Soho House is normally a private-members club, but the Berlin one has a hotel open to the public. Many beautiful rooms in a cool location, and who knows who you'll run into in the lobby!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I don't like the idea that one hotel could be better than another. In any city, I try to find a hotel that has the identity of that place - Claridge's in London, the Danieli or Cipriani in Venice. In New York, I stay at the Mercer Hotel; it is so much in the character of SoHo.
Berlin is my favourite city.
And of course I like Berlin a lot. It's such an interesting city.
If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.
In my flat in Chicago, I've got this big room with an office in the corner and a balcony so I can watch people go by.
The very best hotel I've stayed in is the Intercontinental on Park Lane. We went there for the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, and it was sheer luxury. Everybody had a smile on their face. I came home and changed all my pillows because the hotel ones were so beautiful.
Berlin is in a state of transition. There are lots of people who don't stay here. They pass through. They might not 'clean up,' but they mature. It is a city where people spend a significant time in their lives, and then they move on.
The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places.
Theater is a public space. It is a spectacular space. It is a gathering place.
Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.