The Inside World Of Members Clubs
How the members club went global—and what it means for your social life.
Members clubs are a lifelong affliction and anxiety—a quest to sit on an ever better, more exclusive set of sofas; an unthinking hop-skip-jump from prep school, to big school, to Pop, to the Bullingdon, to Hertford Street, to White’s, to Coutts, to the Hurlingham, to the MCC, to the House of Lords—and on and on, upwards and upwards, the air ever thinner and finer, towards the loveliest tomb in the smartest graveyard in the finest Home County in the history of the world (Hampshire; never Surrey). Clubs for dogs (the Kennel Club). Clubs in which to put your golf clubs (Swinley or nothing, if you’re asking). Club sandwiches and club ties and club rules and clubmen (and clubwomen, of course—but we’ll get to the Garrick later).
In London, where the ideal of the members club was very much honed and popularized in the 19th century (though by no means invented), the austere institutions of St. James’s knew that discretion was everything. “Your traditional London clubs tend not to invite attention, let’s say,” says Seth Alexander Thévoz, the author and journalist who wrote Behind Closed Doors, the definitive book on clubland. “White’s, Boodle’s, Brooks’s… they’re very private places, and the demand to find out about them is insatiable,” he says. This, combined with a new sort of tribalism in an increasingly fragmented culture—where your charcuterie and your tote bag might now come to define you—has brought about a rabid blossoming of the members club model. People want to be part of something these days, even if the only reason they want to be a part of something is because other people aren’t a part of it. “The number of new clubs is growing,” Thévoz says. “Because [the] demand to join a club in general is sky-high.” And so this peculiar affliction has now seeped out from the wing-backed stuffiness of St James’s and into the rest of the world. That’s globalism for you.
"Your traditional London clubs tend not to invite attention, let’s say."
New York has long had members clubs, Thévoz points out. In fact, its total is second only to London. Places like the Knickerbocker or the Union Club are, in some ways, far snootier than their counterparts across the pond. “I was browsing through the list of one of the major New York clubs quite recently, and there aren’t many people on the rolls who don’t have ‘the Third’ after their name,” says Thévoz. “The clubs are far more socially elitist than the London ones.” But a spate of recent openings in New York is attempting to put a more modern, cosmopolitan twist on the model, to varying degrees of success. (We are largely going to leave Soho House out of this. Something about its public listing rather dulls the notion of a private club. And the fact that there are Soho Houses everywhere now means, in essence, that there are Soho Houses nowhere… in the world of private clubs, at least.)
Casa Cruz—a modern alternative to the private club concept within an Upper East Side townhouse—opened in 2022 in a blaze of slick symmetry and beautiful people. You can book a table at its restaurants, which are open to the public. Although it does not collect any members’ fees, it draws a sceney crowd nonetheless, including President Bill Clinton. Sartriano’s in SoHo describes itself as “members-mostly.” NoHo’s Zero Bond is the club famously favored by the likes of Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Mayor Eric Adams, and it was used as a filming location for HBO’s Succession. Despite the presence of fingerprint scanners for entry into Zero Bond’s private sections, in general the place feels more loungey than clubby. Aman New York, just south of Central Park, offers a private member’s package for $15,000 a year, with a $200k sign-up fee. The Club at Casa Cipriani, in the Battery Maritime Building just below Wall Street, houses an interesting, sceney, vaguely Euro crowd, a regular who chose to remain anonymous tells me. “But the problem is that it’s just so bloody far away,” he says. These new entrants will be wary of a similar spate of club openings in London across the last decade or so: around 60, at some estimation, of which about half have already gone bust. Their mistake, perhaps, has been in forgetting that a successful club is filled with interesting people with some sort of common taste, purpose, or hobby bigger than themselves (such as the arts), and not simply populated with anyone willing to pay enough money to be there. “Some of these new ventures are just aimed at very, very rich, bored people looking to outsource what is there to entertain them,” says Thévoz.
"Demand to join a club in general is sky-high."
So much excitement is gathering around Maxime’s, a long-awaited Upper East Side entrant from Robin Birley, very much the patrician prince of Mayfair’s club scene. “The two clubs I’m most often asked about around the world are White’s and 5 Hertford Street,” says Thévoz, citing Birley’s most famous club in Shepherd’s Market in London. Named Maxime’s after Birley’s aunt, Maxime Le Bailly, who became an underground film star in the 1960s, the Manhattan property lounges across an entire block between 69th and 70th on Madison Avenue, on the site of the old Westbury Hotel. “Robin Birley has a really strong track record of success, of understanding what people in London who are in that club scene want, and that’s because he’s been steeped in clubs,” Thévoz says, citing the influence of Birley’s father Mark, who founded London’s Annabel’s in the ‘60s in its previous and much clubbier incarnation. (It now lives a few doors down from that site as a gargantuan townhouse-clubstaurant run by Birley’s old rival, Richard Caring). Birley’s superpower at 5 Hertford Street has always been his exacting taste and refinement of detail; a sense of walking into an eclectic but precise country house, chintzy but never twee, that has seemingly been dropped, as if by magic,into the center of the city. That kind of thing can only be achieved and maintained, one suspects, under close and constant supervision, and so it will be interesting to see how this larger outpost fares outside of Birley’s natural habitat. Other notable entrants into the U.S. ecosystem are The Twenty-Two (another Mayfair spot), which is opening a sister hotel and members club in the Union Square area of New York in the fall, as well as the power-drenched San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood, which will turn five this year.
In the broader sweep of history, there is nothing unusual whatsoever about a club on the East Coast of the U.S. In fact, as Thévoz points out, though the notion of the members club was groomed in London, the earliest examples popped up in the Northeast in pre-independence times, when America was still under English rule. The South River Club in Annapolis, Maryland, may well have been the very first, with a rumored foundation as early as 1700. Its structure still exists today: a tiny, one-room, white clapboard clubhouse with a pretty, gabled roof.
Behind London and New York, meanwhile, the place with the most private clubs is India: specifically Mumbai and Kolkata, where the specter of British colonialism lingers on in the presence of more than a dozen grand, sprawling members clubs. The Tollygunge Club, for example, sits over 110 acres of rolling greenery, with a central, collonaded clubhouse that looks eerily similar to the one at The Hurlingham, the beloved tennis club of London’s red-trousered set. Farther east, Hong Kong and Singapore are similarly clubbed up. This globalization of the members club comes at a time when some in London’s clubland face an identity crisis. Tramp, the historic members-only nightclub underneath Jermyn Street, will re-open this coming September under new ownership, at which point it will attempt to shake off the slightly sleazy reputation it had gained as the nightclub in which Prince Andrew famously didn’t sweat. In May, an ongoing debate at the Garrick Club over whether or not women should be permitted as members made front page news across the British papers, following a historic vote on the matter. The furore—including the torrent of think-pieces around it—exposed the outsized hold these places still have on the British imagination. The Garrick has only 1,300 members in total, and is mostly just an amiable snoozing spot for grand old thespians in their salmon and cucumber ties. But the idea that one of its founding principles might be disrupted and overruled raised questions of tradition, heritage, maleness, fairness, and wokeness, which seemed to hit at a much wiser unease.
Still, to some, such exclusion is very much the point. Exclusivity—that overcooked buzzword among the newer cadre of private clubs—means, of course, simply not letting certain people in. The Pugs is a semi-official international set which calls itself “the world’s most exclusive club” and whose members are said to include Prince Heinrich von Fürstenberg, Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece, Bob Geldof, George Livanos, Taki Theodoracopulos, and The Maharaja of Jodhpur. Its purpose, beyond the odd seven-hour lunch and a jolly regatta on old sailing yachts, seems very much to simply not let anyone else in. Their blackball process, by which they propose and then instantly dismiss potential members, is their statement of disapproval on various celebrities and grandees, and, one suspects, on the modern world at large. (Hugh Grant, George Soros, Jay-Z, Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, Sir Elton John, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Geordie Greig, Bernie Ecclestone, Salman Rushdie and Mick Jagger are all said to have been blackballed.) You are what you are not, after all. For all its jockey snobbery, The Pugs displays a purity of thought and taste that any new founder would do well to imitate.
