That’s a Wrap: Highlights of Our 2016

It goes without saying and you've heard it a million times already, but it bears repeating: 2016 was godawful. It's safe to say we all found ourselves in disbelief and disgust in about 1,000 different ways this year. To paint you a picture of us here at The Standard, in the beginning of the year, we were Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby, and at the end of the year we are his haggard character in The Revenant. We're in a bear carcass just trying to keep warm.

With the end of the year nigh, we decided to blast some holiday music for strength and find 16 highlights of The Standard's 2016. Looking back on everything good that happened in our world, we're slowly starting to crawl out of the bear carcass. Join us, won't you?

A lot can happen in a year. Alma, the beloved and acclaimed LA restaurant helmed by Ari Taymor, popped up at The Standard, Hollywood for a three-month stint. The chemistry was very real, and the food was delicious, so we asked them to join our fam. Now you can find Alma at The Standard, Hollywood full-time, serving up food and drinks for the entire hotel. #Blessed. 

Read about Alma here and here.

Turns out, 10 years really flies by when you’re sunning, swimming, sipping, and spa-ing. Everyone’s favorite Miami hideaway celebrated its first decade with a thing called Camp Standard. Some of our favorite people descended on their home-away-from-home for a long weekend of all-things-Standard-Miami. Solange serenading us in the garden is not something we’ll soon forget. 

Read the oral history of The Standard Spa, Miami Beach here.

As if being able to snap up same-night stays wasn’t enough, the gloriously glam photographer Dewey Nicks captured the magic on our app, One Night Standard. 

See the full photoshoot here.

This past winter, we went searching for cures, and found them in some unexpected places. While everyone knows The Standard Spa, Miami Beach has a cure for anything that ails, we discovered that New York and Los Angeles have their own cure-centric subcultures.

There’s just something about hotels that captures the imagination. This year, downtown legend, Glenn O’Brien, unpacked the deeper meaning of checking in for us, and the doyenne of modern sex, Karley Sciortino, dissected the inherent allure of hotel hanky panky. 

One of the perks of being us is knowing everything there is to know about the cities where we live. This year, we gathered this collective wisdom to share some city guides with you, and went one step further with some guides to other things we know well, like LA road trips, rosé, Bey’s Lemonade, what to do on Miami's rainy days, and where to find the best drunchie fixes in NY and LA.

This year forced us to confront some big existential questions, like: “Can martinis and micheladas co-exist?” The answer was a resounding “YES!" In July, The Standard and Liz Lambert’s brilliant, Texas-based Bunkhouse got into bed together. Now you always have a place to stay down Texas-way. To kick things off, Bunkhouse taught us a thing or two about how to get wet. 

Read about Texas bathing culture here.

While we always have our fair share of music legends in the house (see: Nile Rodgers, Gladys Knight), it was the up-and-comers that made our ears ring this year, like Seinabo Sey, Okay Kaya, Cakes Da Killa, and Robert Ellis. 

In a prescient act of political commentary, the Paris-based conceptual artist Iván Argote, installed his brilliantly bold flaccid obelisk “Strengthlessness” on The Plaza at The Standard, High Line. The piece was a perfect commentary on the surreal state-of-affairs that was this election. In another piece of political provocation, Zoe Leonard’s viral hit, “I want a president” landed on our struts. 

In the era of everything on-demand, it seemed crazy not to let you check in and out whenever you felt like it. Now you can come and go as you please at all The Standard hotels. It’s called Standard Time, and you’re welcome. 

We happen to think that the best conversations are the tipsy kind. In our new series called "Three Sheets to the Wind," we sailed astray with some noteworthy names this year, including model/rocker Matthew Hitt, fashion designers Thaddeus O’Neil and Sandy Liang, and surf rockers Lewis Del Mar. 

In 2015, we decided that dogs should stay free at The Standard. In 2016, your four-legged friends showed up in packs. There was a dog-themed Standard Talk, our custom line of doggie accessories with Found My Animal, dogs checking in, and dogs strutting their stuff. 

We stumbled across an incredible tale of a lost '90s nightlife lore, in the form of a New York hip-hop club called Building, complete with a trove of baby-faced celebs from their club kid glory days. 

Read the story of BLDG here.

What’s bright, fresh, delicious, and comes in cans? Our Standard beer, Standard Brauhaus. Did you like it? Well, you drank roughly 144,000 cans and counting, so we’ll take that as a yes. 

When Isabella Rossellini invites you over for lunch, you go. We got to pal around the Blue Velvet legend’s Bellport family farm with Isabella, her foodie daughter Elettra, and her model son Roberto Jr. Check that off our bucket list. 

Read about our day at the Rossellini farm here.

A lot has changed since the heyday of the '80s ball scene. The LGBT community has made huge gains, and elements of gay culture have gone mainstream. We sat down with the legendary House of Xtravaganza—whose father, Jose, took voguing to the wider world as a dancer and choreographer for Madonna—to hear stories from the early days and why family still matters more than ever. 

Read about the House of Xtravaganza here.