Strange Bedfellows

Ian Schrager invented the boutique stay. Arne Sorenson runs the world’s biggest hotel company. Together they have created the first global chain of hip hotels, Edition, which is about to open its tenth outpost.

- John Arlidge

To lose one hotel may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. Yet that is what happened to Ian Schrager, the man who created the ‘boutique’ or ‘style’ hotel. In 2010, he opened The Waikiki Edition, the first of what he hoped would become a chain of hip hotels, developed and operated in partnership with the world’s biggest hotel company, Marriott International. But just weeks after the first guests checked in, the landlord turned up in the middle of the night, changed the locks on the front doors and told staff they worked for him now, not Edition. He was angry at what he claimed was poor financial performance. The same thing happened to the second Edition, which opened in Istanbul in 2011.

The twin setbacks could have been the first and last anyone heard of a brand dreamt up by Schrager and the then CEO of Marriott, Bill Marriott Jr, in 2008. But Schrager and Marriott doubled down – and there are now ten Editions, in London, New York, Miami, Barcelona, Bodrum, Bangkok, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Sanya and, from October, West Hollywood. Fifteen more will follow over the next three years, including in Rome, Tokyo, Milan (W*235), Dubai, Reykjavik, Madrid, Las Vegas and Tampa.

The latest openings are not just a remarkable reversal of fortune for Edition, but a triumph of perhaps the most unlikely partnership in modern business: Schrager, the scrappy, edgy disruptor of everything from nightclubs to hotels, and Arne Sorenson, who took over from Bill Marriott Jr in 2012, as boss of the buttoned-up global hospitality behemoth whose rooms are decorated in 17 different shades of magnolia.