In a very particular corner of Portland, Ore., there is a dive bar whose vending machine dispenses tarot cards and a dessert joint with a white-water kayak in its bathroom. On a nearby block, for vaguely environmental reasons, a dozen goats used to roam free.
The goats are gone now, replaced by an apartment complex with a Chipotle. Many Portland residents have grown to expect this kind of development; what they were not expecting was a Soho House.
That London-based chain of exclusive members’ clubs, known as a posh hangout for jet-setters and celebrities, will open a new outpost this week in the gentrifying stretch of Portland known as the Central Eastside. Its arrival introduces a rooftop pool, a two-story gym and a restaurant serving steelhead tartare to a freshly renovated industrial building that once housed one of the city’s scrappy artist cooperatives.
Members who apply and are accepted to the Portland club will pay $1,950 a year for access to its amenities; $4,500 a year also grants entry to Soho House locations in London, New York, Paris and Los Angeles.
Portland’s hipster stereotype was never as total as “Portlandia”-style caricature made it seem: The city has a growing population of well-heeled professionals who work at Nike or for the creative agency Wieden+Kennedy, rent luxury apartments in the Pearl District and stop for martinis at the 20th-floor bar of the new Ritz-Carlton downtown. Soho House, which has recently been fending off suggestions of financial precarity, is most likely banking on this crowd to join.
Still, the apparent friction between Soho House’s you-can’t-sit-with-us brand and Portland’s reputation for crunchy eccentricity has made the club a kind of inkblot test for locals’ opinions on the city’s evolving identity.
Some consider Soho House’s elite cachet a win for Portland, especially after the city weathered high-profile store closures amid the pandemic and a year of protests. But less enthusiastic residents see the club as mismatched with the city’s gleefully offbeat texture, and an uneasy fit for a neighborhood experiencing some of the city’s widely publicized struggles with homelessness and fentanyl addiction.
“My first thought was: really odd move,” said Connor Bowlan, 34, a Portland native and a founder of a nonprofit arts and entrepreneurship center. “It’s kind of the antithesis of the culture here.”
In fact, complaining about things like Soho House has long been a part of Portland’s identity, Mr. Bowlan said. In front of some other locals, he is a little embarrassed to say he might join. “Largely the reaction is like, they think of it as a Cheesecake Factory with a $2,000-a-year subscription,” he said.
From Art Cooperative to Members-Only
With the new club, the company says it has created a luxurious space that strives to be as Portland as possible — or at least as Portland as a Soho House can be.
The club’s interior is a series of lounge and work spaces accented with veiny marble and softened by plush throw pillows. Emerald-colored ceramic tiles come from a nearby tile maker, Pratt + Larson, and the second-floor restaurant’s menu was developed by Matt Sigler, a chef known for the celebrated Portland restaurant Renata.
Andrew Carnie, Soho House’s chief executive, said on a video call from London that the club was a natural fit for Portland in part because of the city’s creative industries. What, exactly, does “creative” mean in this context? Mr. Carnie said chefs, tech workers, business owners and employees at Nike might all fit the bill. “We’re trying to reach a crowd that’s creative in their souls and like-minded,” he said.
Some of the city’s artists bristle at the club fashioning itself as a home for an artistic community, given the building’s history.
The club occupies the century-old Troy Laundry Building, which was constructed as an industrial facility for the laundry company. Around 1980 it was rented by a collective of artists that remained there for more than three decades.
When the building sold for nearly $6 million in 2016 to a buyer unaffiliated with Soho House, most members of the cooperative were displaced.
Sean McGonigal, 72, a leather restoration worker and one of the cooperative’s founders, remembered it as a slightly shabby but vibrant community that welcomed hundreds of artists over the years and hosted rowdy Halloween parties. Mr. McGonigal and Joanne Radmilovich Kollman, 63, a painter and teacher who also worked in the cooperative, could not afford to continue renting space there; they now work out of her home a 15-minute drive east.
Soho House is leasing the building from AJ Capital, a real estate development company that bought the Portland property in 2019 for $15.6 million. (The company declined to share the length of its current lease.)
Both artists from the cooperative saw a bitter irony in Soho House’s efforts to position itself as a creative space, given that many artists in the city would be unable to afford it — not to mention those who had already been forced out of the very same building.
“If the Troy building is being used as a private nightclub for exclusivity and fake creativity, it’s not going to work,” Mr. McGonigal said. He added that he believed the building was haunted.
Soho House says it has prioritized reflecting the city’s artists in its more than 140-piece art collection, whose works mostly come from locals. Anakena Paddon, the art collection manager for the Portland location and other clubs, said she was aware of the artists’ cooperative that had been in the building but that Soho House didn’t “knowingly go back and try to track down all the original tenants.”
“From what I understand it was a lot of craftspeople, a lot of makers,” Ms. Paddon said. “There were a lot of different practices happening there, not all of which would be appropriate for the art collection.”
“I think of all the things that big, gorgeous building could have become,” she said. “It’s kind of special that it’s remained a space for creatives, albeit in a very different existence.”
Mr. McGonigal and Ms. Radmilovich Kollman said they had not been contacted by Soho House.
The building displays work by more than 60 artists, including Salomée Souag, who is creating a pastel mural for the building’s second floor, and Yuyang Zhang, whose collages mix graphics from Chinese propaganda posters with screenshots of Tinder notifications. Most artists were given memberships and Soho House credit in exchange for their pieces, although some were paid commissions for new work.
“I’m optimistic,” Ms. Souag said. She was impressed by the number of artists and activists that Ms. Paddon had been in touch with. “She’s inviting us in these walls, which usually wouldn’t be accessible.”
Julian Gaines, who contributed a painting modeled on a Jet Magazine cover, saw his work’s inclusion as a way to ensure Black people would see themselves on the walls of a club in a city where some seven out of 10 residents are white.
Mr. Gaines said he believed that Soho House would serve as a “creative catalyst” that could draw new talent to Portland. He convinced his dermatologist to apply.
Hard Looks From Wall Street (and the New Neighbors)
Soho House Portland is the company’s first location in the Pacific Northwest, and it is part of the company’s aggressive expansion effort that has lately come under scrutiny.
Since its founding in 1995, the company has faced growing criticism that it is overrun by corporate types. The company’s stock tumbled last month after a report from GlassHouse Research, a short seller, argued that its push to establish footholds outside the biggest, wealthiest cities was harming the company’s bottom line.
Soho House said in a statement that the GlassHouse report “contains factual inaccuracies, analytical errors and false and misleading statements,” and that its membership growth was strong. But the company, whose share price has dropped since it went public in 2021, added that an independent committee’s evaluations could result in taking the company private.
The jump to the Pacific Northwest was made easier for Soho House by a Trump-era tax break: According to a spokeswoman for AJ Capital, the purchase of the Troy Laundry Property benefited from being in a so-called Opportunity Zone.
The federal designation, which was intended to encourage development in “economically distressed” neighborhoods, has been criticized for enriching the wealthy. The program was also leveraged by the glitzy Ritz-Carlton in downtown Portland.
Business leaders in Portland still see Soho House’s reputation as a positive for the city. Portland’s economy was hit hard by pandemic lockdowns and by protests after the murder of George Floyd, which attracted forceful federal crackdowns and resulted in a national narrative of violence and chaos in the city. REI, Nike and Walmart closed stores.
Mayor Ted Wheeler described the new Soho House in an email as “an investment in the future of our city.”
Andrew Hoan, the president and chief executive of the Portland Metro Chamber, believes the Soho House and the Ritz-Carlton signal to other companies that Portland has rebounded from the pandemic and is in a moment of generational change. “We’re growing up to be a big city,” he said, “and big cities have big, institutional brands like this.”
But Portland wouldn’t be Portland without vigorous complaints about those brands, Mr. Hoan added.
To Paul Messersmith-Glavin, 59, an acupuncturist and board member of the Social Justice Action Center, a nonprofit that operates out of a building near Soho House, the club is a particularly galling example of the gentrification that has driven up rents and erased much of the countercultural spirit that he said makes the city special.
Mr. Messersmith-Glavin said he was unconvinced that the club would do anything for residents of Portland who aren’t wealthy. “There’s so many people on the streets, and people just barely getting by,” he said. “It’s a little ostentatious to open up a social club.”
Connor Smith, 31, an owner of Workers Tap, a bar nearby, said he was worried about a clash between Soho House and the neighborhood’s homeless population. “There’s a lot of houseless camps, and I’m concerned that they will be sweeping those out of the way,” he said.
He said he was “kind of looking forward” to seeing how displeased locals might welcome the club. “They’re going to have to have a pretty big budget for graffiti removal,” he said.
Soho House said it was conscious of those concerns. Min Shrimpton, a spokeswoman for House Foundations, the club’s charitable wing, said it would offer a mentorship program that pairs 25 “young creatives from lower socioeconomic and underrepresented backgrounds” with its members. Some of those mentees would come via a local organization that offers job training and creative programming to 15- to 24-year-olds experiencing homelessness.
“We definitely don’t want to shy away from things like that,” Ms. Shrimpton said, adding, “As a private members’ club, it’s not necessarily an easy link of how we’re going to step in and help.”
Threading the Needle of ‘Elite and Weird’
When news broke that Soho House was coming to Portland, Brooke Jackson-Glidden, the editor of Eater Portland, summed up the question on everyone’s lips in an article: “My immediate thought is, “Who is this for?’”
Ashod Simonian, 49, the creative director of a perfume brand, moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2006 because of its reputation as a young, progressive city with access to nature and great beer. He is relatively unfazed the fact that condos have been built on top of some of his favorite bars and music venues.
“This is what’s happened in every urban area in the history of time,” he said. “I never want to be the old guy screaming, ‘Get off my lawn.’”
Mr. Simonian joined Soho House because its price seemed reasonable compared to the combined cost of a gym and a co-working space. “Yeah, it’s super expensive, but everything is expensive now,” he added.
Rai Renee, who works for a creative agency and a nonprofit, said she wouldn’t be mourning the old Portland, which she said has traditionally excluded people of color. Ms. Renee, who is Black, hopes the club will be part of a trend toward spaces in Portland that are more welcoming. If the club ends up attracting interesting members, it could be a good place to network with the city’s “movers and shakers.”
“There’s mixed feelings when you bring in something that would be considered elitism to a city that’s considered hippy-dippy and weird — but you can be elite and weird,” Ms. Renee said.
She is still waiting to hear back if she has been accepted to the Portland Soho House. “I’m trying to be a high-level weirdo,” she said.
Jack Begg contributed research.
