"View: Mark Zeff"
Published in Inked magazine, September 2009. This is the unedited version.
By Kristina Feliciano 
Photo from the New York Social Diary.
If Mark Zeff gets pigeonholed as a designer of sexy spaces, it’s not his fault. He’s done homey: the Magnolia Bakery in New York, which Carrie Bradshaw and her Sex and the City friends frequented and which still draws droves of real-life locals. He’s done serene: the Sense Spa at the venerable Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan. He’s working with some Florentine bakers on a biscotti shop in the East Village. The man has even designed a yacht. But when his two new projects debut in August, no one’s going to be thinking about cupcakes and Italian cookies.
His vision for the Voyeur nightclub in West Hollywood draws from a range of racy influences, including Eyes Wide Shut, the photography of Helmut Newton, old-school men’s clubs, and “that crazy, scratchy, underground, obsessive-compulsive mass-murdery thing” that characterized the movie 7. “The club’s name was important, so we created this place that is overtly sexual,” explains Zeff.
Over in Las Vegas, meanwhile, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino enlisted his company, zeffdesign, to reconceptualize it as “the sexiest hotel in the world.” Zeff’s aesthetic starting points for this $600 million-plus project? Rock & roll, of course. Sex, naturally. And tattoos. “I used tattoo [culture] as an inspiration in everything that I did,” says Zeff, who also designed Carey Hart’s Wasted Space lounge at the Hard Rock. Some of the hotel rooms, for example, have oversized mirrored panels with elaborately detailed designs. “It’s like you’re looking through a medieval gate,” says Zeff, “but it’s really a tattoo.”
Mind you, creating a sensual space that caters to visitors of all stripes and, uh, taste levels is not easy. “I’m trying to find a way to bring a 60-year-old guy with a mullet who thinks he’s really cool together with a group that have traveled in from Detroit, who have 17 pounds of piercings, who are in for a drinking, sexy weekend at the Hard Rock,” says Zeff, and you can almost hear him start to perspire.
Time to call in the textiles. “My work is very textural, so we’ve got beaten metal next to silk. We’ve got shiny, almost motorcar-style elements next to rough-hewn wood. We’ve got patterns that you would think you’d find in a Tudor castle next to very modern, sleek stuff. The lighting is very moody.” He pauses. “This is a very dark and nasty, sexy place,” he says finally. “This is not a bright, twinkly Vegas joint.” A dark and nasty, sexy place in Vegas? Yeah, good luck with that, Mark.