The Groucho Club, a private London venue famed for celebrity hedonism, is finally zeroing in on a location for a major outpost in New York.
The members-only watering hole — whose patrons have lately included Anthony Bourdain, Kate Moss and Harry Styles — is in talks to lease at least half of a new, 10-story building downtown designed by architect Morris Adjmi, sources told Side Dish.
The prospective digs, located at 363 Lafayette St. at the corner of Great Jones Street, will include a club-run restaurant and bar, screening rooms, party rooms and hotel rooms, insiders said.
If all goes well, the Groucho Club could open its doors as soon as spring 2019, according to sources.
“The club has a long friendship and connection with New York and we feel it is a logical home for us,” Groucho Club’s Matt Hobbs said in an e-mail, confirming the Big Apple ambitions.
Launched in 1985 as an antidote to the Old Smoke’s stuffy, suit-clad, mens-only clubs, the Groucho Club soon gained notoriety for reports of behind-closed-doors decadence. Once, a publicist claimed he landed in the emergency room after the artist Damien Hirst lit his chest hair on fire during a late-night bender.
Groucho’s founders included the late, Bronx-born literary agent Ed Victor, and was originally backed by four New York celebrity investors: Paul Simon, the late Mike Nichols, Steve Martin (an honorary New Yorker and LA resident these days) and Lorne Michaels, according to reports.
The club is said to be named after Groucho Marx, who famously said: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
The New York club is slated to be bigger than the London one, with 30 hotel rooms for members and their guests, sources say. The London club has 20 rooms.
“The Groucho Club is considering leasing the whole building, or half of it,” David Kleiner, the managing director of JLL told Side Dish.
“If it goes to half, we are also in talks with boutique private-equity and hedge-fund firms, and high-end family offices to open in the building,” Kleiner added. “We are offering a unique product.”
Bill Schaffel and his son Alex, who are repping the club, could not be reached for comment.
The move comes as London-based rival SoHo House, whose restaurant at Soho House New York was launched by Hobbs in 2001, continues its expansion.
Soho House now has 18 clubs worldwide in cities like Miami, Chicago, Berlin and Mumbai. It even launched an old-school style resort outside London, in Oxfordshire, with cottages and activities for its members and their families. It’s looking for property to create something similar in New York, a sort of high-glam version of the Catskills in the 1950s, sources tell the Post.