Care To Join?

Private clubs are proliferating. But keeping members happy might not be as easy as it seems.

- Mark Ellwood

It's easy to miss Auric Room 1915, the new private members' club at Lone Mountain Ranch resort on Montana's North Fork Gallatin River. It opened this past spring tucked away upstairs above the lobby and reached via a small mahogany lift in the wood-framed main-lodge building. Those who know to step inside are whisked up to a cramped corridor, where a hostess offers a polite greeting and coats-a floor-length vintage fur, perhaps, or an oversized woollen shrug-in case you need to duck out onto the terrace. Then she requires everyone to hand over their phones, which she stows in a wall of vintage safe-deposit boxes.

Auric Room 1915, which is named after the year this ranch was established, is a small space, barely 111sqm, with high ceilings and dark wooden panelling. The decor is wittily maximalist-Elton John's idea of a cowboy saloon-with rawhide banquettes and giant antlers for a chandelier. The same goes for the food. Tables are piled high with fist-sized pots of caviar, which diners scoop up with crispy homemade chips, and drinks are served in hefty crystal glassware.

Most notable, though, is how conversation spills over between strangers mingling together in this speakeasy-like hideaway; one group waves a newcomer over to ask about his boots, and soon he's sitting down to chat. "We wanted this to be a mannered environment, one where if you sit next to each other at the bar, you can be social," says Paul Makarechian, noting that the mobile-phone ban forces old-fashioned socialising, "We have strict non-solicitation rules. It eliminates that quick, 'Let me text you my number', though after a few drinks, people are trying to memorise them."

Makarechian is a co-founder of Lone Mountain Ranch and its CEO, a real-estate developer-turned-hotelier who lives with his family nearby. He's dressed in classic Western wear, with a jaunty Stetson at hand.