Alex Calderwood, Creator and Face of the Unconventional Ace Hotel Chain, Dies at 47
Deidre Schoo for The New York Times
The Ace Hotel in New York. A founder of the chain, Alex Calderwood, called hotels “art projects.”
By RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: November 16, 2013
Alex Calderwood, a founder of the Ace Hotel chain, whose quirky vintage interiors influenced the industry and became the backdrop for countless Instagram pictures, died on Thursday in London. He was 47.
Deidre Schoo for The New York Times
Rooms at the hotel have record players, books and a guitar — effects to make guests feel at home.
A spokesman for the hotel chain declined to specify the cause.
Mr. Calderwood, whose dress was rigorously casual and who wore his black hair in a chaotic mop, became the face of a brand that has, as The New York Times put it in 2008, “attracted a growing clientele of artistic types short on cash and egalitarians with money to spare.”
Mr. Calderwood was born in Denver on Jan. 28, 1966, and grew up around Seattle, the son of a contractor and a newspaper columnist. He skipped college, became a party promoter and ran a vintage clothing business in Seattle, according to accounts he gave of his career. In the early 1990s, he and a friend risked $12,000 to reinvent the classic barbershop — with tile floors, sturdy barbers’ chairs and walls covered in old posters and snapshots.
As the shop, Rudy’s, prospered and expanded to a chain of more than a dozen in the late 1990s, Mr. Calderwood and his partners were offered the lease on a 28-room flophouse in a run-down part of Seattle. “We put a deal together, jumped into the project with both feet, had absolutely no idea what we were doing and through instinct, came up with something fresh,” he told BlackBook magazine in 2009.
The then-pioneering blend of reclaimed furniture and touches like street art, turntables in rooms and low prices — $65 for a room with a shared bathroom — that they used in creating the hotel became Mr. Calderwood’s signature, and was widely imitated. He and his partners chose the name Ace because the card is “the high and the low card in the deck,” he said. “We employ that high and low principle in our hotel models.”
In designing a hotel, he said in a 2011 interview with The Times, “there’s a lot of the pieces of the puzzle. It is not just an interesting design, it is not just the right choice of typeface, it is not finding the executives or team — it is all these pieces of the puzzle.”
By the time of Mr. Calderwood’s death, Ace had become established in Portland, Ore.; New York; Palm Springs, Calif.; and London, with other hotels scheduled to open in Panama and Los Angeles. All arrived complete with buzzword-friendly restaurants and cafes (“farm-to-table,” “nose-to-tail,” “single-source”); in-house music from D.J.’s and bands; and, in some hotels, guitars in the rooms.
The people who frequented the Ace Hotel at Broadway and 29th Street in New York, The Times said, thought of it as their club, a place “whose aesthetics and business model are redefining the overlapping worlds of drinking, dining, sleeping and shopping.” Others, however, derided the hotels as a prepackaged pastiche of counterculture.
Yet as the chain grew, Mr. Calderwood and his partners separated. One of them, Jack Barron, an architect, said disagreements were not helped by Mr. Calderwood’s drinking. But Mr. Calderwood, in the 2011 interview, said that he had been sober for five months after treatment in a rehabilitation facility.
“You get to a certain age, and you get to a certain point, where you realize this is just, like, dragging me down,” he added. “It’s not fun anymore. I’m not enjoying it.”
He is survived by his parents, Thomas and Kathleen Calderwood of Seattle; two sisters, Donna Roberts and Tahnee Ferry; and a brother, Tim Calderwood.
Mr. Calderwood, an aficionado of graphic designers such as Lou Dorfsman and Milton Glaser who was often photographed in jeans, T-shirts and Converse sneakers (he helped design a pair), did not enjoy the label hipster, frequently applied to his hotels, and to him.
He seemed to seek to define himself differently. Hotels were “art projects,” he said, and his business card billed him as a “cultural engineer.”
“I’m just a barber and a tattoo pimp,” he told Interview magazine early in his career.
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