At first André Balazs assumed it was a false alarm. Two weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, he was working in his office next door to the Chiltern Firehouse, his star-studded London hotel, when the fire alarm went off.
“It was rather annoying,” he says. “One always assumes that this is a test. We’ve all been there before. You start cursing the engineer who can’t turn it off.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a test. When Balazs, 68, went to investigate, firefighters were already in the restaurant’s kitchen. Hours later most of the Victorian four-story former fire station in Marylebone, went up in flames.
Burning wood, which had fallen from the pizza oven, set fire to “the void between the basement and ground floor”, according to the fire service. For more than six hours, 125 firefighters struggled to control the flames.
Balazs typically hosts meetings in his own hotel but it’s now a roofless, charred, wet shell of its former glory, so we meet in a less starry hotel down the road instead.
The multimillionaire hotelier is having a nightmarish week, putting out logistical fires after the literal fire that ripped through the restaurant and roof and destroyed all 26 bedrooms. But because I live opposite the hotel, a former fire station, and have never complained about the late-night carousing, he makes time for breakfast.
For more than six hours, 125 firefighters struggled to control the flames.
“Where will the celebs go now?” a friend texted me as the fire hit the news. It’s a valid question. Blake Lively, Bradley Cooper, Gigi Hadid, David Beckham and Leonardo DiCaprio are just some of the Chiltern Firehouse guests that I’ve spied from my kitchen window. Robert De Niro stayed at the hotel a few weeks ago; the actor and fellow hotelier is a friend of Balazs and they have nearby homes in Manhattan. “It’s fair to say that he’s been very supportive for all kinds of reasons,” Balazs says, anxious not to single out particular A-list pals.
By 5pm that Friday, more fire engines had arrived, more black smoke billowed into the sky and more gawkers gathered. Chiltern Firehouse is an often absurd procession of supercars and supermodels but, watching from my living room as the fire got increasingly out of control, I was heartbroken for the staff and my endlessly entertaining hotel neighbor.
“It was a slow burn, excuse the expression,” says Balazs, eating scrambled eggs and smoked salmon (toast left untouched). “It just kept escalating.” By 6pm, the entire roof was engulfed in flames and avalanches of water were being shot into the Victorian four-story building. Firefighters who had been based at the station three decades earlier battled to get the blaze under control, while hotel staff rebooked A-list actors, in town for that Sunday’s BAFTA awards, into rival hotels.
The owner points out the tragedy could have been far worse had it happened at night, when the fully-booked hotel would have been packed. “I’m really thankful that no one got hurt,” he says. “This was bad, that would have been horrible.”
Balazs, who has owned the similarly opulent Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles since 1990, watched in horror from the street for hours as the inferno tore through the hotel, which he’d transformed from a deserted building into London’s glitziest destination more than ten years earlier. “It’s like watching your child go into an operating room. You’re just helpless and you fear for everything,” he says. “Imagine you’re outside the operating room and the news gets worse. That’s what it felt like.” By 9.30pm the fire was finally under full control.
Despite his understandable stress, Balazs oozes charm, all mahogany tan and expensive teeth. He is a renowned networker and ladies’ man. He has two adult daughters with his ex-wife, Katie Ford, the former chief executive of Ford Models (dealing in beautiful people not cars), and has a son, eight, with his ex-girlfriend Cosima Vesey, the 36-year-old great niece of the late Earl of Snowdon. He had a relationship with Uma Thurman and has been romantically linked to Renée Zellweger, Sharon Stone, Cameron Diaz and Naomi Campbell. When I ask if he’s in a relationship now, he keeps shtoom and gives a wolfish grin.
I’ve read that the serial entrepreneur doesn’t like doing the same thing twice; so has he thought about selling up since the fire? “Everything’s crossed my mind,” he says. “Even the question of if one rebuilds, does one rebuild the same thing? I would hate to do the same thing twice but that’s the navigation. How does an insurance policy work? What are you required to do? That has been on my mind a lot.”
The roof of the Firehouse is now largely gone, the windows are shattered and the street still smells of burnt rubber. The combination of water, smoke and fire damage throughout means the hotel will have to be gutted; what will be the financial damage to rebuild? “Whatever it cost to build in the first place, times whatever costs have increased,” says Balazs, who is worth an estimated $700 million. “It’s a complete redo.”
“Where will the celebs go now?”
The hotelier has led an extraordinary life. Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts by his Hungarian immigrant parents, Endre, a physician, and Eva, a psychoanalyst (whose patients included the first known case of a man amputating his penis), he got degrees from Cornell (liberal arts) and Columbia (business and journalism) before co-founding a biotech company, Biomatrix, with his father Endre, a doctor and inventor, in 1988. It worked alongside skincare giants, using Endre’s cellular research on how body tissue heals to help develop products such as Estée Lauder’s Night Repair cream. Twelve years later, they sold it for an estimated $738 million.
In the 1990s, Balazs turned his attention to nightclubs and hotels and quickly proved to have the Midas touch, earning the moniker the King of Clubs. He bought the run-down Chateau Marmont, launched The Mercer in New York in 1998, and built the Standard hotels in the noughties in LA, NY and Miami, a glitzy chain where the great and the good behaved badly. Guests at the Standard hotel in Manhattan were asked to stop having sex against the floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows in view of the public. Balazs says he doesn’t believe it is a hotel’s role to “cast judgment”.
Chiltern Firehouse was a triumph as soon as it opened in February 2014 and for more than a decade, royals, rock stars and Oscar winners never tired of partying at the infamous Ladder Shed bar (where, in its previous life, firefighters stored their ladders).
The hotel was due to host Netflix’s BAFTA after-party on Sunday night, with Hollywood stars such as Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana attending. The event, which cost the streaming giant upwards of tens of thousands of dollars, relocated to Mayfair instead. Phew.
It has been a full decade of bacchanalia, but Balazs remembers Kylie Minogue’s 50th birthday in 2018, where she took over the whole hotel, as one of his favorite nights. “I think she first became familiar with the Chiltern Firehouse because she jumped out of a cake for Mario Testino at a birthday party for him a few years earlier,” he recalls. “Her party had a Studio 54-ish theme, which was fun.”
Last October, he stayed up until 6am for the black and white masquerade ball to mark the tenth anniversary of the hotel’s full opening. All the guests (Sienna Miller, Noel Gallagher, Rachel Weisz and so on) had to hand over their phones on entry. Balazs is big on privacy. “Any good hotel becomes a good hotel if it provides a sense of not just comfort but safety,” he says. “Once you feel safe, you embrace everything more openly.”
What happens to staff caught leaking gossip about high-profile guests? “Termination,” says Balazs without missing a beat. “We’ve gone further and pursued legal action because of a breach of contract. We’ve done that often. I think it’s really important. We’re just custodians of too much.”
Last week, the sun-kissed influencers who usually flit around the hotel were replaced by gray-faced men in gray suits. The insurance process is under way. Balazs stresses that helping the Chiltern Firehouse’s 350 full-time and part-time chefs, waiters, managers, doormen and cleaners, who are suddenly out of work, are his priority and admits that he regrets how he laid off his staff during the pandemic (a time when rock queen Courtney Love, Balazs’s ex-girlfriend, moved into the hotel for a year). “It’s a mission for me to help,” he says. “I didn’t handle Covid well.”
Love, who lived in the hotel with her dog Bell, tells me that she was “inconsolable” on hearing about the fire. Her second thought at the news was: “Where the hell are my friends [the comedians] Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle going to stay?”
“I know Andre and the team will get it back online soon,” she adds. “Perhaps missing it so badly for a while will make us appreciate it more (if that’s possible) when it’s reopened.”
Balazs certainly has a huge job on his hands. He typically splits his time between Los Angeles, New York and Marylebone, where he also owns a home, but now plans to stay put to ensure that the hotel he lovingly raised is in safe hands.
While paying for our breakfast, Balazs dismisses the notion of obituary writers sharpening their pens for the Chiltern Firehouse: “It’s a bit too early to write the next chapter even.”
Laura Pullman is the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London
