ANDREW ZOBLER HAS been a busy man. The CEO of Sydell Group,
the hospitality company he co-founded with billionaire Ron Burkle
in 2005, has opened six properties in the past two years. They include
The Line in Austin and Washington, D.C., Freehand in New York City,
NoMad in Los Angeles, and two hotels in Las Vegas: Park MGM and
NoMad, which occupies the Park MGM’s top floors and features its
own entrance, restaurants, pool, and casino.
Zobler currently has six unannounced projects in the works. All
of this comes just after the debut of The Ned, Zobler’s collaboration
with Nick Jones of Soho House, which quickly became a go-to spot
in London. In the past year alone, Sydell Group’s portfolio has grown
from 1,993 hotel rooms to 5,986. “If you look at what we’ve done, it’s
pretty unusual in terms of the number of independent concepts, that
have legs, that we’ve created all within a relatively short period of
time,” Zobler says over coffee at a corner table at Studio, an all-day
café at the Freehand in New York.
The Ned was the New York native’s first property outside the
United States, but how it all played out is classic Zobler. It begins
with a historic, often “grand” building that presents itself typically in
an under-the-radar zip code. The NoMad in New York, for example, is
a 1903 beaux-arts building in an area formerly known for storefronts
selling everything from cheap jewelry to wigs. A former bank build-
ing designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and dating to 1924 is now home
to The Ned in London; The Line in Washington, D.C., is housed in a
neoclassical 20th-century church. “We look for communities where
there is something to do that is interesting, so the project isn’t just
about riding a wave or just building another hotel,” he says.
Next, Zobler and company get to work assembling a team, from
interior designers to restaurateurs. He’s tapped everyone from Jacques
Garcia, a French architect and designer, to the powerhouse duo
Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of Roman and Williams, who
agreed to design a modern-day hostel in Miami (the first Freehand—
they’ve since done the other three Freehands as well), to Sean Knibb,
a designer and landscaping consultant who had never done a hotel
before winning the commission for The Line in Los Angeles and,
later, Austin.
“We’ve taken a lot of really talented people and given them a
world stage,” Zobler explains. “Gabe [Orta] and Elad [Zvi] are some
of the best mixologists in the world, but no one had heard of them,”
he says of the co-founders of Bar Lab and, now, managing partners
of the Broken Shaker bars in all Freehand hotels.ZOBLER, WHO IS 56, was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, the eldest of
three children of a tax attorney father and a schoolteacher mother. He
named the company after his grandmother, Sydell Weyl, an antiques
dealer who employed a young Andrew in her shop and often took
him on buying trips to Europe. He credits her with helping develop
his eye for design and passion for travel. In his early 20s, he worked
in sales, and then as an assistant manager at Charles Jourdan on
Madison Avenue. It was the ’80s, the height of demand for the French- FREEHAND,
New York City
Opened: 2018
Rooms: 395
Hood: Flatiron District
Fun fact: Artwork at the
hotel is by Bard College
students and alumni. - NOMAD, Los Angeles
Opened: 2018
Rooms: 241
Hood: Downtown
Fun fact: The hotel’s
Coffee Bar was inspired
by Venetian grand cafés.
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