The great members clubs of London, Paris and Buenos Aires were not built for networking. They were built for the disappearance of afternoons — for the slow, unhurried architecture of a conversation that begins over one drink and ends, sometimes, over an entirely different life.
The green leather is not decorative. It is functional. It absorbs cigar smoke, spilled Armagnac, and the confidences of three centuries of men and women who had somewhere better to be and chose, instead, to remain.
A great club is a room in which the clock has quietly agreed to stop.
We are, we suspect, the last generation who will remember what such rooms felt like before the phones came in.