http:// dujour.com/design/standard-thinking-inside-the-world-of-andr-balazs/
Talk about making an entrance. When the Standard hotel opened back in 2009, all anyone could talk about were the exhibitionists getting freaky in the windows of the 18-story, glass-fronted hotel that had just risen (ha) above the High Line park in Chelsea. This wasn’t the first time André Balazs, the man behind the Standard, had flaunted sex to create buzz. The West Hollywood outpost of the hotel opened in 2002 and featured a model in a bikini lounging in a fish tank behind the front desk. At the nearby Chateau Marmont, meanwhile, Balazs made headlines by stocking condoms in the hotel minibars. Part of the appeal of an André Balazs hotel, it seemed, was the feeling that somewhere in the building someone was getting it on.
Most impressively, this fall Susan Sarandon installs the first permanent L.A. branch of her Ping-Pong club, SPiN, at the Standard, Downtown L.A. The Oscar-winning actress had been looking to expand to L.A. ever since the New York branch first opened in the Flatiron District—but couldn’t find the right location. The Standard, Downtown L.A. not only fit the brand but also was accessible and offered an easy liquor license. “The only thing you can count on is that Ping-Pong and drinking go well together,” Sarandon says with a laugh, adding, “The Standard is witty. They know how to have fun. And André is the right combination of business and hip.” The cumulative effect of these big changes at the Standard, it seems, is to create a clubhouse feel. “You can call it a clubhouse,” Balazs says. “But I like to think of it as a culture. You keep layering things on. Otherwise you’re just a Sheraton. You’re just a bunch of rooms.” As for the table tennis, he smiles and says, “It’s the thinking man’s bowling.”
Born to Hungarian émigrés who fled their country during World War II, Balazs spent much of his childhood in Cambridge, Mass.
His father, Endre, was an ophthalmologist known for, among other things, extracting a natural Botox from rooster combs, according to news reports; his mother, Eva, was a psychologist.
After high school at the elite Buckingham Browne and Nichols, Balazs shipped off to Cornell University, where he got bitten by the writing bug and launched newspapers and magazines, he said. He then went to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where “I was taught by some of the last greats of the Watergate era.”
But his first job, in the 1980s, was with Biomatrix, a New Jersey–based biotech company he founded with his father. Years later, in 2000, Genzyme bought the company from Balazs’s father for $700 million, according to news reports.
But back in the 1980s, when the Downtown clubbing scene was in full force, Balazs was living in Soho. In 1985, he married Katie Ford, whose family founded the Ford Modeling Agency. (The two divorced two decades later.)
Then in the early 1990s, teaming up with architect Campion Platt, Balazs bought two properties that put him on the map: The Chateau Marmont, a rundown Hollywood property, and the Mercer Hotel, a six-story former warehouse near his Soho apartment.
He showed a deft financial touch with the Mercer, said Paul Stern, a managing director of Wharton Equity Partners who handles hotel investments for the firm.
The $33 million redevelopment of the Mercer required a large loan from a Japanese bank, which Balazs and Platt defaulted on when the economy turned, analysts say. But with the bank panicking, Balazs eventually bought back his loan for a mere $3 million.
His hotels are not large — some have less than 100 rooms — but like Ian Schrager hotels, most of them have been hot trendsetters with coveted restaurants and bars like the so-called Boom Boom Room at the top of the Standard High Line.