Public West Hollywood, the latest hotel from veteran hospitality operator Ian Schrager, is scheduled to open July 15.
According to an announcement, the Public West Hollywood “is not part of the cycle that turned the boutique hotel concept and name, originally invented by Ian Schrager in 1982 with Morgans, into lifestyle hotels and then into business and marketing categories for general consumption.”
This is something altogether different, said the announcement – “an independent hotel with its own reason for being with a singular and personal point of view – one that rejects labels, institutional and generic formulas and trite approaches, but rather embraces true originality.”
Public West Hollywood, said Schrager, “is born from a fundamental realization: that the most compelling ideas don’t come from a single point of view, but from the collision of influences, energies, and perspectives that creates something completely unexpected and unanticipated… Somehow a cohesive idea emerges from this chaos and apparent disarray.”
At the heart of it all, said the announcement, is The Roof, a three-quarters of an acre private park with 360-degree vistas of the Hollywood Hills, downtown Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Basin. According to the announcement, it is the only private park in Los Angeles, ideal for private events and complete with undulating topography, sports, daily wellness classes, picnic tables, campfires, art installations and an oversized 30-foot outdoor movie screen.
The guestrooms, said the announcement, are “anti-design, simple, even effortless, sophisticated, and refined, distinguished not only by their originality, but more importantly, not by how they look but by how they make you feel.”
Each room, said the announcement, is its own private screening room, featuring an 11-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling original projection surface and specially designed short throw laser display projector with 5,000 lumens and 4k enhancement – “rivaling a true movie theater experience.”
The hotel will also offer a “speakeasy-style” after-hours club, “slightly dangerous (because you don’t know what will happen next)– the evolution of Studio 54” (the famed New York club that Schrager co-founded).
Schrager concluded: “The very system of a hotel itself and high costs to create products stifle and do not encourage or reward innovation…or taking chances or risks… to do something original. It has created a generation of hoteliers as lemmings, who keep doing the same monotonous things over and over repeating themselves but in a different color. It
not only results in the uniformity of all hotels in their look and operation, but also the very
business model…asset free or light, and financial risk avoidance. The public deserves and
wants more.”
