designer’s iconic, high-heeled pump. He was in the right place at
the right time with the right product. “That was the best year of my
life, I had so much fun,” he recalls. In 1984 he went to law school. “I
always wanted to go into business of some kind and I got a law degree
because I was better with words than with numbers.”
AFTER GRADUATING from Brooklyn Law School, Zobler went on
to work for the firms of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison before landing at Greenberg Traurig.
While a partner there, Zobler met Barry Sternlicht and ultimately
went to work for Starwood Hotels
as senior vice president of acquisi-
tions and development in the early days of W Hotels. Looking back,
Zobler credits Sternlicht as being “the biggest influence ... as a deal
maker, he is untouched. He’s a genius.” One of the deals Zobler and
Sternlicht considered was the purchase of André Balazs’s Standard
hotels; it didn’t work out, but Zobler stayed in touch with Balazs
and, in the early aughts, became a partner in the company. Over the
three years they worked together, the company developed several
properties including The Raleigh and The Standard hotels, both in
Miami, and acquired the site for The Standard, New York. “André was
incredibly good at current culture and design and creating a scene
and cultivating a great crowd,” Zobler says.
“Andrew is at once vehemently passionate and driven and focused,
and on the other hand definitely shy and humble,” says Eleven
Madison Park’s Will Guidara.
While he admits he’s “developed an expertise doing ‘cool hotels,’”
Zobler himself has no “burning desire to be cool.” He prefers weekends
at his Hudson Valley home, which he shares with his husband, Manny
Urquiza, their four dogs, and three cats. He wears crisp button-downs
with suspenders and sensible Cole Haan brogues and jokes that he
only wears a suit “when I’m going to meet lenders.” The single visible
display of wealth is a vintage gold Rolex.“I HAVE MET a lot of folks who are creative geniuses, who have
developed or managed hotel product. I have met a lot of lawyers and
bankers and [private-equity] guys who have found creative people
to work with. But I have never found, before Andrew, what I would
consider to be the complete package,” says Jim Murren, the chairman
and CEO of MGM Resorts International. Zobler has managed to create
hotels that are cool but not too cool for a wide demographic range.
Spend a couple of hours in the NoMad or Freehand lobby areas and
you’ll see hipsters with ’70s mustaches in vintage concert tees as
well as businessmen in tailored suits and expensive shoes and locals
hunched over laptops using the free Wi-Fi. “A lot of people try and
define their product as something that everybody will like, and almost
nobody will hate. They try and do something that is universal,” says
Zobler of the competitive market. “We try to create things that really
have a point of view, knowing that some people won’t like it, but peo-
ple who do like it will love it and become kind of evangelical about it.”- THE LINE,
Washington, DC
Opened: 2017
Rooms: 220
Hood: Adams Morgan
Fun fact: An in-house
community radio station
livestreams to guest rooms.
34- THE NED, London
Opened: 2017
Rooms: 250
Hood: City of London
Fun fact: A barbershop
on-site offers classic wet
shaves and beard trims.
APRIL/MAY 2019LANDON NORDEMAN (LOBBY), ERIC MEDSKER PHOTOGRAPHY (DOG), JAMES JACKSON (EXTERIOR), SIMON BROWN (VAULT)