Death of Ace man Alex Calderwood

Last week Alex Calderwood was found dead in a room at his hip new Shoreditch hotel. His friends talk to Susannah Butter about the graffiti-loving-genius who just wanted to take over the world
20 November 2013

The lobby of Ace Hotel on Shoreditch High Street is inviting and full of activity. Next to Hackney florist Hattie Fox’s stall at the entrance, the smiling doormen discuss plans for a weekend event. Inside, there’s a black and white photobooth and a mix of dubstep and new folk music playing while beautiful young people work on MacBooks. A blond man is busy weaving on a loom in the corner near the Hoi Polloi restaurant — where a burger and chips comes to £14.50.

The manager tells me the whole place is driven by owner Alex Calderwood’s vision. Like his other four Ace Hotels in the US it’s designed with sensitive reference to its location — and the result is fashionable but friendly.

Upstairs, prices for rooms start at £200 a night and they are designed to feel “like a friend’s Shoreditch apartment”, with sketch pads for guests to use and curiosities ranging from Kama Sutras to local art, records and turntables.

It was in one of these rooms that Calderwood’s body was found last Thursday at 2.45pm. He was 47.

Although it looks like business as usual at the hotel, staff said they are “in shock” that they have lost this man who was “closely involved at every level of the running of the place”. Only six weeks ago he came over for the opening and was fine tuning everything down to the sheets and furniture designs.

Calderwood was pronounced dead at the scene. Police are not treating his death as suspicious and a post mortem is being carried out this week. A friend of his says “it’s a tragic mystery”. The hotel owner had issues with drug and alcohol addiction, but it is not known whether his death is linked to these. In a 2011 interview Calderwood said he was five months sober: “I am very proud of my sobriety... You get to a certain point where you realise this is just, like, dragging me down. It’s not fun any more.”

Yesterday his friends and colleagues told The Standard of an inspiring, supportive man, with immense creative energy and a wonderful eye. He had an apartment in Seattle but friend Gert Jonkers says “he only returned there once this year. Alex didn’t have time to live anywhere. He had a ridiculous schedule and was always in hotels.”

To relax, he listened to music by Laurie Anderson or the soundtrack to Blade Runner. Jonkers says “he never dressed up and usually wore a parka and converse, looking like he was going to a Pixies concert”. Another friend says “his family was Ace hotels”. The chain is worth an estimated £100  million.

Calderwood grew up in Seattle, where his father, Thomas, worked in construction and property development and his mother, Kathleen, was a journalist. Calderwood has two sisters and a brother. He initially thought he wanted to be a lawyer. “I was a good kid but I think more from a little bit of fear. I just wanted to do things right,” he told Fantastic Man magazine earlier this month. “I got invited to parties, but I was quiet.”

It was in Seattle, at a gay bar, that he met Wade Weigel, who became his boyfriend and then his business partner at Ace. Yesterday Weigel said: “words cannot express the loss I feel. Alex finished my creative thought.”

Their first project was a barber shop called Rudy’s, which opened in 1992 and held club nights for their circle, who included Bruce Pavitt, the man who signed the grunge band Nirvana. Calderwood’s friend Jim Walrod told me: “It summed up everything hip in Seattle.”

Calderwood went on to run a marketing agency, Neverstop. Putting on events for Microsoft, Gap and Nike, a friend says he gained a reputation for “toning down the branding and turning up the experience, which was new then”.

His first hotel came in 1999, when he, Weigel and their friend Doug Herrick were offered a building in the up-and-coming Seattle area of Belltown. They named it Ace after the playing card and artist Shepard Fairey — now famous for the Obama “Hope” poster — provided the room art. Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre hotels, remembers visiting: “The hotel was a couple of steps above a youth hostel, but there was something inspired and completely original about it. Alex was a dreamer.”

Aces in Portland, Palm Springs and Manhattan followed. “What Alex liked about hotels was how they can affect culture,” says Walrod. “That was more important than anything to do with design or ownership. It’s like listening to a record and wanting your friends to hear it.”

Manhattan was the last to open before London, in 2010. It cost around $140 million and has been credited with opening up a previously neglected part of Midtown. Last summer the actress Chloë Sevigny chose the lobby’s bar to stage a reading of Russian punk band Pussy Riot’s letters from prison.

The owner of the Breslin restaurant there, Ken Friedman, says: “Alex was right as usual about coming to this part of New York. Whenever I walk through and see something wrong I think ‘What would Alex say?’”

Jonkers tells me Calderwood was “beyond ambition”. “The things he did were on a huge scale — ambition on testosterone. He wanted Ace hotels all over the world.” When they met for coffee two weeks ago he was “excited about the opening in London. He loved the city, went to Brawn restaurant on a Sunday night for roast chicken, and The Royal Oak pub on Columbia Road. His next plan was to go to LA for six months to oversee the opening of another hotel. He was looking forward to that.”

For years Calderwood had stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel on Shoreditch High Street whenever he came to London. Jonkers says the unremarkable establishment “was an odd choice”. But Calderwood saw its potential. This summer he acquired it and it underwent complete Ace-ification to become his first hotel in Europe. He kept on many of the Crowne Plaza staff.

For the hotel’s restaurant, Hoi Polloi, he approached Pablo Flack and David Waddington, founders of Bistrotheque. Yesterday they said: “Working to open the restaurant, we found a friend — a talented and inspirational one at that. It’s unbelievably sad.”

This was a man engaged with the world, who “devoured” newspapers. Jonkers says: “We had amazing conversations about politics. He was super-opinionated on why George Bush screwed the whole system in the US. I think he was excited about Obama.”

Calderwood had many friends, including Sarah Andelman, creative director of Colette, who has known him for more than 15 years and went to Coachella music festival with him, and Mikhail Sokovikov of New York Graffiti team Mint & Serf, who first met him late at night in SoHo.

“Jason, my art partner, and I were scribbling with spray-paint on store windows when we noticed a hipster-looking guy with frizzy hair gawking at us. We wanted to scare him away but he stood his ground and told us he loved graffiti. He took a spray can and sprayed ‘Alex from Seattle’ on the window. We did some more graffiti together and he invited us for drinks. We talked about street culture, art and New York until we were the last three at the bar. We became friends and he supported us closely.”

Despite running the hippest hotels in the world, Calderwood never got above himself. Walrod remembers going to visit him in Seattle. “He took me to a horrible restaurant and told me to order dessert. It had dry ice in it and became a wonderful volcano.”

It’s this vision that the Ace group will struggle to carry on without. For now, they are focusing on his memorial service in New York, the LA opening and keeping London running smoothly.

Before he died, Calderwood said if he wasn’t staying at his London hotel he’d go to the Conran-owned Boundary around the corner. “That’ll be fine. We’re all friends in this business.” This world has just lost one of the best friends and brightest people.

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