In case you were worried that flamboyant nightclub creator Sam Nazarian wasn't going to go sufficiently over the top putting together his new SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills, rest assured. He did.
The man who built paparazzi-patrolled clubs such as Hyde Lounge and Area couldn't very well open up an inoffensively beige hotel catering to corporate conventioneers. Nor could he conform to the smooth lines and stately bearing of traditional five-star inns.
With its doors opening today to the public, Nazarian's first SLS Hotel is its own organism, at once alluring and unnerving. The chairs have been designed in exactly 177 styles, and wait, is that a solid-glass deer head mounted over that shiny fireplace? It is, and the lamp stand next to it looks like a chromed assault rifle.
There is something eye-catching in every direction, much of it breakable and impossible to neatly categorize. It's cluttered Victorian parlor combined with traditional and modern European design elements -- plus a dash of Liberace.
The tall, 33-year-old Nazarian wore a dark business suit that stood in contrast to the whimsical decor as he showed a visitor around the labyrinthine restaurant and cocktail lobby and explained that the SLS sensibility is "a cross between playfulness and sophistication."
How well that sensibility will wear with people over the long run will be the big question for the emerging hotelier, who until now has been best known for white-hot dance clubs where young celebrities want to be seen.
Nazarian has been a millionaire himself since his early 20s, he has said. He established his business reputation as head of a Nextel software distributorship. By the early 2000s the local native and Beverly Hills High School grad was investing his family's assets in residential real estate.
He opened his first nightclub, Shelter, in 2003 on Sunset Boulevard, and the "Mad Max"-themed venue was soon attracting stars including Denzel Washington, Jennifer Lopez and Christian Slater.
Such clubs have fruit-fly life spans compared with most businesses, however, with 18 months considered a good run. Nazarian's gift has been to quickly invent another new must-see club, sometimes in the same building as one of his old ones.
But it typically takes three years for a new hotel to get established and stabilize its income, industry experts say, and the hotel business right now is taking a collective gasp. After recovering from some lean years after 2001, it enjoyed a sustained financial boom that just came to an end.
