T Magazine: Business of Style | What Makes AndrÃ© Balazs Cry

The appearance of an André Balazs hotel in a neighborhood is a surefire harbinger of skyrocketing property values. No wonder the hotelier with the magic touch has designs on the real estate business.

"I get very, very, very sad in places that aren't right," the hotelier André Balazs says.

Normally he'll deploy a pair of hushed "very"s — for instance, when speaking about the biotech company he founded not long after college with his scientist father: "Ultimately it went public and was very, very successful."

Or about Willa, the "StndAir" cherry red seaplane that flies between Manhattan and East Hampton, making occasional detours to Shelter Island and his Hudson Valley estate: "It seemed to me both arcane and very, very sexy."

But André Balazs is very, very, very sensitive to the quality of his environment.

"I've been to places where I cry if it's physically ugly," he says. "I used to cry when I would go to L.A. I'd get out at the airport and it was so lonely. Such a place without a soul. There was no place to go. I would literally cry."

Balazs is seated at a custom Sergio Rodrigues table in the large, airy offices of his hotel and development company on East Fourth Street and Lafayette. The interior brick walls are painted the perfect matte shade of brown-black, like some exotic dark chocolate.

Behind Balazs's clutter-free desk, a long wall of built-ins house part of his "very, very large library of design books." I compliment him on the way the bookshelves are neatly recessed into a wall of Italian tile.

"You'll like this then," he says with a flashbulb pop of a grin, giving one cabinet a magic touch. A section swings open — a trick door leading to a secret private elevator.

We are in Balazsland, a place that is playful and provocative, with an almost sensuous attention paid to comfort and well-being. In Balazsland they serve Swedish Fish and private-label rosé on the seaplane to Shelter. In Balazsland you step off the elevator and the receptionist is not just superhot but supernice. Within the office things are simultaneously serene and totally happening, and the framed pictures lining the wall aren't boring corporate hotel interiors but shots of Hollywood starlets frolicking in pools and Christopher Walken in repose with Dennis Hopper at the Chateau Marmont, which Balazs bought in 1990. There's also a large portrait of Romulo, a room-service waiter there who is now retired. "He was with me for 28 years," Balazs says. "A Filipino who loved show tunes and would serenade guests, he ended up singing the theme song to Abel Ferrara's movie he did with Madonna and Harvey Keitel."

These are the kinds of things you hear in Balazsland. Things like: "We make our own Ping-Pong tables, did you know that?"

I didn't know, though I have played on the blue tables by the pool of the Standard, Hollywood many times. Balazs leads me to a small conference room, which houses the world's loveliest Ping-Pong table, sleek and red.

"We have meetings in here and then we clear it off and play," he says enthusiastically.

"The legs are inspired by Jean Prouvé. I own a really famous house by Prouvé called La Maison Tropicale. An epic example of an early prefab house. It was put into a cargo plane and shipped to Brazzaville in the French Congo. It was meant to be the centerpiece of a resort that I still haven't gotten around to buying."

The house, which Balazs exhibited at the Tate Modern, now slumbers, disassembled in crates up at his grand Hudson Valley estate, awaiting its next deployment.

Locusts-on-Hudson sits on 85 acres originally owned by an early Supreme Court justice (appointed by Thomas Jefferson) and later by Helen Hull, the former Mrs. Vincent Astor, and by Bob Guccione. Balazs and his good friend, the former Condé Nast editorial director James Truman, share an interest in an organic farming operation on the property, which provides meat, eggs and veggies to the restaurants at Balazs's Standard, High Line and the new Standard, East Village. The latter will feature rotisseries in an open kitchen helmed by Balazs's partner John Fraser, the well-regarded chef of Dovetail, when it opens next month.

Balazs and I sit down to lunch in his office. The crisply ordered quiet within the NoHo HQ belies the big changes in the heart of Balazsland. A few days before, he'd celebrated the fifth anniversary of the nightlife mecca Top of the Standard (which everyone, Balazs included, still calls the Boom Boom Room). Then the same week, he split his company into two, selling a majority stake in the Standard brand to a group of investors. Balazs will remain chairman of Standard International and be deeply involved in the creative direction. "This allows the Standard to grow in a more aggressive way," he says. "It needed to get scaled. It required a bigger organization."

Stacked on the big Rodrigues table next to our food are detailed architectural renderings for his next project: a decomissioned 19th-century firehouse in London that Balazs is turning into a 28-room hotel with partners including Renzo Rosso, the denim magnate, and the former Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt.

"It was built during the height of Victorian grandiosity," he says. This new property won't be a Standard. Instead it will follow the Mercer/Chateau Marmont model of site-specific luxury hotels or, as Balazs characterizes them, "very bespoke situations."

On that front, Balazs is in the early stages of developing a large-scale waterfront complex at Pier 57. "We'll do a beach club or spa," he says. "Something that would draw on the public bathing and spa culture of Japan and Russia."

Additionally, he is negotiating a deal to possibly put a hotel next to Eero Saarinen's iconic J.F.K. terminal.

"It's all real-estate based entertainment, in a way," he says.

Real estate — and the value his brand brings to it — is much on Balazs's mind these days. He is putting together a real estate company to invest in the neighborhoods adjacent to his hotels. "The plan," he says, "is to use both the Standard brand and the luxury properties as the value creators to go into an area."

The reason so many hotels are mediocre, Balazs adds, is that developers rarely give enough thought to design. By overseeing every element of their own projects, he and his partners not only control the look and feel of the place, but also add real value to the properties and, by the transitive property of cool, the areas that surround them.

"When I look at an architectural plan like this," Balazs says, pointing to a rendering of the unbuilt dining room in the London firehouse, "I'm seeing how it feels but I'm also conscious of what it will be like to sell this table in that corner three years after we open. All of that informs your role as a producer."

The Standard, East Village sprouts incongruously from a low-rise East Village streetscape. Opened by some ex-Balazs protégés, what was then known as the Cooper Square Hotel quickly ran into financial trouble. Balazs bought the struggling property, which he describes — wincing at the aesthetic affront of the thing — as a "relatively freakishly wrong building for the neighborhood" in late 2011.

He and his team of lighting designers, architects and scenographers have been painstakingly retooling the place in the image of the Standard brand. Which is to say, making it feel inviting and chic, unique yet somehow inevitable. The building was reoriented to face the bustling avenue, giving the neighbors on the quiet side street some peace and reviving a streetscape that would have made Jane Jacobs proud.

"We've completely changed the facade," Balazs says, "so instead of this monolithic thing, it will be a series of five, East Village-scaled storefronts. The lobby is now in the old tenement house that was there. Making it human scale, that is really important."

He's standing in the dining room comparing tableware options and nibbling at roasted sweetbreads chef Fraser has sent up for review. Balazs's title is Chairman of Standard International but he's clearly retaining the role of Chief Decider of the Minutiae That Matters.

"Nuance gives me great pleasure," he says. "The granularity, in the end, accounts for everything." He laughs and adds: "You have to find people who are working for love and professional pride, because the amount of time it takes, there's no rational justification for it on the creative side. On the economic side, fortunately, there's a lot of it."

One unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon in October, I meet Balazs for lunch at the Standard Grill. On a day like this the High Line is like a dream, reclaimed from the Robert Moses ring of highway and industry that once framed it. Balazs, like a mini Robert Moses of pleasure, has reshaped the city according to his tastes. It's hard to look at the neo-brutalist Standard straddling the old railway and the weekend crowds gathered below, and not conclude that he's improved it.

With his chiseled jawline and Gene Kelly eyes, Balazs cuts a dashing figure. Despite his successes, its been the kind of busy season that would leave most of us looking jet-lagged and bleary. The intensity of activity within Balazsland has not been without its costs.

"I knew going in that this would be a very, very busy year, and unfortunately one of the casualties of this is the personal side," Balazs says, a tactful, reluctant nod to his breakup with the comedian Chelsea Handler, much covered in the tabloid press.

He seems most engaged when he's talking about building something entirely new. I ask if there's an audience for the public baths he's dreaming of for the nearby waterfront.

"No one knows," he says. "I've found that everything that engages me can be made into a success."

He adds, smiling: "You just need adequate effort, sweat, fear, obsession."

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