Who

Balazs is the hotelier behind a handful of boutique properties, including the Mercer, Chateau Marmont, and the Standard chain of hotels. 

Backstory

The son of Hungarian academics—his father taught at Harvard Medical School, his mother was a psychologist at a hospital in Boston—Balazs grew up in Cambridge and went to college at Cornell, demonstrating an early interest in the nightlife trade when he launched a publication for Ithaca-area rock shows. He later earned a master's from Columbia's journalism school, took design classes at RISD, and dabbled in politics, before teaming up with his father to start a biotech company called Biomatrix. Their discovery—a treatment for osteoarthritis—gave Balazs the capital to pursue a career closer to his heart, and in 1988 he started up the club M.K. with Eric Goode and Serge Becker. (Biomatrix was sold to Genzyme for $738 million in cash and stock in 2000.) In 1990, Balazs debuted his first hotel property, Chateau Marmont, spending $12 million to transform the decaying icon into one of the city's trendiest spots.

His first venue in New York was a much more complicated affair. In 1988, he purchased a faded manufacturing facility on Mercer Street and teamed up with designer Campion Platt to convert it into SoHo's first luxury hotel; yet eight years and $32 million later, the hotel was still nowhere near complete. It was only after Balazs enlisted the support of old-hand hoteliers Richard Born and Ira Drukier that the Mercer finally came to fruition, at last opening its Christian Liaigre-designed doors in 1998. Balazs opened the first branch of his quirky Standard Hotel chain in Los Angeles a year later, and he's been expanding with hotels—and, more recently, condos—ever since.

Of note

Balazs now oversees Chateau Marmont, the Mercer, four Standard hotels (two in LA, one in Miami, and one in New York), and the Sunset Beach on Shelter Island. Much like the granddaddy of the boutique hotel, Ian Schrager, Balazs knows how to cultivate a scene, albeit a rarified one. Marc Jacobs stays at the Mercer when he's not in Paris; when Rupert Murdoch needed a place to live several years ago while his SoHo apartment was under construction, he and wife Wendi Deng spent close to a year living in one of the Mercer's suites; and when Russell Crowe famously tossed a phone at a hotel employee, it was a poor Mercer staffer who walked away with the bruises. (Indeed, having such famous guests can be more trouble than it's worth: When Lindsay Lohan spent a year living at Chateau, there were repeated rumors that the hotel wanted her out on account of her "lifestyle.")

Like Schrager, Balazs has taken the plunge into residential development in recent years. In 2004, the Richard Gluckman-designed One Kenmare Square opened in SoHo; Balazs followed up with 40 Mercer, the first American building designed by French celebrity architect Jean Nouvel. In 2006, Balazs and partner Tamir Sapir debuted the cheeky William Beaver House in the financial district. Most recently, Balazs opened a 19-story outpost of the Standard hotel straddling the High Line in New York. For all his empire expansion, Balazs is simultaneously pruning his assets. In April 2008 he unloaded his Lindy Roy-designed Hotel QT in Times Square for $82 million; he sold the land that the Miami Standard sits on several months later (he continues to manage the hotel); and sold off the Raleigh in Miami in the fall of 2009.  

For the record

It's pronounced BAH-lahzh, not BAH-laz. It rhymes with "montage."

Board game

Balazs is on the board of the Public Theater, along with Liev Schreiber, Bob Pittman, Ken Auletta, Nora Ephron, Kevin Kline, and George C. Wolfe.

Personal

The hunky hotelier was previously married to Katie Ford, the daughter of Ford Models founder Eileen Ford. The couple had two daughters, Alessandra and Isabel, before divorcing. (A budding actress, Alessandra starred in the made-for-Lifetime movie Racing for Time, in which she played a suicidal teen prostitute.) It's widely believed that Balazs's 2004 divorce from Ford was precipitated by an affair with Uma Thurman, who became his girlfriend shortly after the split. Balazs and Thurman had a tumultuous relationship—and several practice breakups—before parting for good in early 2007. Until recently, he lived in New Museum Building at 153 Mercer. (He sold the apartment for $10 million in 2007.) Outside the city, Balazs owns a 55-acre country house in upstate New York called The Locusts.