10 June 2024 |
Gabriella Khalil is the creative designer and mogul behind some of the coolest hotels, restaurants, pop-up shops and clubs, from downtown New York to the Cayman Islands. And she’s just getting started.
suit by EMPORIO ARMANI
Grand Cayman in the Caribbean has long had a reputation for attracting tax-dodging financiers rather than hipsters. But over the past few years the pristine island has been luring members of a certain cool coastal set, from Chloë Sevigny to Gigi Hadid. This is all thanks to Gabriella Khalil, the owner of Palm Heights, a 52-suite hotel she opened in 2019, just months before the pandemic.
“It wasn’t great timing but there was a silver lining,” says the Philadelphia native who moved from London to New York in late 2022. “When we could open back up, people could come down and quarantine and then really spend time here.” She treated her new property like a lab, inviting different artists, chefs, athletes, and designers to visit and commune as one big creative collective. There was Gerardo Gonzalez, the culinary whiz kid known for the downtown Manhattan spots El Rey café and Lalito; Angela Dimayuga, the former chef of Mission Chinese; the designer Raul Lopez; and Bambi, a New Yorker who came to arrange the flowers and is now the hotel’s resident DJ and vibe master.
Clockwise from top left: the Palm Heights collaboration with Gohar World; Palm Heights interior; Palm Heights uniform collaboration with Bode; suit and top by HERMES
With Khalil presiding over this extended family, they tested recipes for the hotel restaurant (Tillies), made meals for island locals, threw dinner parties, and essentially dreamt up ideas for the hotel, whether it was creating an artist-in-residence program or enlisting Emily Adams Bode Aujla, the designer behind the fashion label Bode, beloved for its patchwork pieces, to create the hotel uniforms. Khalil accented the rooms with pieces by the designers Ettore Sottsass and Marcel Breuer and beauty products by the cult wellness brand Costa Brazil. Last summer she opened Dolores, an expansive boutique stocked with a smart mix of regional and international brands like Marrakshi Life, known for its contemporary spin on Moroccan dressing, Diotima, featuring its Jamaica-born designer Rachel Scott’s exquisitely crafted crochet pieces, and New York–based talent Christopher John Rogers.
“Gabby really lets people have their opinions,” says Dong-Ping Wong, the founder of Food Architects. Wong was hired to design the Garden Club, the 35,000 sq ft open-air spa at Palm Heights, described by Wong as a Caribbean Versailles, with green mazes that open up to different elements including hot and cold plunge pools, a hammam, and an ice room. “She gave us carte blanche when it came to proposing crazy ideas,” says Wong, who also worked closely with Virgil Abloh.
Clockwise from top left: Palm Heights; Raul Lopez at the Met Gala 2023 after-party at WSA; Palm Heights collaboration with Gohar World
During the pandemic Khalil opened Habibi, a Middle Eastern-style pop-up restaurant. Her Egyptian mother-in-law (her husband is Egyptian Sudanese) was visiting, so was able to help with the menu. “I wanted to serve Lebanese food but with an Egyptian-nightclub atmosphere,” Khalil says. “Everything we’ve done is not retro but celebrating a different time.” It was also a way to invite locals to the hotel for something different from the usual Caribbean fare. “There are only 60,000 people on the island, but there are about 160 different nationalities living here,” Khalil continues.
After the success of Habibi on the island, Khalil brought the concept to Brooklyn for one night in 2021 to raise money for a Lebanese food bank. Soon enough she decided to open a pop-up in the far reaches of Bushwick. Diners were greeted by tuxedo-clad waiters proffering champagne in a freight elevator before being ushered into a glamorous room with floor-to-ceiling windows and decorated with sweeping velvet curtains and disco balls. There was live music and drag belly dancers. The reservations-only bacchanalia became a social media sensation last summer and is now a permanent restaurant.
Clockwise from top left: the Chalet at Studio Skate; Emily Ratajkowski at the Met Gala 2023 after-party at WSA; Palm Heights collaboration with Christopher John Rogers
Ironically, Khalil is not very loud on social media. She seems to let things happen quietly and organically. “When she opened Palm Heights, she really kept it under the radar so she could work out all the kinks,” Wong says. “She’d never run a hotel, so she really wanted to give her staff and herself the time to learn how to run one.” Unlike at many hipster boutique hotels, the service at Palm Heights is excellent. (One nice detail: before a guest arrives, their room is supplied with a selection of books catering to their interests.)
Khalil doesn’t seem to crave the limelight either. Despite her orbit being populated with a who’s who of New York’s downtown scene, she comes off very unassuming—a rarity in the fashion and design worlds. But her quiet, almost humble veneer belies a woman with an incredibly ambitious master plan. Not one to rest on her laurels, this winter she opened Studio Skate, complete with a skating rink playing Seventies disco hits and serving mulled wine and a Swiss-style restaurant with sheepskins, chandeliers, fondue, and schnitzel in a warehouse in Brooklyn. It’s a St Moritz all-night rave by way of Bushwick. There was a Dolores annex here too, which featured many of Palm Heights’ products, including Khalil’s recent sea- inspired tabletop collaboration with Gohar World.
Renell Medrano and Kendall Jenner at the Met Gala 2023 after-party at WSA
Khalil’s footprint is expanding at a “blink and you’ll miss it” pace. Happier Grocery, her Erewhon- style health food shop on Canal Street, opened in late 2023 and sells everything from organic sheet masks to fresh-pressed juices to sushi boxes. Flavor Home is Khalil’s burgeoning homewares collection, inspired by the fact that she couldn’t find a good design shop in New York.
And these aren’t even Khalil’s most ambitious projects in New York. That honor could be bestowed upon WSA at 161 Water Street, an office building in Manhattan’s Financial District. Khalil has taken over 31 floors in the Eighties-style skyscraper to create a cultural hub with workspaces and studios for artists and designers. Things are still in the works, but she has already opened the raw space up to fashion fetes (Emily Ratajkowski hosted a Met Gala after-party there last May) as well as a cult coffee pop-up, Rocky’s Matcha. The buzz has been gathering as brands clamor to have their parties and events at the venue, no doubt due in part to WSA’s Instagram feed (@wsanyc), which is regularly peppered with iconic images from the Eighties of what the finished product is planned to look like.
Khalil is constantly experimenting and evolving. She rattles off a members’-only club and a spa as her next possible endeavors: “I haven’t found a good hammam in New York since I moved here,” she says with a knowing look in her eye.
Photographer GREG KESSLER
Sittings Editor IMAN DABBOUS
Text MAURA EGAN
Talent GABRIELLA KHALIL
Photographer’s assistant GRADY CORBITT
Production director JENNIFER BERK
Location The WSA building
Instagram: @palmheightsgc
palmheights.com
