The Romanian designer with the French accent is describing a fantastical ice sculpture that will shortly emerge from the Clift Hotel freezer to adorn the Redwood Room. The occasion is the ultimate confirmation of cool-a Vanity Fair photo shoot.
"The ihze will be dripping with grapes," she tells . "Green grapes."
Surely these will complement the kelly-green pleated lampshades, but Schrager-the hip hotelier whose reported $50 million renovation of the Clift will be unveiled to a wary public Tuesday-has a very precise vision.
"Not too many grapes," he urges. "Do it like we did in Florida. Not too many!"
Schrager, trim and energetic at 54, darts around the set in a white pocket-T and jeans. He's conspiratorial, unwinding sentences without pausing for breath or punctuation.
"We really left the star of the lobby the redwood, it sets the tone," he says. "We tried to do something very monochromatic so we wouldn't take away from that." The surreal lobby features an immense fireplace and wacky furnishings, including a giant Alice-in-Wonderland armchair and Salvador Dali-designed coffee table.
The Redwood Room is still elegant, if updated with a looming mirrored bar and five "plasma screens," which will show the latest in visual art-"moving paintings."
Excitedly, Schrager points out camera-ready vignettes, framed by bright white klieg lights that gleam off the redwood paneling. Here a tooled-leather love seat plumped with faux-fur pillows, there frosty silver bowls proffering Champagne-all propped as if awaiting the return of a tempestuous star for whom everything must be perfect.
But, no. This comeback scene belongs to that grande-dame-with-a-face-lift-the Redwood Room. She's almost ready for her close-up, and the world is watching.
Backstage, chilling in the walk-in freezer, is San Francisco's own florist-to-the-stars, Stanlee Gatti. All smiles, he's hovering over a casket-sized ice chest.
"It's still in pieces," he says, pulling back a towel to show off what will be a grand "compote," or tiered tray, for the grapes. "As it melts, the ice gets clearer." Gatti is atwitter-he's here, he's there, he's a temporary Schragerette. Only seconds ago he was in the lobby, asking "Ian, do you like the flowers?"
Forget the towering, twiggy arrangements of years past. According to the Schrager vision, Gatti has designed low, voluptuous bouquets of ivory roses in square silver vases to punctuate the spectacularly lit, carved "redwood" registration desk.
What's Gatti's role? "We needed a stylist for the shoot," explains Schrager, who seems surprised to hear that Gatti is president of the San Francisco Art Commission. Not that he's unhip to City Hall-just last night he had dinner at Bix with Mayor Brown, whom he found "highly charismatic."
After dinner, Brown got a late-night preview of the surreal new lobby and a peek at the Redwood Room to prove its integrity is intact.
"The mayor?" Schrager whispers. "Blown away."
The buzz on the set -the percolating energy, the sense of fun, the sheer fabulousness-implies that this, right now, is the center of the universe. No less could be expected from Schrager. He's the man who, with partner Steve Rubell in the 1970s, created Studio 54, the legendary New York nightclub that promised heaven just beyond the velvet rope for those stylish or Warhol-esque enough to get in.
This time, though, there's no music. It's no disco; it's a beloved, historic landmark in a town with a tradition of grand hotels and a reverence for its past.
San Francisco hasn't exactly been welcoming. Plus, hotel occupancy is down and competition in the industry is fierce. But today there's no hint of turmoil as Schrager and crew prepare to raise the curtain on the new Clift.
In 1999, when people heard that bought the Clift from the Four Seasons for $80 million, a chorus went up-"Dear God, what will he do to the Redwood Room?"
"Usually, I buy dumps in off areas and bring value by developing them," Schrager says. "But the Clift was already the grande dame of San Francisco. And you know what happened? Over the last several years, every renovation took away from what was really unique about the Clift. So it wasn't the Clift anymore."
Schrager didn't mean to step on toes or bump into the furniture, but last September, when it got out that the appointments of the old Clift were going up for auction, San Franciscans went nuts.
"It wasn't in a subtle way that I got the message, I have to say," he admits. "There are very strong views about the Clift. We had never encountered anything like it before."
He was deluged by communiques from the quickly assembled committee to Save the Redwood Room. "I think people would have run me out of town on a rail if I would have done anything here that was inappropriate to their beloved family jewel. Which, you know, I understood!
"We'd been known to be very aggressive in what we do," Schrager says. "When I go into a city, everybody thinks I'm going to take the building, move it over across the street. People thought we were gonna come down here and gut the Clift and completely change it.
"It wasn't quite as sensitive here as it was in Santa Barbara (where Schrager bought the old Miramar in Montecito), but there was particular sensitivity toward the Redwood Room."
After the public outcry-including pages of newspaper editorials, cartoons and letters to the editor-management pulled the reproduction Gustav Klimt paintings and the bar itself off the auction block.
(The "Klimts" had been added to the decor in 1978; since they were not original to the room, community groups threw their weight behind saving the bar.)
Before the auction took place, local architectural historian Michael Crowe-founder of the Art Deco Society of California-issued a plea: "The bar is an integral part of that room. If you take out the fixtures, what do you have?" But the bar, rumored to be carved from the same tree as the wall panels, disappeared. Hotel management maintains the bar was so termite-damaged, there was no choice but to replace it.
Like most San Franciscans with roots deep in the city, author Merla Zellerbach has an attachment to that bar.
"I remember going on a date, I must have been a senior at Lowell," Zellerbach says fondly. "I had my first drink there, I know it was a Planter's Punch. We sat at the bar, we listened to the piano player. And I'll never forget-you could smoke then-and my date took out this big, smelly cigar, which quickly ended any romantic interest I might have had."
For those who have such memories-or wish they did-the founders of San Franciscans for Saving the Redwood Room, Erika Lenkert and Beth LaDove, established a Web page. Their mission: to encourage that the renovation "be done with the utmost care and respect and to encourage people to enjoy the room as it is before it becomes a trendy hot spotÖand to ensure that when the dust settles, the Redwood Room is still the Redwood Room, and not a redwood room."
Well, it nearly became the Redwood Bar.
"'Redwood Bar' was in the press release," Schrager says, laughing, "until I thought, 'Something's telling me we should call it the Redwood Room. Let's call it what it was!'"
The Clift Hotel was built in 1915, part of San Francisco's post-quake architectural renaissance. Sacramento-born lawyer Frederick C. Clift commissioned one of the city's great architects, George A. Applegarth (his masterpiece is the Palace of the Legion of Honor), to create a grand, earthquake- and fire-proof hotel.
The 12-story, 350-room hotel opened with room rates of $2-6 per night. Three floors were added by 1924-at $1 million per floor. Clift's own residence was a stone bungalow on the rooftop, the Spanish Suite. But the Depression hit hard and when Clift retired in 1933, the hotel reverted to a trust company and was sold to Robert Odell for just half a million dollars.
Odell had grand ideas for rejuvenating the Clift. With Prohibition abolished, cocktail lounges were the height of chic; the Redwood Room was added in 1934 by architect G. Albert Lansburgh, who also designed the War Memorial Opera House.
The Clift's official written history cites Lansburgh's masterstroke: to sheathe a room in a single rare material, "aged 'curly' redwood, from the bodies of toppled giants over 2,000 years old that had lain in North Coast streambeds and gullies for centuries. The inner wood from those old trunks, when polished, takes on a deep patina that gleams like a thousand different hues of burnished bronze and topaz-a phenomenon that can't be manufactured."
As recently as 1984, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen held such sway-having made the Redwood Room a kind of home base for the "Vitamin V" vodka martinis that fueled his perambulations about town-that hotel management sent carpet samples to Caen's office for approval.
Today, San Franciscans are very invested in the restaurant scene. And some local foodies were startled when they learned Schrager planned an Asia de Cuba restaurant for the Clift's old French Room. (There are Asia de Cuba restaurants, run by chef and Schrager-partner Jeffrey Chodorow, in New York and Los Angeles.)
"Some people were disappointed to hear it would be an Asia de Cuba," says Graceann Walden, food tour guide and Chronicle food columnist. "I would be surprised if that would be a big hit downtown, with tourists coming here and wanting something very San Francisco and very California-and it's, you know, transplanted!"
Asked about this reaction, Schrager says, "It's a restaurant based upon food from Asia, combined with the spices of Latin America. I didn't think of it as a New York restaurant. I think of it as a global restaurant.
"I don't have that view of San Francisco or New York. I have more of a global view, an international view. I happen to think that the people in Manhattan have more in common with the people of Paris and London and Berlin and Milan and San Francisco than they do with the people of Brooklyn or Queens. There really is this global sensibility.
"I believe in these 24-hour international gateway cities, they are here forever."
Who is this man with the global sensibility and the fate of the Redwood Room in his hands?
"Born in the Bronx, moved to Brooklyn. The best of both," Schrager says with a laugh.
East Flatbush, precisely. "Where a lot of 'gunslingers' are born and raised-Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, David Geffen," he notes. "It's just coincidental that a lot of these people, some who didn't even go to college, were driven and had great success in whatever they chose."
Schrager graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in economics and went on to St. John's Law School in Queens. He practiced law for just three years, but it had an effect.
"I was low man on the totem pole-estates and trusts," he says.
But Schrager proved himself unafraid to go to court. The most significant case he prosecuted as a lawyer, he says, exposed price-fixing in real estate brokerage commissions. "That was a big case," he recalls.
"Having an impact on things is really what it's all about, isn't it?" he asks. "But I was gravitating toward business, and that's when this whole phenomenon was going on with nightclubs.
"I used to drive by and see people waiting on line to go take some abuse from a doorman to get into some nightclub. I thought, 'Oh, that's a business I gotta get into,'" he says, laughing. "People, waiting to buy air!"
Studio 54 had an impact on things-so much so that it came to embody the excessiveness of an era. When that excessiveness spilled over into the business office, though, Schrager and Rubell were convicted of tax evasion in 1980. They did 13 months at Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Ala.
Schrager used the time well: He not only kept up on New York real estate news, he studied architecture.
"I had gotten very much involved with creating environments with the nightclub business. When we were inÖjail-I can't even say the word, even today-there was this dialogue going on between modernism and postmodernism.
"And Harry Helmsley was building a hotel in New York, the Palace, and Donald Trump was the new generation. I got very drawn into that dialogue. I thought, we can do a hotel better than both of them!"
Schrager notes that Rubell coined the term for what they wanted to do: boutique hotels. "It was Steve's way of saying, 'If the other hotels are department stores-being all things to all people-this is like a boutique.' We have a very specific point of view, very special, very unique."
After doing their time, he and Rubell unveiled a whole new collaboration, opening Morgans Hotel on Madison Avenue in 1984. Representing a hip, highly designed new destination, it was a hit.
But soon, Schrager was on his own; Rubell died in 1989 of hepatitis and septic shock. Schrager was devastated: "We got in trouble together, we stayed together, we did everything together. The success was ours, both of ours."
Schrager kept the business going by sticking to the boutique idea and by aligning himself with top talents, creating an indelible brand. It's still, he says, "like a family effort."
From Miami to London, New York to Los Angeles, the signature of all Schrager hotels is the cutting-edge design of Philippe Starck-who also got his start in nightclubs, having created the Paris nightclub Les Bains-Douches.
"Knowing nightclubs and knowing how public space works and what people react to makes him a social scientist, too," Schrager says. "He's not a static designer. Philippe keeps going off in new directions, which is interesting for me. And I like him. He's my friend."
Starck is a partner in the company, Romanian designer Anda Andrei is a partner; another partner is Michael Overington-"who used to be a busboy for me at Studio 54. Michael went to NYU Film School, and he wanted to be part of it-like young people do, they just want to be part of something they think is special. And he stayed." Overington is now president of development for Hotels.
It's a tight ensemble: "Some of us wear our heart on our sleeves, some of us are more aggressive, or more edgy, or more intense. But we all want the same thing."
And what's that? Well, the right number of towels in each room, for a start.
Schrager has spent the morning before the Vanity Fair shoot deciding how many towels are supposed to be in the rooms (eight) and how they should be folded.
"There is such minutiae involved in making something successful. But we all in our own way like being part of it."
It may come with the job, but Schrager has become a booster.
"There's a real renaissance going on here," he says. "It's not by mistake you have all these great architects doing buildings in San Francisco."
Line 'em up: Mario Botta (SFMOMA), Fumihiko Maki and James Stewart Polshek (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Gae Aulenti (Asian Art Museum), Herzog & deMeuron (de Young Museum), Daniel Libeskind (Jewish Museum), Ricardo Legorreta (Mexican Museum), Renzo Piano (California Academy of Sciences).
"You've got more great architects building in San Francisco than any other city in the world now," Schrager says. It's one of the things that drew him to San Francisco.
"You have these dichotomies all over the place-between being so really cutting-edge and hip and being involved in a revolution that's changing the world forever, and on the other hand being really quite traditional and charming."
Which naturally feeds directly into Starck's design for the Clift's public rooms. "The harmony comes from the diversity," Schrager explains.
"What is the look of the Clift? It's impossible to categorize. It's really just freeform. It's eclectic. It's somebody's individual vision of something. It's its own reality. Very individualized. And I think that's what San Francisco is," he says.
"Do I wish I was opening up in a hot cycle? Of course I do! I'd have a higher rate and higher occupancy." But he's undaunted; the Clift is just the first of many hotels he'd like to have in San Francisco.
"I have a very, very big investment here, and the fact that I'm not opening up three years ago at the height of the Internet boom, I'm opening up now, is totally irrelevant to me. Because I believe in the Clift."
Of competition-from hotels like the W chain, which some say borrowed his formula, and others-Schrager says: "I'm expanding more aggressively now. If I don't, people are gonna take my idea.
"When we entered the market, our predicate was innovation," he says. "Now a lot of people are out there trying to do product that's also innovation, so one way we have to keep our edge, we have to bring the service level up."
The proving ground for service is the Clift, Schrager's first attempt at a 5-star luxury hotel. (That's a ranking officially conferred only by the Mobil travel guide once a hotel is up-and-running.) "We've been working our way up to it," he says. "Providing better service is something essential. It's really one of the missions of the company."
Schrager is aiming for "a modern 5-star hotel, which I had never done before. More sophisticated. And very, very, very site specific to San Francisco. It's my version of a 5-star hotel, one that doesn't have the obsequiousness.
"I'm gonna do what's important to me. It's not important to me that my coffee come in sterling silver service with the finest bone china. What's important is the coffee's good, it's hot and gets there on time, served by somebody polite. That's modern luxury for me. Without all the froufrou. I use my own definition of 5-star. You know the approval I'm looking for? The guests."
But will the city's arbiters bestow their approval. It may take time to trust him. The man's got a reputation.
Didn't druggies attend that Bianca-Jagger's-second-home-of-a-disco? What about his jail time? Wasn't there some kind of pleabargain? Didn't he just settle a discrimination suit with the federal government after employees at his Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles charged they were fired for being "too ethnic"?
Hasn't his chain of hotels-some with tiny little rooms!-made him obscenely wealthy? And, perhaps most important to San Franciscans: Isn't Philippe Starck (gasp)Öa minimalist who designs space-age toothbrushes, furniture with antlers, and hotel interiors about as cozy as the dust-free room in a computer-chip factory?
And by the way, isn't Schrager's name constantly in the news? That's indiscreet, to say the least, by old San Francisco standards.
The most recent bulletins include a comment in New York magazine that he didn't get much for the $5.4 million pricetag on a Central Park apartment he bought for his wife (a former New York City Ballet dancer, from whom he's separated) and their kids.
Later, that weekly's gossip column quoted Schrager saying he's close to selling his company to "a Saudi prince." (Could that be Prince Al Waleed of Saudi Arabia, cited on the June 2000 news page of Hotel Interactive magazine as a client of a company called Hotel Capital Advisers? Just a thought.)
Schrager tells the Chronicle the quote was in error: "There is no Saudi prince," he says, adding, with a characteristic twinkle, "though I'd sell anything for the right price-except my wife and kids, even in my current marital state."
Everyone has something to say about Schrager's new Clift. But the best quip comes from Stan Bromley of the Four Seasons: "It's like Helen Hayes has turned into Madonna."
Bromley-who was general manager of the pre-Schrager Clift-is now Regional Vice President and General Manager of the spectacular new high-rise Four Seasons Hotel set to open in 2001 on Market at Grant.
(The Four Seasons will further anchor the Yerba Buena neighborhood-which some say will replace Nob Hill as the city's posh-hotel nexis, along with the St. Regis Hotel soon to rise alongside SFMOMA, and another yet-unnamed luxury hotel planned as part of the Bloomingdale's project in the former Emporium building.)
Bromley is a fan of Schrager hotels: "People may resent the fact that the Clift is going to be one of the hottest, hippest hotels in the country," he says. "They would like to retain culture, retain things as they were. And that's great, if you're running a museum."
He is sanguine about the competition: "It's like BMW and Mercedes-they have a racy model and they have a sedan. In the hotel business, there's an age group that really likes the Schrager hotels and the W hotels. When they graduate from that, they come to us."
Hotel customers also have a plethora of options from San Francisco's home-grown "boutique hotel" companies, the Kimpton Group and Joie de Vivre Hospitality.
The Kimpton Group has taken their version nationwide. Next up, locally, are two big projects: The Argonaut, a $40 million renovation of an historic Fisherman's Wharf building, to open next summer; and The Cypress Hotel, under construction now in Cupertino.
Chip Conley's Joie de Vivre hotels have grown up, after great success with the trendy Phoenix Hotel and other properties. Conley's about to break ground on a prime site-the former Embarcadero Muni yard-for a new ground-up, high-rise hotel with a spa theme, his most ambitious project to date.
Bill Kimpton's pet project was the Hotel Monaco and Grand Cafe, just across Taylor from the Clift. With that-and their Hotel Serrano and its hip eatery, Ponzu, nearby-the company's chairman and CEO, Tom LaTour (who took the reins after Kimpton died in March), believes the Kimpton Group helped prime the neighborhood.
"It's now OK to say you're having dinner on O'Farrell and Taylor," says LaTour. "Previously, you wouldn't be caught dead there."
The new Clift will, La Tour notes, make the area "a destination for an additional clientele-younger, hipper people that previously sought out other locations."
On the day of the extremely hip Vanity Fair shoot of the Redwood Room-amid enormous hubbub and flashing of lights-Philippe Starck enters the temporary lobby that serves as a staging area.
Starck looks sleepy, his signature hair tousled. "I was on ze phone until 2 o'clock," he says, eyes wide. Discussing what? He throws up his arms: "LIFE!" He shrugs grandly, turning toward the action.
Schrager turns thoughtful. "This hotel occupies a very dear place in people's minds. And rightfully so," he says. "You can't be like the Ugly American or the Ugly New Yorker coming into San Francisco and telling everyone what they like. No. It doesn't work like that.
"You can't develop by being a bull in a china shop. I can't afford to alienate the community, because this is a hotel for the people that live in the city where the hotel is located. Because that creates the energy, and that creates the buzz.
"If the people from San Francisco don't embrace the Clift, then its not going to be a successful hotel, period."
Heidi Benson is the Magazine's Senior Editor.
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