After Snctm success, Damon Lawner launches an L.A. restaurant

Damon Lawner used to throw legendary intercourse events in L.A. because the founding father of Snctm, an unique membership for the super-rich. To get in, members needed to apply upfront, submit photographs of themselves, pay as much as $75,000 in annual charges and reply such questions as, “What most turns you on?”

In 2019, he bought the key society for $1 million after six hedonistic years that price him his 15-year marriage and strained his relationships along with his two younger daughters.

“I turned Damon: the founder and proprietor of Snctm,” he mentioned final month, sitting on a squashy white love seat within the sparsely furnished two-bedroom Hollywood residence the place he now lives. “I don’t need that to be me anymore.”

Not too long ago Lawner turned co-founder and co-owner of Puzzle, a members-only French restaurant scheduled to open this summer time in West Hollywood. To get in, diners have to use upfront, listing their internet price, pay as much as $10,000 in annual charges and reply such questions as, “Describe a dream evening at Puzzle the place something you want will be loved.”

If that sounds so much like Snctm, Lawner assured me that the dinner events gained’t be like his intercourse events. Consider Puzzle, he mentioned, as extra like foreplay than the total factor.

Then he talked about the curtains.

5 of the restaurant’s 15 tables shall be tucked into cozy arched alcoves and outfitted with thick jewel-toned velvet curtains that may be drawn shut for privateness. That raises the apparent query.

“I’ve to inform folks they can’t have intercourse. Like, I’ve to inform them that,” Lawner, 52, mentioned. “Then the query turns into, nicely, what occurs behind these curtains and what are grown-ups allowed to do in their very own little personal area? Am I going to peek my head in? No.”

By the point Lawner moved into the Snctm social gathering home — a 6,500-square-foot seven-bedroom with a built-in intercourse swing and a stripper pole down the hill from the Playboy Mansion — he was already being referred to as the subsequent Hugh Hefner. If something, his nights had been even wilder.

A former mannequin and nightclub promoter, Lawner had began Snctm in 2013 with the intention of making a sexual utopia the place the rich may shed their inhibitions and discover their wishes via erotic theater.

A few hundred folks — a mixture of paying members of each sexes, particular superstar company and girls admitted free on the idea of “aesthetic attraction” — would arrive at his extravagant month-to-month soirees in masquerade masks and black-tie apparel or lingerie. The garments sometimes didn’t keep on lengthy.

On the first gathering, held in an underground nightclub in Beverly Hills, Lawner shortly found that many pleasure-seeking attendees didn’t need to simply watch the performers have intercourse: They wished to get in on the motion — with the dates they got here with, or with others they’d simply met, typically on the similar time, in full view of everybody else.

Lawner inspired it. Though cameras had been banned from the occasions, phrase bought out in elite circles and shortly Snctm turned the free-love personal playground for A-list actors, rock stars, chief executives, metropolis officers and run-of-the-mill millionaires.

The events had been in such excessive demand that Lawner went on to host them in New York, Miami and Moscow. Showtime made a 2017 docuseries referred to as “Bare Snctm.” Different luxurious intercourse golf equipment with utility types and masquerade themes started to furtively crop up round city.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Steven Tyler and Invoice Maher had been among the many attendees noticed at Snctm occasions; reps for all three didn’t reply to requests for remark.

“It was an incredible journey,” mentioned David Winkler, a member from 2017 to 2019. “I’d all the time been a reasonably shy, sexually vanilla particular person, and abruptly I used to be doing issues that I’d beforehand been uncomfortable with. It opened me up for the higher.”

Lawner’s present for handpicking charming and open-minded partygoers was central to Snctm’s attraction, mentioned Winkler, 59, a movie producer and writer from Westwood.

“Damon was so selective about who he let into the doorways — it wasn’t some low-cost intercourse social gathering the place all people brings a date and also you routinely swap,” he mentioned. “There’s a really huge distinction between a intercourse social gathering and a Snctm social gathering.”

Nevertheless it wasn’t all boundless ecstasy for Lawner, who was $1 million in debt when he watched “Eyes Extensive Shut” and got here up with the concept for Snctm. He indulged readily in every part on provide on the events, making quite a lot of love and cash within the course of, however the steamy nights, heavy ingesting and arduous medication took their toll.

“I misplaced myself in that world,” he mentioned throughout a go to final month on the under-construction Puzzle, a tiny, windowless area set behind an unmarked black door on the Sundown Strip.

“I simply wished to be cherished and I wished to be particular and I wished folks to assume extremely of me as a result of I didn’t really feel that means about myself, and Snctm gave me that in spades,” he continued. “It elevated me to this place, however it additionally was a really empty and false factor.”

His older daughter, 17-year-old Olivia, was within the neighborhood with a buddy and stopped by. She recalled being bullied in center college due to Snctm — “It was actually not the factor you need to see your dad doing” — and frightened about him continually, making him promise to do away with the membership by the point she entered highschool.

“My notion of him on the time was, like, fully modified and nearly ruined from who I grew up with,” she mentioned. “It affected me a lot.”

Lawner mentioned an aimless interval of remorse and restore adopted his sale of Snctm 4 years in the past, an all-cash take care of a bunch of buyers led by a New York-based member. He made amends along with his household, bought “California sober,” adopted the non secular moniker “Father Damon,” tried to reconcile along with his ex-wife and, when that didn’t work, pledged his future relationships can be monogamous.

Lawner, who made as a lot as $1.7 million yearly when he owned Snctm, additionally wanted to discover a new job.

“The final a few years, I haven’t identified what I used to be going to do — I simply wasn’t feeling inspiration for something,” he mentioned. “How do you comply with up what I did?”

At first, Lawner hosted some personal events and nightclub occasions in L.A. and London. He thought-about instructing “tantric love and soul-gazing” workshops for {couples}. Just a few months in the past, he was hyping a grander members-only intercourse membership referred to as Secret Backyard, “an unique society the place prosperous people are met with stunning backyard women and experiences.”

Secret Backyard memberships had been NFT-based and priced from $100,000 to $1 million. Lawner didn’t promote even one.

“I put the phrase out and never a lot traction got here from it,” he mentioned. “On the finish of the day, sitting right here on this second, it’s not one thing I need to pursue — creating a personal island social gathering for billionaires and what that entails. That doesn’t flip me on.”

None of his different enterprise concepts panned out both, resulting in his newest skilled pivot: “All of my new endeavors,” he introduced not too long ago on Instagram, “are about love.”

Puzzle shall be a private check for Lawner, whose model is constructed on intercourse and who’s by nature liable to temptation. Velvet curtains apart, he’s excited by the potential for a restaurant that’s as a lot about sensuality as it’s about meals.

“It’s our little hideaway for individuals who can afford it,” he mentioned as we made our means via the eating room, strolling rigorously over piles of sawdust whereas a building crew pounded away overhead, “and people who find themselves engaging sufficient to affix them.”

He has already bought three-quarters of the memberships for Puzzle, together with all however one of many 11 most costly Emerald-level slots, priced at $10,000 a yr (23 Black-level memberships price $5,000 and 75 Gold-level memberships price $2,500). The tiers correspond to precedence entry for reservations; diners must pay for meals and drinks on high of the annual charges.

Elena, an Emerald member who declined to supply her final title so she may freely focus on her sexual proclivities, utilized in February after she noticed one in all Lawner’s Instagram posts concerning the restaurant.

The style blogger from Hidden Hills mentioned she was intrigued by its promise of intimacy and glorious meals (a to-be-announced French chef is relocating from a Michelin-starred restaurant to run the kitchen, Lawner mentioned). She disregarded the steep value level: “I would like top-of-the-line every part,” she mentioned. “You need the perfect, it’s important to spend more money.”

Elena anticipates going to Puzzle each week or two for “an incredible dinner with different members, speaking about our fantasies and exploring different folks’s goals and ideas.”

“And if I get to lick caviar off any person’s boobs, then I’m going to try this,” the 42-year-old mentioned. “That might be an incredible evening.”

Lawner has teamed with three enterprise companions to open Puzzle, leaving the fine-dining modernist menu, opulent decor and repair particulars to the others.

His focus, because it was at Snctm, is on visitor listing curation and leisure.

On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, Puzzle will rework right into a neon-lit nightclub from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Lawner plans to be a fixture for the after-hours festivities, in addition to for the PJs-and-lingerie Sunday brunches he’s planning.

He’s at present assembling a roster of “Single Women,” a particular complimentary membership that “offers essentially the most attractive women in L.A. full entry to our personal membership for drinks on the home and dancing all night to the perfect DJs,” in line with Puzzle’s web site. Single Woman candidates are required to submit their Instagram handles for Lawner to peruse.

“For higher or worse,” he mentioned, “stunning girls make the world go ‘spherical.”

Thomas Fuks, one of many companions in Puzzle, introduced Lawner onto the challenge at first of the yr. The 2 buddies first met shortly after Lawner had bought Snctm and was working the nightclub circuit in Hollywood, bringing engaging girls over to tables crowded with huge spenders.

“I sat with him and I advised him, ‘I believe you’re higher than that,’” mentioned Fuks, who additionally owns Mediterranean restaurant Members in Hollywood. “He’s such a inventive particular person; he has a lot expertise. I mentioned, ‘You shouldn’t do that selling, you must actually create and convey your universe and take over the evening.’”

The result’s boundary-pushing Puzzle. The staff is trusting Lawner to “make it scorching with out being trashy,” Fuks mentioned, with the hope that like-minded clients shall be amenable to the restaurant’s provocative, don’t-ask-don’t-tell premise.

“We’re nonetheless, to be trustworthy with you, making an attempt to determine what we are able to and can’t do. It’s sort of difficult,” he mentioned. “It’s important to ensure all people’s on the identical vibration and web page and imaginative and prescient contained in the room.”

Lawner’s different new love enterprise is the extra overtly named Intercourse Weed, his high-end hashish line of pre-rolled joints; the strains had been all chosen — after many gratifying nights of trial-and-error testing, he mentioned with a sly smile — to intensify sexual pleasure.

Intercourse Weed “frees women and men of ego and efficiency that will get in the best way of really transcendent sexuality,” the corporate’s web site asserts. It is going to be launched at dispensaries round L.A. in a couple of weeks, priced at $100 for a field of 5.

“I’m hand-rolling rose petals and wrapping them in freaking gold leaf by hand,” Lawner mentioned, opening a shiny crocodile-skin-patterned Intercourse Weed field and eradicating a fragile fuschia pink joint a couple of days after the Puzzle go to. “I imply I’m not, however the folks which can be doing it are. It’s very labor intensive. I can’t cost $40.”

To assist fund his new companies, he bought the 1965 Shelby GT350R that he purchased for $250,000 in the course of the peak of his Snctm reign, making a $100,000 revenue.

Lawner’s life today is significantly extra modest. After transferring out of the Holmby Hills Snctm Mansion in 2017, he bounced out and in of inns and rented houses earlier than signing a one-year, $3,000-a-month lease in March for his Hollywood residence, the place he lives above a waxing salon and a pizzeria.

He owns virtually no furnishings: The eating space is empty; the lounge consists of a marble espresso desk, a big teddy bear and a pair of marshmallowy love seats with an identical armchair; his bed room is naked save for a mattress and tv on the ground beside a cluster of potted crops. Almost every part is white, together with the skinny, calf-length tunic that Lawner is carrying with no underwear.

“I’ve been a millionaire a number of instances over and misplaced all of it a number of instances over,” Lawner mentioned between languorous pulls of a Intercourse Weed joint. “I’m on the trail to being a millionaire once more. Now the query is: Do I repeat the identical cycle?”

That’s one thing his household and buddies are questioning, too, because the charismatic playboy reemerges onto the scene.

“Damon to me is just like the modern-day intercourse Jesus — I sort of really feel like he sacrificed himself for the better good of making a tradition for those that was wanted, particularly in a metropolis like Los Angeles,” mentioned Claudia Fijal, one of many first girls employed by Lawner to work as an “environment mannequin” at Snctm when it debuted. “I imply, he risked his marriage, he flipped his world the other way up.”

Regardless of Lawner’s efforts to tame his methods, “on the finish of the day a lion is a lion,” mentioned Fijal, now 34 and dwelling in Las Vegas.

“It’s such a disgrace as a result of he has this inside battle on a regular basis,” she mentioned. “Like on one hand you’re speaking about monogamy, and now you’re speaking about velvet curtains and handing out condoms.”

Winkler, the previous Snctm member, mentioned he’s undecided about whether or not to affix Puzzle now that he’s in a contented relationship and “grew out of that way of life.”

“I’m guessing that something Damon does will finally flip into intercourse,” he mentioned. “As eccentric as he’s, he actually is a form man who simply desires love and needs intimacy. Till midnight.”

Lawner is aware of he has to work arduous to maintain his addictive persona in verify. He nonetheless goes to Snctm events occasionally — he plans to attend the one in downtown L.A. on Saturday — however is extra conscious about his late-night extracurricular actions.

“Needing to be cherished and needing to be admired — these issues have pushed me to locations that I shouldn’t have gone,” he mentioned. “I’ve one thing in me that, if I don’t attend to it, will be very self-destructive. And so I simply should admit that and keep on a very good path.”