It’s 8.30am on a Friday. Ivanka Trump, real estate heiress and executive vice-president of development and acquisitions of the Trump Organisation, is sitting behind the desk of her 25th floor office at Trump Tower, in Midtown Manhattan, New York. Looking immaculate, her back perfectly straight, not a single blonde hair out of place, she is surrounded by photographs and magazine covers emblazoned with Ivankas, at various ages and in various outfits, staring out.
In addition to her crucial role in the family real estate empire, the 28-year-old former model, who has lived most of her life in the tabloids, owns a Madison Avenue diamond boutique and recently published a New York Times bestselling book.
But today the biggest issue on her mind is the imminent opening of Trump SoHo, a 46-storey, 391-room, five-star luxury hotel located in New York’s downtown.
Though Trump SoHo is a joint venture with her famous father, Donald, and her brothers Donald Jr and Eric, it is Ivanka who carries the weight of being the face of the project. Her e-mail pings mercilessly every few minutes.
“I have a lot of friends who come to New York and they just won’t stay uptown,” Ivanka says, explaining the rationale for such a giant downtown project that dwarfs neighbouring buildings. “They want to stay downtown but they have to stay at a hotel that’s inferior to the type of hotel they’d normally stay at simply because that’s the only option. We are creating another option.”
Trump SoHo is the fifth addition to the Trump Hotel Collection, which includes the flagship Trump International Hotel & Tower, just off New York’s Central Park, as well as properties in Las Vegas, Chicago and Hawaii. There are plans for more Trump hotels in Toronto, Dubai, the Dominican Republic, Scotland, New Orleans and Panama.
“We come from a developer’s vantage point, so we are unlike most hotel operators who have never built a building and only feel comfortable operating when a building is a square box and every room is exactly one size,” says Ivanka. “We are more flexible in terms of how we can interpret luxury without compromising anything. “We want each of our buildings to be very unique. So you look at Chicago and it’s this classic, refined, modern, super-sleek, urban high rise. It’s 92 storeys, the sixth tallest building in the world – very Chicago.
“Then you look at our building in Vegas – a totally different feel. It’s perfectly Vegas. It’s not only very glamourous, but it’s also got glitz and it’s got elegance. “Then there’s New York. Uptown we are doing a massive renovation. It’s going to be absolutely beautiful, and it’s going to have the feeling of a throwback to an Art Deco type of sensibility, really maximising the views and using very lush colours. In SoHo, our hotel is much trendier.”
“We want every building to feel different,” she concludes. “We want the experience for a guest in each city with Trump to be reflected by that city while also maintaining a calibre of experience that’s never compromised.”
When the Trump SoHo project was announced some years ago, no one could have envisaged the real estate collapse and tourism slump to come. But Ivanka is upbeat about the newest hotel’s prospects.
“You look at the hotel product downtown. It’s hip and it’s cool but it wouldn’t fall within what one categorises as a five-star luxury product,” she says. “Often chic and cool comes at the sacrifice of real quality. There aren’t marbles. There aren’t granites. There aren’t mahogany woods. Everything’s more plain and sort of vanilla box.”
Trump SoHo, which is due to open this month, is anything but vanilla box. The hotel offers 132 deluxe one-bedroom suites, 245 deluxe guest rooms ranging from 422 to 905 square feet – many of which can be combined to create over 70 spacious two-bedroom suites – and three spa suites that include in-room saunas. The top floors will be crowned with 10 spectacular, two-bedroom penthouse suites ranging from 1,200 to 2,300 square feet with 17-foot floor-to-ceiling glass curtain walls.
The hotel also includes a spa and fitness facility that covers more than 12,000 square feet, with a pool deck, cabanas and a yoga studio, as well as male and female hamam. The hamams, Ivanka says, were inspired by a recent trip she took to Turkey, and have been decorated with marble and statuary throughout.
“It’s very unique to have this sort of retreat, an urban oasis, right here in the city,” Ivanka says. “I live not too far way so I am going to be hanging out at the spa in Trump SoHo quite a lot.”
Ivanka and her siblings have stayed at some of the top hotels around the world. And it’s these experiences, she says, that have informed some of the little extras Trump SoHo will offer guests, such as the new Trump Attaché Service.
“When I stay at a sister property of a hotel I have already stayed at, I want that hotel to know my preferences from when I stayed with them the last time, but they don’t,” Ivanka says. “So we created the Trump Attaché Service, which records the history of our guests’ preferences, from the music they like playing in their room when they arrive, to the newspaper they order, to whether they have a pet and how they like their refrigerator to be stocked. “We really try to customise that experience and I think that’s what the industry is gravitating towards.”
Ivanka says that she and her brothers were the driving force behind the creation of the Trump Hotel Collection, which launched in 2007. Nevertheless, she adds, their father plays an invaluable role.
“It’s his innate sensibility of what the luxury consumer wants paired with our instinctive understanding of the next generation and what’s new and what’s fresh that makes it special,” she says. “I think it’s an interesting balance and I think that’s why Trump SoHo, aesthetically, is so unusual.”
The global recession has been a blow to some Trump Hotel projects. While the hotel venture in Panama continues to forge ahead, work in Dubai has ground to a halt.
“We’re on hold until the world settles down,” says Ivanka. “Then we’ll go forward. It’s pretty bad everywhere and I don’t think Dubai’s an exception to that rule. I think there’s a lot that they have to work through the system by way of massive, across the board, de-leveraging. “I’m happy that we hadn’t started construction outside of some foundation work. It allows us the ability to wait for the right timing.”
“That building will be built,” she adds. “It just won’t be now.”
In the meantime, Trump and her siblings will continue to forge ahead with the Trump SoHo and with expanding the Trump Hotel Collection globally.
“The difference between working on a Trump project as opposed to working on a Four Seasons project is that we all feel ownership,” Ivanka says. “It’s our last name. We’re all tasked, and we all have an internal mandate, to represent our name well. And that’s, really, what motivates us.”