Ian Schrager Taps Highgate for Global Rollout of PUBLIC

Ian Schrager said PUBLIC would be the hotel brand that upends the hospitality orbit in a game-changing, luxury-for-all fashion — years ago.

He’s back this week saying the same thing — but with a partner that might just actually turn it into a reality.

In a move that signals a significant evolution in his business model, the Ian Schrager Company announced today a joint venture with Highgate to expand the PUBLIC brand globally. The partnership tasks Highgate, a management behemoth with over 80,000 keys across North America, Europe, and Latin America, with the operations and management of future PUBLIC properties. Schrager will retain full creative authority and brand stewardship.

For industry observers, the deal structure offers a telling contrast to Schrager’s previous partnership with Marriott to create the EDITION brand. While that collaboration successfully married Schrager’s design ethos with Marriott’s massive distribution network, it was often characterized by the friction inherent in pairing a singular visionary with a publicly traded giant.

Schrager’s job was to create the most beautiful ham sandwich while a bigger corporate partner’s was to decipher how much ham to actually place on the sandwich before sending it out to a guest, the hotelier once told me with a laugh.

This new venture appears designed to bypass those hurdles. By aligning with Highgate, Schrager is betting on a partner known for operational discipline and nimble asset management rather than just sheer global footprint. It is a play for quality over quantity, leveraging Highgate’s diverse portfolio to bring the “Luxury for All” concept to untapped markets without the constraints of a traditional hotelier lineage.

“I could have chosen anyone in the industry to partner with, but I chose Highgate. They are the smartest, most talented, and most disciplined operators and investors in the business,” Schrager said in a statement. “This partnership allows me to focus entirely on what I do best – concept, product, positioning and experience, while allowing Highgate to do what they do best. To me, it’s a dream team, where 1+1 = 10.”

The deal comes as the lifestyle sector — a category Schrager effectively invented five decades ago — becomes increasingly crowded. The PUBLIC brand is Schrager’s answer to this saturation: a “radical rethinking of luxury” that decouples high design from high price points.

Mahmood Khimji, principal at Highgate, frames the partnership as a stewardship of that legacy.

“Ian is the greatest hotelier of the modern era,” said Khimji. “He literally invented the lifestyle category. We are extremely excited to be working with him to operate PUBLIC Hotels.”

The operational bifurcation is clear: Highgate provides the platform for scale, while Schrager protects the originality of the product. This is critical for PUBLIC, which Schrager describes as his “most important idea to date.” The brand defies traditional luxury metrics (scarcity, price) in favor of accessibility and experience.

“I reject the notion of yesterday’s innovator becoming today’s establishment. I’m only interested in creating something original, unique and special that defies categorization — something that people have not seen before,” Schrager says. “In fact, I try to give people something that they did not even know they wanted or believe existed. I don’t believe in traditional demographics — that is an outdated concept, in my opinion. My projects have always appealed to a person’s sensibility, emotions and what and how they feel. If I was not accomplishing this, I would not be in the business.”

The partnership will be tested immediately with the upcoming opening of PUBLIC West Hollywood, previously the original location of The Standard, this spring. True to form, Schrager promises the property will be defined “by what it doesn’t have rather than what it does have,” including guestrooms that function as private screening rooms — a nod to the locale.

Additionally, a new F&B collaboration for the flagship PUBLIC New York is set to be announced later this year, reinforcing the brand’s commitment to the social experience, a hallmark of Schrager’s strategy since the Morgans Hotel Group days.

For investors, the Highgate alliance represents a maturation of the PUBLIC concept from a singular success story to a scalable asset class. It suggests that Schrager has found a way to institutionalize his magic without diluting it, a balance that has historically been the hardest act to master in hospitality.