Tastemaker’s Note
Most under pressure → Gold, real estate, Bitcoin, and oil are all in the red; less an asset story, more a macro one. Rising Fed rate-hike expectations and a stronger dollar are doing the work. Oil's drop is the sharpest, down nearly 7% as tankers resume movement through the Strait of Hormuz. The outlier → Watches. The WatchCharts index holds at 37,288, up 6.7% over the past year. The secondary market for the big three continues to behave like a different asset class entirely. A note on the others → Classic cars, whisky, wine, handbags, art, and diamonds run on a monthly cycle. Full index updates in two weeks.

Somewhere right now, in a room you've probably never heard of, something is being decided. A deal. An introduction. An idea that hasn't met the world yet.

And so, it has always worked this way: long before the doorman, the waiting list, the $39.8 billion industry built around a very old and very human need to find your people and close the door, rather quickly.

What’s most interesting is that humans built sacred gathering spaces before they built cities or agriculture.

To be exact, although the modern members’ only club dates back to 17th and 18th century London, the impulse to build a room for meaning — not shelter, not storage, not defense — is at least 176,000 years old. And it predates our own species.

The Neanderthals were doing it in the dark, 336 meters underground (France, Bruniquel Cave).

→ Rooms were the first act of civilization. The ultimate declaration that here, we are safe. Out there, we are not. It represented the boundary between the known and the unknown.
→ Rooms were used for rituals. Göbekli Tepe in Turkey (built around 11,600 years ago, before agriculture, before cities) is essentially a series of ceremonial enclosures.
→ Rooms solved organizational problems. It was a way to signal and maintain hierarchy without constant physical contest. The room did this elegantly.
→ Rooms were where trade happened. Both for the exchange of goods and the exchange of information (ex. which caravans were coming, which routes were safe, which harvests had failed, which kings were weak, etc)
→ Rooms were used as theaters. The great halls of medieval Europe were about displaying power and cementing loyalty. The feast was a performance. The seating arrangement was a political statement. All of it communicated rank, relationship, and allegiance in a language everyone in the room could read.
→ Rooms were built specifically for certain private conversations. The early Christian church meeting in Roman catacombs. The Freemasons. The Enlightenment salons of Paris, where ideas that would eventually topple monarchies were first spoken aloud among trusted company.
And finally → Rooms were built for the passage between states. Birth rooms. Death rooms. Initiation chambers. The sweat lodge. The confessional. These were spaces where humans marked the moments that mattered. This is where one version of yourself ended and another began.

What connects all of these is that rooms were never really about the physical space. They were about what became possible inside them that wasn't possible outside: safety, meaning, hierarchy, information, identity, ideas, transformation.

Humans organized labor on a massive scale to create a space for shared meaning.

This tells us something profound: the room as sacred space may actually predate the room as practical space. The need to gather around something bigger than survival: a belief, a story, a shared cosmology, all drove architecture before necessity did.

I’ve watched people curate thousands of followers and yet struggle to find one person to call. And I’ve personally been scouted and invited to some private clubs and rooms that failed in delivering the promised outcomes: beautiful spaces with no soul, expensive rooms with nothing to protect.

The ones that work always know why they exist. Not what they offer. Why they were built. That distinction is everything in hospitality, in real estate, in any space designed for human gathering. Why you are building is always more important than what.

The conversations happening in these rooms — about capital, about politics, about what comes next — are happening in private, among people who have earned each other's trust. The room protects the idea until it's ready. It always has.

And what it's for, it turns out, has never really changed → Belonging. The particular safety of being among people who understand you without explanation. We built our first sacred enclosure 176,000 years ago for exactly that reason.

Every room since has been trying to get back there.

(Read The Future of Private Members Clubs from Five-Course Tasting 👇)

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The thing about belonging is it starts with the foundation…and in my family, that foundation comes with about twelve courses and zero empty seats 🤣

The right room works the same way 🥂

P.S. Like my style (and taste)? Work with me.