Paul Schell - Owner of De Nom
De Nom is one of Sydney's exclusive bars with a $10,000 membership fee. Myffy Rigby chats to owner Paul Schell about private drivers, Axl Rose and yes, the golden dwarf
Who is De Nom for? You know, it's such a hard thing to profile. I've found it's surprising how eclectic the clientele is. It's for people that want to be transported somewhere else and I think that's what my clubs and bars are about - it's meant to be escapism, it's meant to be a departure from your everyday reality and the grind of the world we inhabit most of the time.
Do some places become popular only because they're exclusive? People still want exclusivity but I've also seen a more egalitarian view by the club-going population over the last ten years. I think there are probably enough A-listers in Australia to fill a teacup, let alone all these exclusive venues that are out there. And sometimes I think we get caught up in bullshit like that. I think what people once upon a time deemed "A-list" is such a different thing nowadays. Sure, there's still the old philanthropic, money A-list, but now we've sort of got this A-list of young fashion designers and music. Once upon a time I can remember when I was first going out clubbing, if it was small and impossible to get into and you couldn't find a sign for it, that meant it was hot. Accessibility has broadened the market – a lot more people know about these kind of things now and there's more of them. There's such a really fine line between exclusivity and snobbery that any venue walks and I would like to think that we walk down the middle of the line and we do our very best to do so.
Does anyone have the $10,000 membership? They do indeed.
And what do you get for your 10,000 bucks? That's changed over the last two and a half years since the venue's been open. I'd rather not go too far into it.
So the room hidden behind the bookcase – is there really a dwarf painted in gold at your service for the right price? [laughs] The Golden Dwarf. It’s really funny that you ask, you know. It’s a little bit like when we were saying that we were building De Nom – nobody believed that it would ever open, it almost tended toward urban myth. It took several years to get it finished, and then it opened and I guess the bookcase room with the golden dwarf is a little bit the same – it’s been talked about for so long in the media and it’s never come. I can tell you that I think you’ll probably see it open; if not by the end of this year it’ll be the start of 2009.
How do people go about joining? They make an application to us and we discuss with them and meet some certain criteria for it and goes from there.
What are the criteria? It's not really stuff that we publicise, to be honest. De Nom is French for 'by name', and that's always been the principle of the room: that your name is effectively your passport through life. I guess it's much the same thing with the application process for membership - it just comes down to who you are. And it's also dependent on the level of service those members require - every member's got different needs, and some members want us to orchestrate private driver services and we do that. Some members really don't require much at all - it really depends on the individual.
I heard you had the Rolling Stones in one night. Mick Jagger actually opened the room for us. We've had Axl Rose sing in that room for us; we've done events for Paris Hilton for New Year's; all of that kind of thing. The only difference between us, and I'm not really trying to fire a shot off the bow here, but the only difference between us and some of the other venues that have opened is that we don't pay people to attend our venue, and we don't give them anything that the other people in the space don't get. Because in our mind, everybody that's in that room is pretty much equal.
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