AUSTIN HIGH-END ENTERTAINMENT

A safari-tinged new vibe for city's nightlife

By Michael Barnes
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, December 12, 2007

London. New York. Miami Beach. Sao Paulo.

Now Austin.

Just as the city known for its laid-back lifestyle has begun to absorb the presence of Tiffany's, Neiman Marcus, boutique hotels and high-modern, high-rise condominiums, along comes another upscale import: the ultra-lounge.

Michael Ault — a self-effacing, self-made offspring of New York gentry, raised on the international charity gala circuit known for celebrity-magnet hot spots and a ubiquitous presence on the New York Post's gossipy Page Six — is spending, along with his partners, almost $3 million to turn the former Alamo Drafthouse at 409 Colorado St. into a concept lounge known as Pangaea.

"They are going to make a huge splash," said Matt Luckie, co-owner of fashionable Austin clubs such as the Belmont — last year's biggest nightlife sensation — and Lucky Lounge. "These guys have access and money. They're going to bring a lot that's new, including celebrities, to Austin."

Ault has opened more than 25 nightclubs operating under different monikers and has worked on 60 others. Austin's Pangaea, decorated in African antiques and hunting trophies like its namesakes in New York, London, Hollywood, Fla. and Marbella, Spain, is tentatively due to open on Halloween. It will feature serpentine couches, posse-friendly "bottle service" to reserve a table's supply of liquor or wine, and DJ house music designed to turn a night out into an infamous party by closing time.

Named and designed after the geologic "first continent" of scientific theory, Pangaea is expected to attract the curious and the celebrated, as did Ault's earlier creations, especially Spy in New York and Chaos in Miami Beach, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Moss might have found themselves on the wrong side of a velvet rope during the mid 1990s before they hit super-celebrity status.

Pangaea joins existing lounges in the Warehouse District, including Michael Girard's threesome — Imperia (a mix of Asian restaurant and lounge), Cuba Libre and Speakeasy – as well as 219 West, Red Fez and J. Black's, and the clubs owned by Luckie.

"At the end of the day, we all sell the same product," said Girard, whose Cuba Libre shares the lower floor of the building with the foyer of the 8,000-square-foot Pangaea, which will feature a long upstairs room with two bars and a capacity of about 450. "So what differentiates you is your theme. I'm a big fan of concept."

Ault's high-concept clubs are designed to take thematic approaches to music, people and alcohol a step further.

"I think people go out into the night to be somewhere they haven't, to be someone they weren't," Ault said. "They act way out of bounds. This (club) is going to be a deeply freeing place. It's designed to appeal to the primal in all of us."

At Pangaea, it's the sex and danger of couples on an African safari.

On a recent visit to his lounge under construction here, Ault, a lightly tanned and fit 44, with serious jewelry winking from his subdued dress shirt, delicately handled an antique African weapon that leaned against the giant cedar and cypress posts. He explained how it would be used for hunting.

"My stepfather was a white hunter and my father was a white hunter," said Ault, using an Edwardian term that reflects his habitually historical mind-set, as well as his dyed-in-blue bloodlines. "I spent a lot of time on the safari, growing up with African culture."

Safaris are what you do when your Dutch family — his mother is Faith van Cleef — goes so far back in New York that they antedate not only the city of New York, but also its roots as New Amsterdam. Or when your father, Bromwell Ault, sprang from the Proctor & Gamble family of fortunes, your first stepfather was Dean Witter and your second stepfather was Chase investment banker George Meredith.

A fortunate son

Michael Ault's childhood sounds like a novel by Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitzgerald, with some Ernest Hemingway thrown in for good measure.

"I don't think we were at all spoiled," Ault said of his childhood with sisters Leslie and Faith and brother Courtland. "We weren't given any money. And as soon as we got out of school, any money stopped. It was made clear we'd have to make our own way."

The children grew up shuttling from New York to Palm Beach, attending exclusive East Coast boarding schools that educated Kennedys, Rockefellers and DuPonts. His roommate at one school was Abdullah II bin Al Hussein, now the king of Jordan.

Ault graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1985 — that's when he discovered the party scene in Austin — attended Oxford University for his junior year abroad and earned a masters' degree from the London School of Economics.

The varied education and the extensive travel at a young age fed the young Ault's interest an cultural history, which in turn informed his club ventures. He recalls safaris with "camels lined up as far as the eye can see to take you into the bush for months at a time."

At the same time, he was terrified by the dark rooms housing the game trophies that his stepfather Witter bagged. "We all synthesize the good and the bad from our childhoods," he said. "Your fear of something evolves into fascination."

Instead of turning completely inward, Ault learned to please through socializing.

"He's one of those people who can remember names," said famed club consultant and social connector Inna De Silva. "He's a great listener also, and in New York that's very unusual. When you are in his presence, you actually get the impression that he hears what you are saying. That's not a small thing in a city where most social exchanges are superficial."

At home, he and his siblings would sit at the top of the stairs — like something out of a 1930s movie — spying on the social transactions at the charity galas his mother threw.

"I watched the party machine," he said. "I got it: The old boy network."

After a stint on Wall Street, Ault thumbed his thick personal phone book — he claims more than 500,000 names, with a Triple A sub-list he'd put up against Donald Trump's or Henry Kissinger's — to help promote parties at such hot spots as Studio 54, Area, Maxime's and the Palladium.

"Michael is the ultimate host," said John Schadler, who markets clubs in Las Vegas and has grown closer to Ault since Ault married model Sabrina Randall in Venice three years ago. "He knows how to throw a great party and make everybody feel special and important. He's very sincere about it. It's like you're at his house."

The promotion of clubs as a hobby turned into a full-time ownership job for Ault in the 1990s. He and a few friends opened their first New York club, MercBar, where old-guard preppies met Euro-trash and Wall Street types, in 1991.

"We decided to create that loft in SoHo that nobody could afford," Ault said. "And we'd call it a lounge."

"He was responsible for creating the blueprint for the modern lounge venue," said New York graphic designer Gregory Homs, who created the subliminal images for the Pangaea typography, as well as graphics for Gucci and Tom Ford. "He has an instinct for where he should be next."

'Drawn to Austin's fascinating integrity'

Like Ault's previous clubs, the first of five Pangaeas was an instant success in downtown New York when it opened right after Sept. 11, 2001. "Everybody needed a place to be and talk about what happened," Ault said.

Despite that club's success, Ault decided to pull the plug in 2004 when his lease expired.

"New York has reached a kind of absolute glut of lounge-style venues," Homs said. "On 27th Street, they are all lined up next to each other; it's like a red-light district. Michael intuitively pulled out before anyone else."

One of Ault's first ventures away from a big-city, high-end nightlife capital was in Hollywood, Fla. That Pangaea — smaller than the one under way in Austin — opened in 2004 and takes in an estimated $15 million annually.

So why Austin, which is still grappling with its freshly minted reputation for money, glamour and culture?

"We thought about Dallas," Ault said. "But we really loved Austin, the people and the more liberal, open feel."

"He considers it one of the great cities in the United States," De Silva said. "Outside of (famed columnist and University of Texas alum) Liz Smith, who's always beating the drums for Austin, he's the only person I've heard speak so romantically about the city."

"He was drawn to Austin's fascinating integrity," Homs said. "It's a city without a chip on its shoulder about New York or Los Angeles — not a second-tier city but one with its own culture that it takes pride in."

Ault said he is sensitive to Austin's environmental sensibilities and insists that all the game trophies "have their papers," and are animals culled from overpopulated areas. "We are very careful about that," he said.

How will Austin respond to the velvet-rope treatment, de rigeur in Los Angeles and New York but confined to just a few local clubs here on the busiest nights?

"Some people won't like it, no matter how respectful or responsible we are about it," Ault said. "But we want diversity in the club, not just all the same type every night. You have a responsibility to mix the room."

Ault speaks of an almost ideal blend of races, genders and sexual orientations, without denying his industry's preference for celebrities, models and, of course, the young and the beautiful. And with bottles — wine, liquor — going for between $150 and $1,000, reserved in advance, not everyone will want to cross the velvet line.

Ault and his principal partner, Steven Seymour, hope for a Halloween opening, but construction, staff "casting" and training could push the launch date into November.

"We will open when we are ready, when everything is in its place," Seymour said. "Everything in this business is about first impressions. You never get a second chance."

Other club owners in the Warehouse District will be closely watching Pangaea.

"They are going to hurt a lot of bars," Luckie said.

"I think it will be good for the area and good for the market," Girard said.

"Nightclubs in big markets have become commodities, flavors of the moment," said marketer Schadler. "You see these places open and close sometimes within weeks, a year maybe. When you look at Michael's career, they are clubs that endure. He builds brands through a very personal approach. There's a certain exclusivity that comes from a desire for people to be in on a magical formula."

Ault and partners are betting that Austin will go for a socializing fantasy derived from its creator's un-Austin-like past.

"The travel, the love of ancient art and architecture, all of it helps my work," Ault said. "In our clubs, we build homes for ourselves, more exotic than the ones we live in, and treat all our guests like our friends. It's always less like a club than a party."

mbarnes@statesman.com; 445-3970