New Private Member Clubs Take On Soho House to Redefine Hospitality
Photo Credit: The Design Studio is a co-working space located inside The Curtain hotel in London, and is only accessible to hotel guests and members of The Curtain's private membership club. The Curtain/Gansevoort Hotel Group
Skift Take
It sounds antithetical but, in their efforts to make everyone feel "like a local," perhaps hotel brands should be taking a look at The Curtain and Karl Lagerfeld Hotels, seeing how the private club model could work for them.
The private members club concept is not at all new, but the hospitality model is certainly undergoing a transformation of sorts.
Much of that evolution first began in 1995, when Nick Jones founded Soho House for bohemian, well-to-do creatives, shunning the more typical banker types whom you'd find in more traditional clubs.
Now, 23 years later, there are 18 Soho House clubs around the world, as well as talk of Soho House going public.
But now the pioneer Soho House is facing a number of new entrants into the members-only club space. They include co-working brands like WeWork and NeueHouse, and new hotel-member club hybrids that follow the Soho House model in some ways, but are positioning themselves to appeal to a broader, more inclusive type of customer base.
Raising the Curtain for Creatives
One such example of that is The Curtain, which opened in London last year. The 120-room hotel and private members club, with nightly rate averages at about $340, is the passion project
