Cindy Crawford, in most situations as cool and collected as they come, sounded like an exploding firework when I asked her about it. “If you live in L.A., this is a big deal,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for something like this for so long.”
Laura Dern went on and on (and on) about it. “I’ve emailed them three times,” she said. “When is it opening?”
Baron Davis, the tech investor and former pro basketball player, joked that he intended to “basically move in” from sunrise to sunset. “To have a place, a cultural hub, on this side of town is going to be a game changer,” he said.
They were talking about a new private club called San Vicente Santa Monica, a sequel to the wildly popular San Vicente Bungalows, a celebrity haven in West Hollywood, Calif., where camera phones are banned and stars pretend to be regular people. The breathlessness, though, struck me as somewhat silly. Another private club? At this point, they pop up with numbing regularity. There are more than a dozen in Los Angeles alone. How many does one jet set need?
But the San Vicente Santa Monica, which opened last month at a cost of $40 million, offers something that, paradoxically, is almost nonexistent in Los Angeles — a luxury clubhouse at the beach.
The new San Vicente sits atop a three-story building on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, the seaside city between Venice Beach to the south and Pacific Palisades to the north. The club’s indoor-outdoor restaurant looks out onto the sand, the surf and, on the two occasions I visited, the occasional sailboat. Five other spaces, including a rooftop bar and casual dining area, have equally jaw-dropping vistas.
“Even in Malibu, where I live, there are very few nice places where you can sit and enjoy the view,” Ms. Crawford said. “There’s Nobu, and that’s pretty much it.”
Jeff Klein, who owns the San Vicente chainlet, said people as far north as Santa Barbara (two hours by car from Santa Monica) have been vying for memberships. “I’m telling you, these are like people who have not had water in eight years in a desert,” Mr. Klein said. “They literally have had nowhere to go.”
What about the vine-covered Jonathan Club, operating on the beach in Santa Monica since 1927? Shutters on the Beach? Hotel Casa Del Mar?
“Please be serious,” Mr. Klein responded. “No offense to the Jonathan Club, but there are way too many children there — running kids, crying kids, nagging kids.” (San Vicente Santa Monica is 18 and older, except for weekend brunch and Sunday family dinner.)
“Shutters is fine, but it’s a public hotel with no guest curation,” Mr. Klein continued. “And I’m not even going to address Casa Del Mar.”
Well, then.
“I do think Soho Beach House is interesting and does a great job,” he said, referring to Little Beach House Malibu, which opened in 2016 and is part of the publicly traded Soho House chain.
Even so, San Vicente Santa Monica is twice as big at 21,000 square feet. Little Beach House also focuses on Malibu residents, while the new San Vicente aims to draw members from across Los Angeles County and beyond.
“Hollywood royalty and plutocrats and interior design pashas and fashionistas and art world denizens and music industry people and sports stars and Silicon Beach innovators,” Mr. Klein said. Membership initiation fees range from $3,200 and $15,000 depending on age, with annual dues running $1,800 to $4,200. Current members of the San Vicente Bungalows receive free access to the Santa Monica club for a year and then must upgrade to a “global” membership.
It’s too soon to know, but San Vicente Santa Monica could result in new migratory patterns for A-listers on the West Side, an ambiguous area west of the 405 freeway that contains the upscale Brentwood neighborhood. At least among a certain social set, three restaurants have long dominated in this part of the city: Toscana, which first opened in 1989; Giorgio Baldi, which arrived a year later; and Nobu Malibu, a relative newcomer at 24 years old.
“Over the past 30 years, there have been a couple of restaurants that have been lovely clubhouses,” Ms. Dern said. “But it’s not the same as what Jeff does.”
Mr. Klein, a 54-year-old fussbudget with a big laugh that borders on a bray, does have a history of forcing a changing of the guard. In 2004, he bought the rundown Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood for $18 million (recently revalued, he said, at roughly $150 million) and turned its ultra-elegant Tower Bar into a power scene that eclipsed the one at the venerable Chateau Marmont. Nothing has come along to overshadow Tower Bar as a celebrity haunt in the 20 years since, except perhaps Mr. Klein’s own San Vicente Bungalows, which opened in 2018.
“It’s so hard to find places that are private but don’t feel ostentatious,” Ms. Dern said.
The main dining room at San Vicente Santa Monica echoes Tower Bar in its design: Japanese walnut paneling, suede puce-pink banquettes, silk pleated lampshades casting a dim glow. “We wanted a formality, a sophistication, that I think is unexpected for the location,” said Lisa Koch, who designed the space. There is also a library and billiard room, a 50-seat screening room and a “tent room” draped with Pierre Frey fabric.
Ms. Koch said she drew inspiration from the Italian Riviera circa 1960 and luxury cruise liners from the 1930s. If the vibe at Tower Bar is Old Hollywood, this is Old Hollywood on vacation — Bette Davis draped in a fritillary-decorated evening cape and steaming toward Rio de Janeiro in “Now, Voyager.”
“I will probably go to Jeff Klein jail for saying this, but I think it might surpass Tower Bar as the gold standard,” said Gabé Doppelt, San Vicente’s global membership directrice and a former maître d’ at Tower Bar.
Mr. Klein is also expanding San Vicente Bungalows by adding a large swimming pool and cabanas. In February, he will bring his mini club empire East for the first time as part of his $130 million purchase and renovation of the historic Jane Hotel in New York City. Although a portion of the Jane will remain a low-budget hotel (“a hostel,” in Mr. Klein’s words), most of the public spaces will be sealed off and renamed San Vicente West Village.
The Jane’s ballroom — once a vibrant nightclub, downtown trysting spot and neighborhood living room — has been transformed into a private restaurant, for instance. Mr. Klein is adding a basement discothèque, but a lot of the stylish 20-somethings who used to gyrate at the Jane won’t be able to get in anymore. San Vicente memberships in New York will cost the same as in California.
“What was so fantastic about the Jane is that it felt cool and fancy and upscale but half the people there were actually unwashed dirtbags,” said Andrew Zipern, a former regular who makes a living as a digital media jack-of-all-trades.
Mr. Klein visited more than 200 properties in his search for the new Santa Monica club. He vetoed most of them for being too far from the ocean (a block or two). He ultimately decided to lease a space beside the Georgian Hotel, an Art Deco gem that reopened last year after a no-expense-spared renovation. (Jon Blanchard, the force behind the Georgian, laughed off Mr. Klein’s “nowhere to go” comment as classic Mr. Klein. “There really wasn’t much that catered to Santa Monica’s cultured community prior to the Georgian,” Mr. Blanchard said.)
The neighborhood may be on the ocean, but it has seen better days. Dozens of storefronts sit vacant. Garbage overflows from graffitied dumpsters. Homelessness has decreased — the city strengthened an anti-camping ordinance in September — but more than 700 people remain unhoused in Santa Monica, according to a government count earlier this year.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis — one only cast into sharper relief by a luxury club arriving,” said John E. Alle, a local commercial real estate broker and community activist.
Mr. Klein responded: “I think the city of Santa Monica knows that it has to deal with this problem, which is truly heartbreaking.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, a line of S.U.V.s idled outside San Vicente Santa Monica as valets scrambled to find parking for everyone. Upstairs, the scene at the cramped front desk was equally chaotic. (“We’re working through the kinks,” Mr. Klein said later.)
A bossa nova tune drifted in from the indoor-outdoor dining room, where a bassist, pianist and several other musicians were stationed. A fireplace was lit, but some banquette dwellers were still chilly, prompting servers to swaddle them in monogrammed blue lap blankets. The producer Brian Grazer and his wife, Vanessa Smiley Grazer, were cozied at a prime table. Maria Shriver and Al Pacino surveyed the room, along with Kevin Huvane, the Creative Artists Agency heavyweight, and Prakash Amritraj, the former pro tennis player.
“Wowzie,” said Sharon Sachs, an actress, staring out at the ocean.
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