Soho House of Cards (Part II) - Bundling Moments of Highly Public Exclusivity
Annabel's urinals, Winnie The Pooh and I'm-Better-Than-You As A Service -- how Soho House is all the calories and none of the nutrition.
Cafe Society is Maxwell Social’s Whenever-I-Have-The-Time-To-Write magazine on the intersection of community and society — an anthropological look at the underpinnings of what makes the world tick, written by David Litwak (@dlitwak) and the Maxwell team. Maxwell is building a new type of social club in Tribeca, check it out.
This is part II of a two part deep dive on the Rise of Soho House. See part I here.
In our last article we detailed the beginnings of Soho House in London, gave the background on the London private club scene it launched into in 1995 as a media & arts focused alternative to the traditional clubs focused on the aristocratic hierarchy, and elaborated on how Soho House was an arena for Highly Public Exclusivity that leaned into all the worst parts of faux intimacy and exclusivity symptomatic of social media.
But it is worth investigating the underlying dynamics of how we got here, specifically how the core fundamental economics of Soho House’s expansion strategy actually prevented it from being anything other than what it is. And to understand that we need to understand the Soho House Facilities Bundle.
Soho House wasn’t doomed to end up like this. Every private club and membership exists at least partially for broadcasting status — we are status monkeys after all, keenly aware of our place in the existing social hierarchy and always striving to improve it. And if you speak to old-timers there were moments in time where Soho House actually DID feel like a private club, and a refreshing one at that — on the surface Soho House made the private club model more accessible — $250 bucks a month instead of $1,000, women included, a priority on artistic types and creatives over aristocracy and wealth…
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David (@dlitwak), Kyle, Joelle
Curious, if in the future maxwell wants to expand, how you plan on doing it to not become the next soho house