Cindy Crawford, in most situations as cool and collected as they come, sounded like an exploding firework when I asked her about it. “If you live in L.A., this is a big deal,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for something like this for so long.”
Laura Dern went on and on (and on) about it. “I’ve emailed them three times,” she said. “When is it opening?”
Baron Davis, the tech investor and former pro basketball player, joked that he intended to “basically move in” from sunrise to sunset. “To have a place, a cultural hub, on this side of town is going to be a game changer,” he said.
They were talking about a new private club called San Vicente Santa Monica, a sequel to the wildly popular San Vicente Bungalows, a celebrity haven in West Hollywood, Calif., where camera phones are banned and stars pretend to be regular people. The breathlessness, though, struck me as somewhat silly. Another private club? At this point, they pop up with numbing regularity. There are more than a dozen in Los Angeles alone. How many does one jet set need?
But the San Vicente Santa Monica, which opened last month at a cost of $40 million, offers something that, paradoxically, is almost nonexistent in Los Angeles — a luxury clubhouse at the beach.
The new San Vicente sits atop a three-story building on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, the seaside city between Venice Beach to the south and Pacific Palisades to the north. The club’s indoor-outdoor restaurant looks out onto the sand, the surf and, on the two occasions I visited, the occasional sailboat. Five other spaces, including a rooftop bar and casual dining area, have equally jaw-dropping vistas.
