PUBLIC West Hollywood has been described as a bag of contradictions – built around multiple ideas that coexist, overlap, and evolve in real time, working together to create a new place and experience that feels truly independent, effortless, and entirely new…
For five decades, Ian Schrager has been throwing away every tried-and-true rule of hospitality and has gone off into his own personal direction. From the seismic cultural explosion of Studio 54 in 1977, to more than 40 original one-of-a-kind hotels worldwide and countless new concepts and ideas for restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and other entertainment facilities, he has continued to set new standards and reinvent the entire hospitality industry.
His career has never been simply about design, visuals or even nightlife. His projects have always been about people, creating windows into society itself, defining and evoking the cultural milieu, capturing the moment and the zeitgeist.
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“It’s been a really great ride. I’ve always sought to go where no one else has gone. To stand alone. To always be subversive to the status quo. To be rebellious, always break the rules, go off into uncharted territory, and blaze a new trail. It’s what makes me breathe. In fact, it’s the only reason I am still at it today. It’s a thrill for me and tremendously gratifying to continue to astonish people and blow them away. I’ve always found that the inherent trap, contradiction and danger of success is either in repeating yourself or abandoning what made you successful in the first place. Despite this apparent contradiction, I have always sought to create something that is so well conceived and executed, it couldn’t possibly be copied. You can always tell the real thing from the replica. This is where the magic lies – where the total what’s created is more than the sum of the individual parts, and where completely unlikely and disparate elements come together to create something truly surprising, unique and that has never been done before… that’s the secret sauce and the pixie dust.” – Ian Schrager
That balancing act where something finally emerges – rebellious yet refined, sophisticated yet disruptive – has defined every project Schrager has undertaken, and PUBLIC West Hollywood is no exception.
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PUBLIC West Hollywood is born from a fundamental realisation: that the most compelling ideas don’t come from a single point of view, but from the collision of influences, energies, and perspectives that creates something completely unexpected and unanticipated. Schrager has always worked this way – bringing together opposing forces, balancing tension with harmony. Somehow a cohesive idea emerges from this chaos and apparent disarray.
Most hotels boast about what they have, but PUBLIC West Hollywood is equally defined by what it doesn’t have. It combines the best of residential, office and hotel living to form a new genre…a modern one, and a new identity. There is no celebrity chef vying for attention, no traditional front desk slowing down the process and acting as a barrier between guests and experience. The modern traveler just really wants to get up to their room as fast as possible – jettisoning the old fashion idea of sitting and waiting for your room while sipping on champagne.
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No unsightly black big bulky TV dominating the room, no blinking lights in the nightclub, and no predictable ‘minimal design’ formula masquerading as luxury. Instead of thoughtless clutter, theatrics and gratuitous gestures, everything is stripped back to very its essence and to what truly matters: intimacy, warmth, connection and comfort.
Less is not only more, it’s better. In the words of the great Leonardo Da Vinci, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
In a world full of sameness, PUBLIC stands apart, not by addition only, but by thoughtful subtraction as well. Schrager commented, “It’s a one-of-a-kind editing process that requires constant observation. It’s quite challenging because we never know which detail is the detail that will push a project over the top. I have always outworked everybody else and worked with the most talented people in the world, who never even worked on hotels before, by the way. This allowed for the emergence of fresh new ideas despite how risky this was taking a gamble with multi-million-dollar projects.”
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Seventy-five percent of the hotel’s public space is outdoors, encompassing everything that is quintessentially Southern California and a microcosm of Los Angeles – dining under the sky, relaxed working, lounging in the sun, late-night gatherings under the stars, sports and health and wellness. The food and beverage offerings are deliberately unassuming, easy, and casual, stripped of pretension, yet still rich with flavor and authenticity – just great food, simply done, rooted in quality and freshness, and reasonably priced.
At the heart of it all is The Roof, a three-quarters of an acre private park with 360-degree spectacular vistas of the Hollywood Hills, Downtown LA and the LA Basin… the only private park in LA. It is an unparalleled oasis right in the middle of a world-class city. Ideal for private events and complete with undulating topography, sports, daily wellness classes, picnic tables, campfires, art installations, and an oversized 30-foot outdoor movie screen. Equal parts
playground and sanctuary, it is inspired by the great parks of the world including Central Park, Tuileries Garden, Hyde Park, Griffith Park – although smaller, it stands shoulder to shoulder and is utterly unique to Los Angeles.
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The guestrooms are equally emblematic: ANTI-DESIGN, simple, even effortless, sophisticated, and refined, distinguished not only by their originality, but more importantly, not by how it looks but by HOW THEY MAKE YOU FEEL. There are no wasted design flourishes – each detail is designed to create comfort and ease while embodying a distinctly Californian spirit.
Designed with technology and intimacy in mind, they blur the line between a private retreat, sleep, fun, play, work, rest and entertainment space – a fresh idea. Each room is its own private screening room. Featuring an 11-foot-wide floor to ceiling original projection surface and specially designed short throw laser display projector with 5,000 lumens and 4k enhancement – rivalling a true movie theatre experience in the privacy and intimacy of your own bedroom. From the acoustics to the image clarity, every element enhances the cinematic experience, bringing a touch of Hollywood to the guestrooms. Indeed, it is your own private movie theater in the heart of the film capital of the world.
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And when the sun goes down, PUBLIC reveals another side with a nightclub experience Schrager describes as “tantamount to dancing in a sealed-off immersive sound stage, where you can actually feel the vibrations of the music in addition to hearing it.” With an emphasis on sound and an elegant symphony of black design details, finishes, and materials, it is a speakeasy-style after-hours club, slightly dangerous (because you don’t know what will happen next) and built for intimate conversation but also pure abandonment and non-stop sweaty dancing – the evolution of Studio 54.
At its core, PUBLIC is built on Schrager’s radical premise: LUXURY FOR ALL. It’s a new idea for a new age. This is not the outdated, analogue version of luxury defined by wealth, exclusivity, or hollow status symbols. It’s a new luxury… without the old fashion elements that traditionally defined luxury. This is luxury reimagined – egalitarian, democratic, emotional. Luxury here means comfort, ease, humanity, freedom and no distractions. It’s about great service that is personal, attentive, unscripted, and unpretentious, great style that is both provocative and timeless, great entertainment and experience that makes your heartbeat faster. PUBLIC breaks down barriers, delivering the ultimate luxury – the freedom of choice and time all at a tremendous value that makes it accessible to everyone.
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Schrager continued “The very system of a hotel itself and high costs to create products stifle and do not encourage or reward innovation…or taking chances or risks… to do something original. It has created a generation of hoteliers as lemmings, who keep doing the same monotonous things over and over repeating themselves but in a different colour. It’s akin to a group of circus elephants where each grabs the tail of the one in front of it, parading around the circus ring. It not only results in the uniformity of all hotels in their look and operation, but also the very business model…asset free or light, and financial risk avoidance. The public deserves and wants more.”
PUBLIC West Hollywood represents both a continuation and a reinvention. It is truly independent, unclassifiable, and original – born from a global mix of collaborators but grounded firmly in the soul of California. Like every project Schrager has ever undertaken, it seeks to disrupt the industry, shake up the status quo, and set a new benchmark for what hotels can be.
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