Actor Robert De Niro used to be just another famous guest in the world of swanky hotels. Now he's opening his own posh lodge in downtown Manhattan.
Standing seven stories high in Tribeca, De Niro's roughly 75,000-square-foot Greenwich Hotel, which is scheduled to open this spring, will include all the world-class amenities that one might expect from a wealthy two-time Oscar winner: Moroccan tiles, Tibetan rugs, French doors, Siberian oak floors—even a fancy Tuscan-style restaurant and Shibui Spa.
Room rates will be just as extravagant, starting at $725 per night.
And people will probably pay it—if not for the stylish surroundings or celebrity cachet, then perhaps because every other decent place in town is either entirely booked or equally expensive.
De Niro isn't the only A-list luminary looking to get in on the lucrative action.
Hip-hop mogul Shawn Carter, aka Jay-Z, perhaps foreshadowed his own foray into the business when he first unleashed the celebratory rap lyric "after the show it's the after party and after the party is the hotel lobby."
The Grammy-winning former president of Def Jam records and part-time party promoter announced this past December that he, too, is planning to build a new high-end hotel in Manhattan with the help of CB Developers.
The reported $66.4 million, 150,000-square-foot project, located on the site of an old warehouse and parking garage in the Chelsea neighborhood, will serve as the flagship for a whole new chain of luxury lodgings called J Hotels. "Everything is in a very developmental stage," noted Mr. Carter's publicist, who declined further comment.
Fashion designer Giorgio Armani, meanwhile, is searching for a chic spot to create a New York counterpart in the next few years to his opulent Armani Hotel and Residences in Dubai.
For Armani, who announced plans in 2005 to open at least seven luxury hotels within 10 years, it seemed only in keeping with a grander vision of his eponymous apparel label's becoming a complete lifestyle brand.
As the designer previously explained in a statement, "Today, more than ever before, fashion has expanded to encompass our way of life—not just how we dress, but where we live, which restaurants we eat at, where we holiday and which hotels we stay in."
Indeed, the hotel business in particular has become increasingly fashionable over the years.
Widely credited for pioneering the boutique model, hospitality guru Ian Schrager may be just as responsible for paving the way for the new celebrity hoteliers. As part owner of notorious nightclub Studio 54, Schrager was already somewhat famous by the time he entered the hotel business in 1984. But after opening Manhattan's highly stylized Royalton Hotel, with its famous lobby designed by Philippe Starck, in addition to the Paramount and the Hudson hotels, among others, Schrager transcended the usually ephemeral influence of a mere liquor-industry impresario, becoming a bona fide tastemaker and trendsetter.
His iconic rock star persona set the standard for the next wave of hip hotel operators, including jet-setters André Balazs and Jason Pomeranc, each of whom runs chic hotels both in Los Angeles and New York. And each has made a name for himself on the social circuit, although neither was very famous to begin with.
It remains a very sexy profession, if only in appearance. "I could dispel that idea pretty quickly if anyone follows me around for a day," said Pomeranc, 36, who just returned to New York after opening a new hotel in Beverly Hills the other day. "The energy of the night, opening the hotel to all of Hollywood and L.A.—it was a really satisfying moment," he said. "But that doesn't mean it wasn't two years of struggle to get to that moment, and every day it will involve a little more struggle to keep that going."
Pomeranc's company, Thompson Hotels, is also planning to open a number of new hotels in New York this spring, including one near Wall Street and another on the Lower East Side. About a year from now, Pomeranc said he also hopes to open a third hotel in Tribeca—where he will face off in direct competition with De Niro's Greenwich Hotel.
"If that project helps establish Tribeca as an end destination for hotels at high rates, that only benefits me," said Pomeranc, who was none too surprised by the big-name celebrities now encroaching on his turf. "When people have achieved a tremendous level of success in a creative field, they have this desire to transfer that creativity into another field of expression—I think that's the attraction," he said. "I don't think they want to use it as another vehicle of fame, because they've already achieved that."
Such superstars have long turned to the hospitality sector when seeking to invest their talents and riches in some sort of side project. For a while, it seemed as if every single one of them were opening a restaurant or nightclub in New York.
Just last summer, singer Justin Timberlake and friends brought Memphis-style barbecue to Manhattan with the splashy opening of Southern Hospitality. Years earlier, his former girlfriend, pop star Britney Spears, tried to cook up a similar Southern style as part owner of the ill-fated eatery NYLA.
Actor Stephen Baldwin launched Alaia and later Luahn in Union Square, and Sex and the City star Chris Noth was the real-life Mr. Big behind the Cutting Room.
Some of these star-studded ventures proved spectacular business failures on a par with their celebrity proprietors' own career-worst performances. Consider actor Sylvester Stallone's widely panned 1995 box office flop Judge Dredd and the twice-bankrupted Planet Hollywood franchise, which he helped launch alongside Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Times Square back in 1991.
Yet other celeb-tied enterprises rode the fame train to critical acclaim, further bolstering their owners' public personae as well as their financial portfolios.
De Niro himself has partnered with a number of other famous investors, including Sean Penn, Russell Simmons and Bob and Harvey Weinstein, in the operation of Tribeca Grill, which opened in 1990; it's an endeavor credited with elevating the profile of the entire neighborhood.
De Niro's subsequent partnership with Chef Nobu Matsuhisa in launching the perennially popular Asian fusion restaurant Nobu in 1994 not only further enhanced that emerging neighborhood vibe but also spawned 16 additional Nobu locations, including two others in New York.
Hotels are the new restaurants, the eventual next step in celebrity entrepreneurship.
"I think it's all good—each one of them has a distinctive personality and they can make their property reflect that personality," said George Fertitta, CEO of the city's tourism office, NYC and Company, who seems delighted by the additional marketing opportunities presented by new celebrity-run hotels. "It's just another way that we can talk about all that New York has to offer," he said.
City projections point to a total of 13,000 new hotel rooms by 2010, with builders both famous and not. But not everyone buys into the big numbers.
"With a lot of these announced projects, I don't necessarily think all of them are going to happen," said Pomeranc. "The banking industry will weed out some projects. There still is a demand for more rooms. But this business is a combination of real-estate development, operations, service—it's very complicated. And the snapshot in time like we have right now is not necessarily indicative of what the industry's going to be for the next 10 years.
"It's very important," he added, "whether you're a designer, a musician or an actor, that ultimately your partners and your operations team are experienced in the industry for a long time, because the longevity of these projects is going to hinge on true hotel-related aspects, not the association with the famous name."
