Soho House – Clubability?

It all depends on your definition of clubability. Are you up for short, tight, and perhaps rubberized, or do you slide into the wearing-thin leather armchairs and equally frayed Jermyn Street shirt cuff camp?

This is not a question of the difference between clubbing and the club. This is about the new generation of clubs that are so of the moment that to pass within their portals is to catch zeitgeist dust, even if it gives you an allergy. As long as you have a gloss wand (for either sex), a color Blackberry, and no free evenings to the end of the organiser’s memory, you may enter. A gentle academic, whose spectrum of knowledge spreads as broadly as he does into a quietly ageing club chair, is not going to enjoy this new generation of clubability. There are no familiar doormen, well-trodden carpets, cherished paintings, those fading and faintly collapsing chairs, quiet rooms, and slowed time where there is the possibility of falling asleep after lunch and waking up ten years later to find that nothing has really changed, neither the curtains nor the politics. The new generation of clubs are less likely to around in ten years to mark whether there has been change or not.

These new babies are sharp, hard, and fuelled by the current need for a door policy and scene of such extreme cruelty as to make Studio 54 of the mid-70s seem somewhat retro playground time. So, reducing this down again, we can flow seamlessly straight to the newly buffed and Manolo-clicking downtown Meatpacking District of New York: Soho House, English export from the Piers Adam stable of Soho House London, Babington House, and The Electric on Portobello Road. It’s new in this NY medya hood, new in its idea of offering facilities that echo the notion of a country club, that old familiar and easily accepted package, except that this is an old familiar with edges and volume brittle and loud enough to discombobulate a transiting Tibetan monk, perchance he happened to be handing out mantras in the 5th floor library to a cruelly cheek-boned gathering of clubbers in search of a bit of calm in an over-caffeinated city. Here is irony in New York, at last: a place so carefully and cleverly designed to be hard and cool, and yet claiming to offer its members a sanctuary with its elegant menu of rooftop swimming pool and moonlit martini destination; a restaurant and bar, the tables placed in such a way as to minimize rubber-necking while still getting the full panorama; viewing rooms, private rooms, bedrooms; and the party piece, The Cowshed, the eye of the storm, the spa where silence has somehow prevailed.

Take a Friday evening, a challenge of course, the ultimate test of anything hip-hop white hot. The bar is spiked with tall girls in jeans, their bare backs almost cloned in the way skin carves away from the spine, care of Pilates, kick butt yoga, caffeine, cigarettes and youth, and the other thing they all seem to have in common—English accents. The men are the same though more groomed, or utterly disheveled in that labour intensive way that requires hours of hair-muzzing and a definitely denied private income. And if the accent isn’t English the owner is probably a movie star, be it Uma or Gywneth, though the latter and the gang that move around her are as good as English. Then there was the recent episode of Sex in the City in which the almost chic, slutty Samantha was prepared to put her un-virtuousness on the line to get admission. Ever since that episode the scene in the bar has seemed like the programme-come-to-life, or perhaps that just really sums it all up—this generation’s sense of social success is marked by a place with a ‘screw you’ door policy and a starring role in a TV show about high heels and grown-up women in little girl dresses.

Soho House New York, 29-35 9th Avenue, New York, NY 10014 tel: 1 212 627 9800www.sohohouseny.com

Published in the Financial Times, April 23, 2004