Grupo Paraguas Moves Into Hotels With Club Metropolis, Opening Late January
Grupo Paraguas, the company behind El Paraguas and Amazonico, will open Club Metropolis in late January inside Madrid's Edificio Metropolis, its first move into hotel ownership.
The company behind El Paraguas and Amazonico has moved onto ground it has never occupied: hotel ownership. Grupo Paraguas will open Club Metropolis in late January, set inside the Edificio Metropolis, at the junction where Alcala meets Gran Via in central Madrid. Restaurant group becomes hotel group at that single address.
The property carries six gastronomic concepts under one roof, laid one against another like strata compressed into a single building over time. Alongside them runs a private members' club, a second structure bearing weight the group's existing restaurants were never asked to carry. Scale stays boutique; density does not.
Marta Seco and Sandro Silva make their debut as hoteliers at this address, a role neither has held before now, after years spent building restaurants for other people's buildings rather than their own. Among the six concepts sits a Mediterranean grill in which fire functions as the operating principle of the kitchen, not a garnish applied to the menu afterward. The grill is the visible seam where the group's old trade meets its new one.
A members' club changes who is admitted and on what terms, a filter the group's restaurants alone have never needed to install at the door. Six kitchens under one roof also means six sets of running costs pressed against a single set of walls, a concentration the group has not tried at this scale before this project. The Edificio Metropolis becomes the site where that concentration is tested in practice.
Hotel ownership carries a different mass than restaurant ownership: rooms and a members' club run on calendars that do not empty out at midnight the way a dining room does, and cannot be closed for a quiet Tuesday. Late January is the date the group has fixed for finding out whether six concepts and a private club can share one foundation without any single one of them settling faster than the rest. Grupo Paraguas has traded the position of tenant for the position of landowner, and it is the ground itself, not any one menu, that gets tested first.