Privacy’s the Rage Beyond Just the Celebrity Set

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The New York Sun

Take it from this man about town: Private party rooms are nothing new in the American nightlife experience. Celebrities and the well-to-do have long imbibed in reserved spaces far away from pedestrian partiers and kept their comfortable distance from the hoi polloi.

That business model might be changing as the definition of celebrity continues to morph with reality TV, churning celebrities out of ordinary folk, and city politicians scrutinizing the night club as a disturbance to public order.

Enter “Room Service,” a new club on 21st Street in the Flatiron District that looks like a hotel with upholstered walls and an ornate chandelier but, well, is really a nightclub.

“The private room is a great way to let a club-goer feel special and feel like a celebrity,” a staffer at Life & Style Weekly who chronicles nightlife, Jared Shapiro, said. “Celebrities like to go out and feel special and be taken care of and now for a nominal fee you can feel that way too.”

Room Service boasts the traditional bar and nightclub — private bartenders and signature cocktails, like the Spa Treatment, with chilled sake and 42 Below vodka cocktail, served with a cucumber garnish.

But it adds the mainstays of an upscale hotel — a TV, DVDs, a private coat check, a personal bartender (Honest to God, the club calls them “private mixologists”) and even a masseuse. (And like many hotels, the masseuse needs to be ordered in advance.)

There could be another motivation — more bottom-line-focused, perhaps — for Room Service’s founders to rent out its 10-foot-by-10-foot spaces and make people feel a bit more important than they are, instead of cramming as many people in a tight-space as possible.

“In New York City you are usually only one credit card away from being a celebrity,” he said. Renting one of the nine rooms costs between $350 and $800 a night.

At Room Service, there is a common space for interacting with strangers. But the intimate suites provide not only a guaranteed safe space for partying with people you know. The setup offers considerably less of a headache for the proprietors because people know one another better.

The founders of Room Service weren’t sure what form a club would take in a private, luxurious space, Danny Divine (That’s his real name.) of Room Service said, but they knew they wanted to provide patrons with a respite from city life, and designers worked from the trappings that hotels provide.

The club mixes private and public space and allows partygoers to be seen or to command instant privacy by closing the semi-sheer drapes of the suite and creating an intimate setting.

And at Room Service, its promoters concede, the drapes might be necessary.

Even though the concept for the nightclub departs substantially from the traditional setup — where interaction with completely random strangers is reason for spending hundreds of dollars — perhaps one mainstay of an adult night out will always remain the same, Mr. Divine confessed.

“The one question we always get is, ‘Do you really put condoms inside the suite?’,” Mr. Divine confided.


The New York Sun

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