A Hotel Guru Changes Rooms

Schrager's business, like that of most hoteliers, suffered after 9/11. He had expanded too rapidly, and the competition had caught up to him. By 2003, Schrager was forced into bankruptcy protection for the Clift Hotel in San Francisco and had to refinance debt. Last year he left his company, Morgans Hotel Group. Since then, he and his partner, developer Aby Rosen, have been involved in several deals in New York City, including 40 Bond, a condo in NoHo being designed by white-hot architects Herzog & de Meuron, and the Metropolitan Life building, a 1909 gem.

More than anything, Schrager is a stylist, and he understands that the façade of any development, whether a hotel or a residence, has to jibe with pop culture to be commercially successful. Several years ago, he started to look around for a new idea, traveling everywhere from Istanbul to Texas. "Seeing other exotic kinds of aesthetics was expansive for me," he says. "I wanted to do something that was really a reversal. The prospect of working with an artist was new to me." And when he saw Schnabel's movie Before Night Falls, he knew Schnabel could project his unique style onto a different medium. It was also a good time to get back into the hospitality business, which is surging. The question is, How hot can his new "anti-cool" aesthetic get?