Life at the Top – Two Liberty Place – Cole Hamels
If Stern’s first restaurant, the recently closed Gayle, was small, intimate and charming, R2L is meant to be the opposite: big, brash, and full of supper-club swagger. More critically, it’s supposed to reinforce the idea of Two Liberty as a brand, a place where chic people go and where people who aspire to be chic follow. Never mind that Two Liberty sits above a shopping mall that includes a Bath & Body Works and a food court. In a condo market on its knees, Daniel Stern and his magic spatula are the latest weapons Two Liberty is employing in hopes it will get recognized as Philadelphia’s forwarding address.
As with the general real estate market, condo prices didn’t increase nearly as much in Philadelphia as they did in other sections of the country during real estate’s Roaring Aughts. As a result, the ensuing downturn has been sobering but not as deadly as in, say, Las Vegas, where prices have plummeted 53 percent since 2006. In Philadelphia, that figure is closer to three percent. That’s not to say the city market for high-end condos — units priced at over $500,000 — is good: Sales have declined 24 percent over the past year alone.
In this kind of Samoyed-eat-Samoyed world, what separates one tony building from another is strictly tactical. The Murano held a very public auction of 42 of its units in June, a move that netted a front-page Inquirer story but also questionable returns — and resentment among earlier buyers who’d paid full freight. The Barclay and Parc Rittenhouse play up their Edith Wharton-esque park views and stately facades; the Ayer, where Chase and Jen Utley live in a $4.1 million penthouse, has tried to summon up a certain Jazz Age élan on Washington Square. The Ritz-Carlton has a name that signifies luxe living, Eric Ripert’s acclaimed 10 Arts restaurant (with room service!), the Richel D’Ambra Spa, and, for good measure, Jon Bon Jovi’s crash pad.
In contrast, Two Liberty’s marketing revolves, in addition to its high-octane list of residents, around selling its views, its finishes, and its cater-to-every-whim service: a house Mercedes you can hop into to run errands, a restaurant freezer to store your delivered groceries till you get home. But what it’s really selling is its fog of faux exclusivity, the feeling that you should live here because you deserve to live here — L’Oréal ad campaign as real estate credo. You’re riding the elevator with Heidi Hamels, you’re on the treadmill next to Andre Iguodala, you’re strolling through the private residential entrance to your table at Daniel Stern’s R2L. At Two Liberty, the message isn’t that you’re rich. It’s that you’ve arrived.
“I DON’T KNOW IF I COULD do this as a life,” I tell Ella Jones-Brown as we sit in the gleaming lobby one late afternoon.
She seems taken aback. “What do you mean?”
Though I’ve spent a week being catered to, pampered, figuratively bowed and scraped to, it still feels a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps this is because I’m an imposter, like a little girl who clomps around in her mother’s pearls and heels, playing dress-up. But even if I hit the lottery, I couldn’t see myself moving here. I can’t shrug off the mental image of Yul Brynner in The King and I, entering to a whole room falling on its knees.
