them to the office. So, I’m a really big dog person, so this was not to dissuade me. I basically got down on the floor in my suit, the dog comes over to me, and he’s sitting in my lap and I’m petting the dog, and obviously he didn’t bite me. Garcia comes out to be introduced, and we go in and we have this meeting with him. We conduct the entire meeting in English, and it was a great meeting. And then everybody in the office basically told me after, ‘Generally, when you work with Garcia, he never speaks English until the fourth meeting.’ So it was a really great meeting, and we just hit it off.

He’s wonderful to work with. He’s very open to ideas. Of all the designers we’ve worked with, interestingly, he may be the most famous, definitely the most expensive, and probably the most open to ideas. We found a picture of an apartment that he lived in when he was in his 20s, and it was early Garcia. It was a little more Bohemian, but had the early Garcia style in it. We said, ‘That’s what we really want,’ and we edited and edited and edited, and he tolerated it, which I think most of his clients were princes and kings and billionaires. And he would say, ‘This is the design, it is brilliant,’ and they would say, ‘Sure.’ We drove him crazy. But, ultimately, I think, he liked the relationship, we liked the relationship, and we got some really great hotels with him.

SSR: What do you think is the secret to a successful collaboration? What do you look for with all these designers that you work with? I mean, is it listening, is it the back and forth? What’s your key to success with designers?

AZ: It’s an alchemy of two things. It’s people who really will listen and people who really have their own mind. And I know that that sounds inconsistent, and it is a little inconsistent, which is why it’s much more of an art than a science. But I think if someone in the design world thinks that their way is the only way, that’s not going to be a good relationship. There needs to be more of a give and take and an exchange of ideas. But if someone also is just about delivering your vision and as wishy washy about their own sense of style, that’s also not going to work either. Really a perfect example, in a little bit I always say that it’s like when you get a Ferrari, your grandmother driving the Ferrari is different than Mario Andretti driving the Ferrari.

So it’s like when you work with Roman and Williams, for example, Robin can be very stuck in her ways. But I actually really like that, because she believes in a heartfelt way in what she’s designed, but she’s open. We talk. We’ve worked on six things together. We ultimately produce great things. And Garcia is the same. They both have a distinct sense of style. What I think we’re happiest with is when we’re editing that for a narrative. We’re creating a particular narrative and we’re working with them to edit it. So it’s those two things. It’s being flexible, but also really having a sense of style that you stand behind. And when you present an idea, you really defend it.

SSR: That makes a lot of sense. And you’ve continued with him. So he did Los Angeles and also the beautiful property here in Las Vegas. If you guys have not done over there, it’s not far. You should go check it out. But, how did the involvement with Sydell and Park MGM come about? Because it’s a great collaboration story I think.

AZ: It’s a bit of a story too. So Jim Murren, who’s become a great friend and mentor, Jim is the chairman and CEO of MGM. In early days, at NoMAd he used to stay with us on a regular basis, and he was very friendly with my partner Ron Burkle. Ron had originally introduced him to the NoMad. I remember Ron said that, ‘You should take good care of Jim,’ and I didn’t really pay that much attention to it, but we take good care of all of our guests.

Jim really, really loved the NoMad and they called and they basically said they were going to renovate the Monte Carlo, which was 3,000 rooms and would we pleased to do a NoMad hotel as part of this project. I basically said, ‘We would love to do something with you, but I can’t really conceive of a NoMad that it would exist in isolation in this large building and not have a direct relationship to everything else that was going on in the building.’ So it ultimately evolved into this idea that we would collaborate on the entire building together, and that they would be Park MGM and NoMad would be cousins and would have a relationship with each other.

That really made the project fantastic. Because for me, was like being a kid in a candy store, all of a sudden we love collaborations and all of a sudden the scale in Vegas being able to collaborate with 10 restaurant people instead of one restaurant group and multiple designers. We had a ball. They operate almost 45 percent of the market out here, so they really wanted us to do something different, not just repeat what they had done. They gave us an awful lot of license, which is not to say they never commented, but they were an active participant. But, we really were able to have a lot of rope to do what we wanted to do there. I’m really very proud of what we were able to accomplish there.

SSR: How did you translate the brand to Las Vegas?

AZ: Most of our hotels are more really idiosyncratic to their location. I think NoMad was really an example of where we tried to replicate, to some extent, what we had done elsewhere. But we did it in a way that we thought fit into the market here, because again, there wasn’t really a style in Las Vegas that was, what I would call, indigenous or intrinsic. Everything here is about fantasy and escape, but we just wanted to do it in our way, so that it wasn’t kitsch, it was hopefully sophisticated, but still was meant to basically take you on a journey, and it was mental. You walk in and you’re supposed to, if it works right, you’re supposed to imagine that you might be in New York or Paris or some combination thereof, and there’s that level of urban dynamism going on that is not typical of Las Vegas.

I do think that we accomplished what we set out to do. I actually think the public rooms, in the NoMad here, are the best of any NoMad. I think the dining room with a triple height ceiling, with the library, is maybe the best restaurant we’ve ever produced. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s worth going over to see. It’s this model after the reading room of a library in Rio de Janeiro, and it goes three stories up into the sky, and it’s full of books that we collected. In particular, we have all of David Rockefeller’s, or most of David Rockefeller’s collection, with all these inscriptions from him to his various friends and relatives, and you can pull them out and look at them in it. It’s really just one of the best things we’ve done.

SSR: Something like 20,000 books or something?

AZ: Very good, yeah. I think about 28,000. I haven’t counted, but that’s what I’m told.

SSR: Talking about local and having a sense of place, I think, to transition off of NoMad for a minute, the Line collection of hotels really is that ultra local, uber local feel to it. Can you talk a little bit about this brand and what you’re doing with it, especially the new opening that just happened in Austin and there’s one coming in San Francisco as well?

AZ: Sure. Everyone thinks our first love is probably the NoMad. As my mother would say, I love all, my children the same. But probably if we had first love, it probably would be the Line. And that’s because it’s the most Sydell of brands. It basically doesn’t have an aesthetic, it’s really an idea. And the idea is to create something that really feels appropriate and locally rooted for its building, for its architecture, for its neighborhood, for its city. That is the most fun for us. It’s limiting in the sense that you can’t just do 10 Lines a year, that will never happen. We’ll never be able to do that because they take so much work to be able to produce something that has that level of idiosyncrasy to it, but that’s what it’s about.

If you look at DC, it’s completely different aesthetically than the Line in LA. Austin has a little bit more in common because we worked with Sean Knibb on both, but still they’re really quite distinct. Austin’s really very much about the local environment and it’s on the lake there, and everything we did relates to the nature, the surrounding, the water, the Texas dirt, and how it all comes together.

We’re really excited about San Francisco. So new build, which is really, really hard to do in San Francisco, and it’s going to have a great roof. Fifth and Market are excited about that. We’re actually, we haven’t signed, but we’re pretty far along in a couple of other projects for Line. One is in New York within a grand bank building. One is in Atlanta and one is in Boston. We’re actually also, early days, we’re working on something in Detroit. So we are probably doing more with Line than anything else.

SSR: You mentioned Line DC, can you tell the audience a little bit about the building and what you transformed? Because I think it’s pretty impressive project.

AZ: Basically, the DC project is a great old church. About 60-foot ceilings. We just really fell in love with the space. It’s, for other people, it was set maybe in what people would think of as a secondary location in DC. Adams Morgan is not downtown. It doesn’t have a view of the White House. It’s not in Georgetown, but the neighborhood is a really funky, friendly, residential, and it’s actually pretty easy walk to Dupont Circle. So, we just fell in love with the building. It’s pretty special if you go.

One of the things that we did there, from a design perspective that we really love and we’d love to be able to duplicate if we can, is everybody, we learned this from Ace New York, everybody wants to have a party in the lobby, especially when the lobby is dynamic and fun. So we basically created a lobby there which has mirror images to the right and to the left. So basically it’s very easy for someone to have half the lobby as an event space and the other half to be open to the public, because it’s always really hard. People are always approaching us at the Ace. They would say, ‘I want to rent your lobby.’ At NoMad people say, ‘Oh, I want to rent the whole restaurant.’ We do it at NoMad probably four times a year, but we probably could do it 40 times a year where you can’t, because you can’t take away the lobby and the restaurant from your guests on any regular basis. So as a design move, we love that.

SSR: As an event planner, as my second job, I love that too. I mean, you get to see so much in all these different markets, how are you seeing taste changing in the realm of design and lifestyle hotels? How do you keep track of this ever evolving traveler to continue the success of Sydell?

AZ: There’s really two answers. One you’re going to maybe like and one you’re not going to like. The one you’re not going to like is, we’re less interested in really looking at what everybody else has done, and we’re much more interested in just what strikes us as interesting or people that strike us as interesting, or buildings that strike us as interesting. So I think we follow trends less than people might think. We’re not really seeking to build hotels that are of the moment, but we’re seeking to build hotels that just we think will resonate with people. That has a lot to do with judgment and instinct and personal taste. In terms of service, it’s hard for anyone to walk away from the room and say how I learned something from that. But it is how we think about it.

And then in terms of what trends, I think that there is a big trend. That is that basically lifestyle is becoming more and more important for larger hotels. It started just only in key urban cities that started relatively small. It’s grown to some smaller cities but still underrepresented in a lot of smaller cities. Where I think the frontier is, at least for us, is in larger hotels, that meeting space, so many of them are really not interesting. And, of course, in a large hotel, you have to be realistic. You’re not going to create the Mercer in 3,000 rooms, but I think you can do a lot better than other people are doing and make it much more interesting for the traveler.

One of the reasons of Vegas was so interesting to me was, in some ways Vegas is way ahead of the curve and some ways they’re way behind the curve. They’re ahead of the curve in the sense that they’re building these giant hotels with lots of meeting space that are meant to really be fun. You might argue with how they do it, you might argue with some of the execution, but they’re still trying to build the hotels that are fun for people to play in and also to meet it. It’s hard here to do things that are really cutting edge or of the moment or risky, because of the scale.

Because there’s so much money involved, people are much more low to say, ‘I’m going to take a chance on this or that.’ If you’re doing a hundred rooms, you’re much more likely to get somebody, ‘Okay, it’s not such a big bet, I’ll take a chance.’ And here I gave Murren and his board a lot of credit. Look, we didn’t necessarily go every step we would’ve, but they allow us to take quite a few steps and to see if it worked. Luckily, as an experiment it’s really working and people are liking it, and the room rates are what they’re supposed to be or better, and people are going to the restaurants and Eataly is jammed, so it’s really, really good.

But for me, that is the frontier which is going to other cities and doing hotels that have some scale and meeting space, but are also fun, and New York is my favorite example. Everyone in the room could probably name 10 hotels in New York that are fun to stay at, and about zero hotels in New York that are really great to have a meeting for 500 people. So this ability, we’re really trying to find something where we can do something of scale in New York that is also fun to stay at. More on that later, but it’s to come.

SSR: It’s a hard balance. That’d be amazing for you to pull off, and I’m sure you will. Let’s talk a little bit about Freehand, because you said before you’re doing things that resonate with people. I think Freehand definitely resonates, especially with today’s traveler, and how guests needs are changing. Can you talk a little bit about how Freehand came about?

AZ: Freehand, as I said, we really found this funky building in Miami and we thought it had a great campus. We said, ‘Well, what should we do with it? So this idea of shared rooms was, I think, the right response. Why Freehand is grown and why people, I think, really like it is, its youthfulness is preserved by the fact that we have shared accommodations. So, we talked about this a bit earlier, but a lot of brands, like you look at our early Standard. In early Standard in West Hollywood, was a converted nursing home. Really funky, very youthful, inexpensive to stay there. Young people could afford it, they loved it. The pool was fun. And then, the brand starts to get more and more expensive.

With Freehand that never happens. Because, you may have some rooms that are expensive but you’re always going to have good entry level rooms. So that culture and that young traveler is always going to be a part of Freehand. And then, of course, Freehand, it’s got a spirit. It does have a bit of a local changes from property to property, but it has this bohemian spirit that I think people like because it’s authentic and it’s friendly. Again, I think if you compare Freehand to Ace or Standard, Freehand is just, it’s friendly. There was nothing exclusionary about it. It’s super inclusionary. It makes you smile. It’s not meant to be too cool, it’s just meant to be fun. It’s warm, and I think people really feel that when they go to Freehand.

SSR: We have about 10 minutes left, so if it’s okay, I’m going to see, does anyone have any question from the audience for Andrew? Unless, I mean, I have plenty of questions, but does anyone in the audience want to ask anything?

Audience Question 1: How did you name Freehand and the Line?

Andrew Zobler:  Sure. Great question. I don’t know if you could all hear him. He said, “How did you name Freehand and how did you name The Line? Freehand basically was a name we came up with brainstorming with Roman and Williams. It was really about this idea that everything was just loose, and this idea that everything would be written by hand and nothing would be mass produced. I think it’s a good name and I think it fits. The hotel that we did in LA was the first time we did a hotel where we said there may be more of them. So, we tried to think of a name that potentially would resonate with people that you could do things with and you could play with.

And actually that name came from Tyler Brûlé at Monocle magazine, was his idea. We loved it and we loved all the different ways you can play with the name; above the line, below the line, across the line, over the line, line in the sand. But also we liked the fact that it represented for us this idea of that, like a fashion line, there’s a way of thinking that stands behind it, but every year the designer comes out with something different. So that’s our main thesis behind the Line, is there’s a common way of approaching, through storytelling, through being local. But each Line is separate and distinct. It’s like basically a fashion line that each year changes and evolves.

Audience Question 2: Are you planning on bringing NoMad or the Line to Chicago?

AZ: So, we love Chicago. Chicago is a tough city to make hotels work, although there are lots of them there, and that’s why it’s a tough city. The market’s been hard. We would love to bring both into Chicago if the right opportunity came up, and we’re definitely open to it. Love Chicago. But no, no immediate plan.

Audience Question 3: NoMad has meant a lot to me, I think it’s a beautiful property. When you think about the LA version of it, the Vegas version of it, how well has it translated thus far? What were you hoping to accomplish in bringing it to those places?

AZ: The NoMad New York was really a powerful thing. Right time, right place, et cetera. And we took a really long time, and we’re super fussy about where we went second. We were really concerned, after you start in New York, where do you go? We really did want to go to London as our second hotel, and we tried and tried and tried and a few things came and slipped away from us. There was something we almost did with Sternlicht, a building we fell in love with, and a few different things. Ultimately, Ned was not a NoMad and I’ll come back and tell you why.

LA was really the first thing we found where we thought the neighborhood was interesting. Downtown is really evolving and changing. The building was beautiful. The city has the same vibrancy more spread out, but vibrancy like New York and in culture and young people, so that’s why we went to LA. It’s generally been very well received there. I think one of the tricky things, it’s maybe a little bit ahead of its time in downtown in terms of, I think that we’ll ultimately get there, but a lot of people in LA still live on the west side. So, if you go on a Friday or Saturday night it’s jammed, we could sell every table five times. But if you go on a Tuesday night, at 7 or whatever, it’s busy, but not like New York. We would like to get the energy up there a little bit. But other than that, even the rooms have been very well received, and I’m very happy with how it looks.

I think the design, the northern Italian meets California. Vegas was unexpected. We were not thinking about going to Vegas. Honestly, Jim Murren persuaded us and we did it largely because of the scale of the project, and we just thought it would be fun to play in such big parks. I didn’t really know that much about Vegas, I now know more than I ever thought I would, and really do like it here. I wasn’t necessarily a Vegas fan when I first got involved, so I learned a lot about it.

The project they were doing in London is spectacular. It, in some ways, maybe it would’ve been better if it came second, but it is in every way what we wanted. It’s got large rooms. There’s only 91 of them. The public spaces are extraordinary. We have a very wealthy owner that just wants us only to do the very best. We’re really not constrained by anything other than our imagination and trying to do the best possible thing we can do. And we think, well, I know from having spent a lot of time in London, there we’ll be very well received there. So we’re pretty excited about that.

SSR:  It’s nice to have a very wealthy owner. You mentioned The Ned, and that was another interesting collaboration with Soho House. How did you decide to partner up with Nick Jones and his team?

AZ: I don’t know how many of you have been to The Ned. The Ned is a 1920s former bank building. It’s quite spectacular. You go in and there are these probably 40 giant, green, marble columns and 40-foot ceilings, 30,000-square-foot floor plates. It’s pretty extraordinary. No one had really done a cool hotel in what they call the city of London, which is their financial district. People thought of it as being a little bit east, effectively. Most people would stay in west London.

And then what started happening in London is a lot of the cool stuff in London started happening east of the city, in east London. Short answer, going east. All of a sudden the city became much more interesting. Also, a lot of the older buildings in the city, there are some very beautiful new buildings, but a lot of the older buildings started having more tech users and creative companies, as a lot of the banks, were going to Canary Wharf. So, it was just the right time.

Nick Jones from Soho House clearly knows London better than anyone, and he’s great to work with. Just honestly he’s become one of my best personal friends. People thought we would argue over, and we didn’t argue at all. We had a ball doing The Ned. But basically, Nick found it, Nick wanted to do it, and he had trouble raising the money for it because it was a really big project and Soho House was notoriously late and not on budget. It’s one thing when you’re doing 30 rooms than when you’re doing a project of that scale. If you’re a little late, or a little over, you get into a lot of trouble.

So we decided to approach together. We both had a common partner in Ron Burkle, who’s invested with us and with Nick. We convinced Ron that we should do it together, and Ron said, ‘That’s a great idea,’ and became supportive. So that’s why for one, that’s why we did it together, and two, that’s why it’s not a NoMad, it’s Nick’s idea. But of all the hotels we’ve done, this one is really, I mean, we edited and we contributed for sure, but it’s really, I don’t want to take credit for Nick’s work, it’s really a giant Soho House. It’s very much Nick. That’s why it really worked. We were totally happy with that. The way I look at the world, I want to make sure something’s being done really well. I’m not so fussed about whether it’s my way, I just want it to be really good.

I never worried that Nick would not nail the design or the spirit of what a hotel in London should be. And actually the very best part of the Ned is something that Nick came up with at the last minute, which drove everyone completely nuts, but basically one of the best things of Ned is when you go to the Ned, there’s a stage in the middle of the ground floor. The most popular place to sit in the Ned is right around the stage. Entertainment’s always changing, and it makes it always like a spectacle. The city of London was always dead on the weekends. We have a brunch that basically sells out four weeks in advance, every seat, and Saturday night it’s jammed. A lot of it has to do with this idea of having a sense of spectacle, this entertainment. We basically had the idea about two months before we opened. So it was impossible to pull off, and we did it somehow, and it was really important that we did. I think it made the Ned.

SSR: Awesome. Just to end, because we’re running out of time unfortunately, you mentioned Chicago’s a crowded market. I mean, the industry’s crowded, there’s a lot of new brands. What’s your take on where hospitality and hotels particularly are headed?

AZ: Look, I think hospitality is like a lot of other industries. Basically, you have people who are in a niche who are doing things really, really well and that are particular. And then you have people who are doing things that are just big, like the Marriotts of the world, and the Hyatts, and the Hiltons. And you’ve seen a lot of these companies buying up the independence. We’re quite determined to stay nimble, and we don’t have a desire to have a hundred hotels. We love doing three or four projects a year. We like being able to really focus on them. So that’s our, for us, that’s our desire. I think what you’ll see in the industry that was continued movement toward lifestyle, whatever that means, but people are more focused on design and F&B and hotels, and I think that will only continue as the consumer becomes more and more educated, they can go online and they really can see and read about what a place is.

So, I think branding in some ways is less important than it used to be. People still like their points, but ultimately they want a sense of travel and then they can go online and are willing to try different things. I think that will continue, and I think you’ll continue to see, unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon how you view it, some of the better operators in the lifestyle space getting a little higher. I think you’ll see that.

I think the key to those partnerships are going to be the level of independence that people maintain. Because it is very hard, in a large corporate environment, to take the risks and to make the decisions that are required to make things truly idiosyncratic and different. But look, there are plenty of good people out there, I think, doing interesting things, and I love, more than anything, seeing someone do their first project. Very often the first project is the best. It comes from the heart and people put everything into it and make something special. There’s nothing better than that.

SSR: As you grow, is that the biggest challenge for you, is making sure that each of these projects are as special as they have been, as previous ones have been?

AZ: Yeah. It’s a little easier for us because we’ve always been very collaborative, and the company in no way, shape or form is me. We have a number of people that have been with us from the beginning. I think we are able to do really high-quality things, and a number at once and it’s really about me letting go, but that’s okay. It’s always been. We opened six hotels  over an 18-month period or something like that. It’s not very different intended for anyone who wants to be thin or healthy. We got it done. I think that’s not a huge worry for me, and we won’t take on more than hopefully we can do, right? It’s nice to be able to say ‘no’ sometimes.

SSR: Well, I just want to thank you so much, Andrew, for being here. It was such a treat to have you, and thank you all for listening in and a big shout out to our sponsor Walters, we get to sit in their beautiful chairs. But, thank you for being here and thank you guys, and enjoy the rest of the show.

AZ: Thank you.