I spent a couple of nights with my lover at the Gramercy Park Hotel, NYC, Schrager’s collaboration with Julian Schnabel — painter, filmmaker, now, interior designer.
I found the space intriguing. What was it — dark, deeply scented of burning firewood, and some other dense layers of fragrance beneath. But more?
The description might lend itself to something darkly dream like, nightmarish, even; a vision of hammered metals, gigantically scaled chandelier, eclectic heavy furnishings, and curios, mixed with seasoned cypress ceiling panels and long cut pillars ponderosa pine, graphically splashy wall treatments and detailed, customized carpeting.
But all, highly personalized and eccentric, to what I might take as a Schnabelian vision.
I liked it — given the wild interpretations and detailing of the selections and integrations of dense personality and experience. Discrete from Philippe Starck, who’s got his own take on the world, sleeker, less textured and more manufactured — in all of his hotel innovations for Schrager.
Rooms were dark and sexual.
This, on a windbound and raining weekend, alive in NYC.
Stoplights, burning red into the trees of Fall…
all grand — the senses of it…