Ian Schrager

Origins and early life

Ian Schrager was born in Brooklyn on 19 July 1946 and grew up in a Jewish family in New York, took his degree at Syracuse University in 1968 and a law degree at St John's in 1971, and it was in a Syracuse fraternity that he met Steve Rubell.

Work and career

In January 1977 the two of them signed a lease on 254 West 54th Street, an opera house that CBS had been using as a television studio, and six weeks later they opened Studio 54. Four thousand people came the first night to a room that held two thousand five hundred, and the rule of the place was described afterwards as a dictatorship on the door and a democracy on the dance floor. The club ran under the two of them until 1980, and what Schrager did next lasted longer.

In 1984 he and Rubell opened Morgans on Madison Avenue, named after the library across the street: a small hotel treated as a single piece of design rather than a stack of rooms, with no sign on the door. The trade had no word for it, and the word it settled on was the boutique hotel, a category that did not exist before Morgans and now runs through the whole industry. He kept making them, the Royalton and the Paramount with Philippe Starck, the Delano in Miami Beach, the Mondrian in West Hollywood, the Hudson in New York, and in 2008 he took the idea to scale with Marriott, whose Edition brand he created.

He has since built the Ian Schrager Company and the PUBLIC hotels on the same conviction he had at Morgans, that a hotel is a public place before it is a private one and the lobby is where that is decided.