BBC Article: Ever Fancied Joining a Private Members’ Club?

A new breed of fashionable private members clubs are growing in popularity around the world, promising to be more inclusive and diverse than their stuffy older counterparts.

Yet while the newer venues like Soho House, Common House and The Hospital Club certainly have far more youthful millennial memberships, you certainly don't need to have gone to a posh school or university, they still have high joining fees and strict vetting processes.

So how less elitist are they? And what are the benefits of getting your name on the list? Private Club Marketing's CEO Zack Bates spoke with BBC business reporter, Jennifer Ceaser for some exclusive insights.

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The London-based Hospital Club to open Los Angeles outpost in 2018

Los Angeles will soon be home to the first American outpost of the London-based Hospital Club, a private social club aimed at arts-focused creative professionals.

The new venture, designed by HKS architects, would establish a hotspot for artists and creative entrepreneurs in Los Angeles’s Hollywood neighborhood by taking over the existing Redbury Hotel at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. That building, located across from the historic Capitol Records building, will be renovated to contain a slew of performance and shared office and studio spaces, as well as hotel rooms.

The new complex dubbed h. Club LA, will house facilities for film screenings, musical performances, exhibitions, among other types of cultural programs. It will also provide up to 36 bedrooms for use by the public. Hotel guests will become temporary members during their stay and will have access to the member facilities. The club will also offer a slate of member-accessible amenities, like a rooftop patio and restaurant, co-working spaces, gym, and music studio.

In recent years, Hollywood has exploded with a large crop of housing, office, and mixed-use developments, including an office tower currently under construction by Gensler, called the Icon. Los Angeles-based LARGE Architecture is also working on a midcentury modern style-inspired mixed-use residential tower in the neighborhood. The area also hosts a growing contingent of technology-related companies including headquarters facilities for Netflix, CNN, and Live Nation. With its Hollywood outpost, Hospital Club owners are betting the growing creative industries in the area will be a boon to business. Sue Walter, chief executive of Hospital Club, told the Los Angeles Times, “Big names are moving into the area. I have been astonished by the level of development. It’s like it’s on the cusp of something exciting that is about to explode and we want to be part of that.”

The club, which offers half-price memberships to individuals who are under the age of 30, is scheduled to open in 2018.

Source: https://archpaper.com/2017/02/hospital-club-los-angeles-outpost/

Inside Spring Place, New York City’s Hottest Private Members’ Club

The owners of Spring Place hope jet-setting creative professionals will seek it out to host meetings with clients—and cavort with other jet-setting creative professionals.

On a recent afternoon at Spring Place, the new members-only club in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, the atmosphere was so hush-hush that even directions to the bathroom were whispered.

In the reception area, one prospective member strained to hear her tour guide assure her that “everything is steeped in the arts” at Spring Place, a playground for the creative class that doubles as a workspace.

To be sure, a number of immaculately dressed creative types were working—huddled together in private, sun-soaked conference rooms or hunched over Macbooks in a large communal space outfitted with midcentury furniture—which partially explained the library voices.

Continue Reading: https://privateclubmarketing.com/77ap

Jet-Setters-Only, Please: Inside the New Private Club That Aims to Unset Soho House

With a $3,600 price tag, Spring Place means to shake things up. Here’s everything you need to know, including how to score one of those coveted memberships.

On an early afternoon in May, all was quiet at the new members-only club south of Canal street in Manhattan. Spring Place, as it’s called, was slowly coming alive before its official opening this week.

All over the fifth and sixth floors, well-dressed creative types laboriously banged away at their laptops and huddled in important-looking gaggles discussing the sort of things creative types spitball about. The place had the energy of a beehive designed by Philippe Starck, with the low murmur of efficiency as the only background noise.

Sprawling across three floors of the Spring Studios building—home to New York Fashion Week, Tribeca Film Festival, and the Independent Art Fair—Spring Place is a new(ish) breed of workspace and clubhouse. Think Soho House meets Neuehouse, a playground for jet-setters to get some work done while they also fraternize with their cohort in the comfort of their own exclusive grotto. Some floors are for serene study and chin-stroking, other floors are for schmoozing and air-kissing.

Continue Reading at W Magazine

Why Harvard shouldn’t push its all-male final clubs to go co-ed

For the members of Harvard’s super-elite “final clubs,” perhaps nothing produces a more immediate shiver of Not Our Kind of Thing than comparison to fraternities of the Greek system, with their herds of suburban business majors and their abundance of chapters popping up at every benighted State U and third-rate Catholic college. In a sense, fraternities are the very opposite of what a final club represents, which is, first and foremost, a sui generis association with the single greatest university in the history of the world.

Yet most of Harvard’s all-male final clubs began as Greek letter societies, adopting their unique characteristics only after the university banned fraternities in the 1850s. These clubs emerged as a response to the aspects of higher education that young men found feminizing: the enforced chastity, study, prayer and self-discipline. And they’ve been fulfilling their mission to vex college administrators and delight male students ever since.

Just as frat row presents a constant, low-grade headache — and an occasional five-alarm migraine — to presidents of lesser universities, so have the final clubs been a source of increasing irritation to the Harvard administration. A recent, radioactive report by the university’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault revealed a familiar constellation of problems: The clubs dominate the social scene and are locations of binge drinking; their members throw parties with sexually offensive themes and compete with one another for sexual conquests. Most gravely, they were identified as sites of sexual assault.

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