The accoutrements of semi-creative success—MacBooks plastered with Supreme stickers, unblemished Stan Smiths, Parliament Lights—are strewn everywhere. Atop every other table is a half-finished green smoothie. Suntan lotion perfumes the air. The male uniform of Vilebrequin swim trunks (and nothing else) takes business casual to its logical end. To be clear though, people are working.
A male publicist in a caftan arrives. He sinks into the chaise longue cushion next to me, flags down a waiter, and orders a bottle of prosecco. His colleague, a male publicist not in a caftan, appears a few minutes later. They proceed to discuss the scheduling of a manicure for a client whose name I don’t catch but who sounds like a real bitch. The prosecco is delivered in a chiller, along with a pair of realistic-looking plastic flutes. The male publicist in a caftan pours two glasses, hands one to the male publicist not in a caftan, and exclaims, “This is so much better than working out of an office!”
God, I think, what is this place?
Until I began spending basically every day at Soho House, I really didn’t know what it was. Like many people with a passing familiarity, my primary associations were (1) that episode of Sex and the City where Samantha impersonates a British lady to gain access to the pool and (2) the 2010 murder of a swimsuit designer, which took place in one of the club’s bedrooms at the hands of her trust-fund boyfriend. That was pretty much it. I basically thought it was where people went before their bottle-service reservation.
But recently, it seemed like Soho House was in the midst of something relevant—suddenly opening, or announcing, one new exotic outpost after another. There are now a total of fifteen houses (eight of them are in the UK). Already this year, they opened one in Istanbul and “the Farmhouse” in Oxfordshire, and they’ll open New York’s second house, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, early next year. Following that are plans for Barcelona, downtown Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and, reportedly, Mumbai, Malibu, and Hong Kong. They also want to be in San Francisco, New Orleans, Austin, Brooklyn, Tokyo, and upstate New York. Worldwide, there are now 40,000 people in possession of the signature inky black card. And, still, each house, it turns out, has a waiting list that far exceeds its membership.
This seemed kind of crazy to me, this semi-antiquated private-club thing suddenly being so popular they couldn’t keep up with the demand. But it turned out that Soho House had made welcome this new kind of person—a deskless striver with a distaste for suits—that hadn’t really existed when the club was founded in 1995. People who “make content” and seem to network with athleticism and real joy. People who describe themselves as “passionate.” The movie producer who hasn’t necessarily produced a movie; the guy in advertising who when you ask him what he does says, “I tell stories”; the “creative digital-platform co-consultant” (or whatever the fuck).
There are a few celebrities roaming around, but mainly it’s home to an urban-dwelling creative class of people who can afford the dues (about 160 bucks a month) and have internalized the hyper-contemporary idea that a fulfilling life is exclusive of having a boss. They hope that Soho House might be a good place to host a meeting with a client or, better yet, an investor.
When you describe it that way, the demographic is pretty legible to anyone who lives in a city or spends time online, which is to say everyone. The guy with that monetizable combination of cultural awareness and professional ambition working on his laptop from a coffee shop in Berlin? That’s the most fetishized kind of worker right now. And the evident genius of Nick Jones, Soho House’s founder, was his foresight, his prescient recognition of this discrete group and the aspirational-but-still-chill environment they might want to spend their time in.
You can waltz into any Soho House and experience a familiar kind of comfort: The light will be dim, the furniture will be plush and balding, the statement eyewear will be ubiquitous. You’ll be greeted by your first name, and you can order an Eastern Standard (Grey Goose, lime juice, muddled cucumber, mint). The idea is that members let loose to the approximate degree they would at a friend’s house: Curl up, but maybe don’t let the soles of your shoes touch upholstery, don’t invite the loudest guy from the Class of 2005. I know all this because I went and saw a bunch of these places.
read the rest of this piece on GQ
