Cedd Moses and his 213 bar group brought us The Doheny in downtown LA, and truth be told, its membership-only concept has seemed somewhat problematic. Is it the location; the ever-rotating staff; or the pay-to-play concept in general that has kept it from flourishing to the extent of Moses’ other successful open-to-everyone hipster hangouts?
Meanwhile, Nick Jones, magnate behind the uber-exclusive, members-only SoHo House in London and New York is opening an outpost in West Hollywood. In the article below, Kevin West, editor of W Magazine’s Society section, shares his interview with those of us intrigued but skeptical about the membership-only hotspots in the City of Angels:
Nick at Night: Englishman Nick Jones exports his members-only club Soho House to Hollywood.
By Kevin West Photograph by Amanda Marsalis, W Magazine, March 2010
Los Angeles is a city that has long loved clubby restaurants—think Chasen’s, Spago, the Grill or the current de facto insiders’ clubhouse, the Tower Bar. But it has never had a tradition of members-only establishments, apart from a few snobby Westside country clubs and the creaky high-WASP California Club downtown. Even so, a bright-eyed, gap-toothed Englishman named Nick Jones aims to fill what he sees as a lucrative niche.
In the lead-up to the March opening of Soho House West Hollywood, Jones and his team, assisted by a 20-person membership committee, have been scouring the town for 600 founding members willing to pay $1,500 in annual dues for the chance to rub elbows with “like-minded people,” he says. Whether one Englishman’s idea of Brit-pack cool will take root in the TMZ, where celebrities typically gain free access everywhere and warring talent agencies aggressively stake out their dining turfs, remains to be seen.
“I suppose that suddenly people are going to go, ‘Yes, we’ll pay our money to be a member of this club,’” Jones says over morning coffee at Cecconi’s, the restaurant he opened in February 2009 at the prime Robertson Boulevard location formerly occupied by Morton’s. “We hope so.”
Jones, 46, points to the large membership roster, some 4,500 members, at his first U.S. club, Soho House New York, which debuted in 2003 with a dining room full of Swarovski chandeliers and an equally sparkling membership roster. (The club’s social wattage, detractors say, has dimmed considerably as membership has grown to its present, less-than-exclusive size.)
Of perhaps more significance in L.A., Jones possesses considerable cachet as a result of running, since 2005, a lavish “pop-up” Soho House during Oscar week. “Other Oscar houses were tacky, but Soho House spared no expense,” says British-born decorator Amanda Masters, who spent up to four months a year creating Jones’s party palaces, which included a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills. “People were dazzled. Nick imported the whole Brit-pack mentality.”
With its free food, ample drinks and stringent press restrictions, Soho House’s Oscar headquarters gained a reputation for celebrity turnout and late-night partying. Jones acknowledges that the pop-up was more about establishing the Soho House brand in L.A. than turning a profit, and he was often right in the thick of the bacchanal. “I remember one night there was a police helicopter above us with a searchlight coming down,” says Jones, chuckling at the memory. “Just by running [the Oscar house] for many years, we got to know a lot of people.”
Jones’s first permanent foothold in the city was Cecconi’s, which opened during the economic crisis but became a buzzy hit with the Beverly Hills platinum-card brigade. Over the past year Jones and his mainly British team have been courting prospective Soho House members at lunch meetings with agency honchos and even occasionally by pitching VIPs at home.
“Whereas the Groucho Club members had been stalwarts, Soho House got a lot of the young writers and producers who didn’t want to be in the Groucho Club,” says director Alek Keshishian, who frequented Soho House while living in London in the early 2000s. “It was a refuge, and I could take celebrity friends without having it reported in the press.”
Today Jones has five clubs in England, including Babington House, a historic Somerset country estate. Following a $200 million cash infusion from English rag-trade tycoon Richard Caring, the Soho House brand is expanding aggressively. Later this year Jones will open clubs in Berlin and Miami, with plans for more in 2011. Between flights he lives in London with his second wife, British TV presenter Kirsty Young, and their two children, and he recently purchased a home in Beverly Hills. (Jones also has two children from his previous marriage.)
Jones can seem restrained on first meeting, though he proved to be an attentive and chatty host at the hard-hat dinner. The secret of his success, says Frances Pennington, vice president of global marketing at Juicy Couture, who advised him on his Oscar house, is that he is a master at creating a “vibe.”
“When you walk into Cecconi’s, there’s an energy,” she says. “It’s part of Nick’s brand, and it’s something that’s hard to bottle.” Adds Keshishian: “He’s got a great sense for creating sanctuary. You can go there and let people come to you.”
Likely part of what drives Jones is a childhood memory he shares of eating out with his family and discovering for the first time just how inflexible restaurants can be to their customers’ wishes. As he boasts about instilling his staff with “yes culture”—a service attitude that puts the customer first—Jones sounds less like an English social arbiter than an American entrepreneur. “There’s no God-given right for this to work,” he says. “I have a gut feel that the location is fantastic. I think people will get it. But we’ve got a lot to deliver first.”