TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010


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PHOTOS BY XIAOMEI CHEN/THE WASHINGTON POST THE FUTURE OF FITNESS? At this building on U Street NW, David von Storch plans to merge fitness, restaurant, spa and salon enterprises under one roof — topping that roof with a pool and cabanas. D.C.’s self-fulfillment mogul is coming on strong von storch from C1


The room seems unsteadied by von Storch’s ambition. “If I’m being a realist,” mutters a suit,


“it’s gonna be a push.” Others chirp about permits and specifications. “Always listen to the client first,” von Storch says curtly. “I spent over $100,000 getting this approved. I’m done.” He’s 52 but, with his energy and boy- ish blond haircut, he might pass for 35. He knows what he wants, from the con- struction deadline to the double-paned windows with fake muntins. He does ev- erything with a sense of urgency, he says, because a business that doesn’t evolve is as good as dead. By next summer he wants 1612 U St. NW to be the palace of his empire. There, he wants to feed you, tone your body, trim your bangs, get you tipsy and coax you into savasana until your vainglorious, workaholic body feels that life is healthy, productive, groomed, deliberate, ordered. Like his life is. Like it once was not.


Gyms in Washington used to be just


that: gymnasiums. Musty, ratty, gloomy rooms of iron, always underground. In the early ’90s there was a subterranean Bally’s on L Street NW and a windowless workout room at the YMCA. In 1995, af- ter becoming majority owner of the Cap- itol City Brewing Company franchise, von Storch signed a lease-to-own agree- ment for a hulking restaurant supply building at 1612 U St. NW, the gateway to the dodgy, undeveloped U Street corri- dor. There, on the cusp of present and fu- ture D.C., he would create a new kind of gym that would anticipate an evolution of expectations. Fifteen years later: Expectations are being met. U Street is $18 glasses of wine and gleaming condos with doormen. The belly of Northwest buzzes with the promise and practice of balanced life — at lifestyle fitness centers, the body poli- tic worships a collective notion of well- ness. First it was “Which Washington Sports Club do you go to?” and then “Which Results?” and now “You should try Vida. It’s amazing.” These are the Vidavangelists, as some call them. For $92 a month, their world becomes marble sinks and tiled shower stalls and “group power” classes and leather settees and soaps labeled “PURE” and “SOOTHE.” By 6:30 a.m. ev- ery weekday, the early birds of Washing- ton are perched on every one of the 65 cardio machines at the Vida Fitness at 15th and P. Next spring von Storch will open Vi-


da’s fourth location in five years in the renovated 1612 U, with a fifth planned for the Navy Yard in 2013. He oversees two Aura Spas, three Bang Salons (which cut 2,150 heads of hair a week), three Cap City restaurants (which serve 19,000 meals a week to businessmen and tour- ists) and plans to open two higher-end dining destinations in the next year (at 1612 U and 901 Ninth St. NW), all under the corporate heading of Urban Adven- tures. He has 1,400 employees, a seven-


figure income and 153,600 square feet of business spread over Washington, but Miami is his playground — he plans to add a half-million-dollar deck (with pool and fountains) to his oceanfront pent- house there. By next summer he will have conjured that ritzy aesthetic here. On top of 1612 U will be a pampery, members-only rooftop with a pool ringed by cabanas reservable for $500. It will be something people want to be a part of, the latest place-to-be in a city that’s always looking for something more L.A., more New York, less Washing- ton. “It’s the culmination of everything,” he


says.


Success, though, is not enough for Da- vid von Storch. He wants to be on TV, too.


He zips through the city in his Smart


Car, plastered with ads for Vida and Cap City, riffing on his reality-show idea, which several cable networks have passed on but some are still considering. Von Storch has sunk nearly $100,000 of his own money into producing a pilot ti- tled “Complicated Order,” which paints von Storch as a prototypical Bravo-ready diva — driven, a smidge catty, exuding wealth, surrounded by insane employees —who is building an empire in a cosmo- politan, nonfederal version of Washing- ton. “It’s another marketing opportunity


and it’s fundamentally egocentric, and that’s part of David’s personality,” says his older brother, Stephen von Storch, a managing partner in a Charlottesville architecture firm that is collaborating on 1612 U, a building that’s seen its share of ego over the past 15 years. After lassoing 1612 U in ’95, von Storch decided to remain solely a landlord, re- cruiting local trainer Doug Jefferies to run a fitness center. Several years earlier Jefferies had


started his own personal training facil- ity, called Training for Results, in a ga- rage off 22nd and Q streets. He outgrew the space and moved to 1704 R St. NW, where the gym capitalized on the gay commercial and residential corridor of 17th Street. Shortly after Jefferies toured the warehouse for sale at 1612 U, von Storch signed his deal. Jefferies says the innovative concept and design behind Results were 100 percent his. Von Storch lays claim to them, too, saying that Jef- feries was the manager who raised cap- ital and ran with the initial concept. After a decade of he said/he said, it’s


likely that both men had similar visions for a new kind of gym that would trans- form the way the city worked out. Re- sults was Jefferies’s success, but he built it on von Storch’s turf.


By 2000 Results was a bustling behe- moth, a social center for the neighbor- hood and gay community. There were 3,000 members coming and going along UStreet, which sprouted businesses that thrived on this new traffic pattern. Results “put people on the street — there was life, energy,” says Eric Hirsh- field, owner of 18th & U Duplex Diner, which opened in 1998 with Jefferies as an investor. “It was the first of its kind. Gyms prior to that were chains. This was a community gym. It had its roots in the neighborhood and probably spawned these other big and small gyms. It may sound corny, but Results was like the Motown of the neighborhood, which makes Doug the Berry Gordy.” With a reverse migration into the city, higher disposable in- comes and the real es- tate boom, residents expect their neigh- borhood to be more refined, more tai- lored, says real estate developer David Fran- co, who owns the men’s clothing store Universal Gear and rented office space from von Storch at 1612 U. Between 1996 and 2008 the number of health clubs in the District nearly dou- bled, and many were boutique gyms like Mint in Adams Mor- gan and BodySmith on 14th Street NW. “So many business- es and services have developed that per- tain to lifestyle,” says


Jefferies opened a second, larger Re- sults in Capitol Hill in 2001, the same year von Storch debuted the first Bang Salon on the ground floor of 1612 U. The two became entangled in landlord-ten- ant disagreements over alleged lease vio- lations, which Jefferies views as von Storch’s attempt to crowbar into his suc- cess (two more Results would follow, in 2007 and 2008). “He’s never been the easiest guy to get along with,” Jefferies says. “We’ve had a really heated history in the past. He tried to evict us from the space over and over again.” Von Storch says he was just try- ing to get Jefferies to comply with the lease.


By 2005 the squabble was moot: Von Storch bought the building for $5.8mil- lion, opened his first Vida the following year at Verizon Center and began to de- vise his takeover of 1612 U. He’d already turned the fourth floor into an incubator for gay-owned businesses like Universal Gear and the Capital Area Gay and Les- bian Chamber of Commerce, which gave von Storch its Excellence in Business award in April. Von Storch views his proposed reality show as a way to reach more HIV- positive men who still face ostracization within the gay community. He regularly counsels friends of friends who’ve been diagnosed, chatting on the phone about what to expect, assuring them that they have it much easier than his generation did.


“I have been HIV-positive for 20-some years, and one of the conversations I think is missing in my community is someone who has faced the obstacles, the social outcast, at many levels,” von Storch says. “To be able to come through that and be happy and thrive — there’s not really a paradigm for people to con- nect with that.” Employees praise his smarts, his posi-


tivity, his ability to listen carefully and act decisively. Everyone would tense up when he walked in, though, according to several ex-employees who felt disre- spected or used by him. Chris Carnec- chia, a trainer and former operating partner at Vida, says the first Vida was mostly his own vision, while von Storch credits him only with selecting equip- ment and developing the personal train- ing program. In 2007 von Storch fired Carnecchia for having a relationship with an employee; Carnecchia filed a wrongful termination suit that was dis- missed in court. “He was somewhat of a ruthless busi- nessperson — once he got to where he needed to get, he got rid of you,” says


Franco. “All of our lifestyles have im- proved over the past 20 years. Results was pretty much the catalyst of the gym industry in D.C.”


Carnecchia, now general manager of a Merritt Athletic Club opening in January in Hanover, Md. “Unfortunately, through the years David’s gotten engulfed with himself. [The TV show] is not going to benefit anybody else but himself.”


He was raised in Clark Summit, Pa.,


north of Scranton, next to a farm. His fa- ther was an engineer, his mother a housewife. Von Storch got his first job in sixth grade. There was enough money to send him to Deerfield Academy in Mas- sachusetts, where his classmates were the children of bankers and royalty. He surfed a full ride to the University of North Carolina, became president of his fraternity and ran his own DJ business, toting turntables to parties. In between semesters and after gradu-


ation he did accounting for investment firms in New York. At 23 he enrolled in Harvard Business School, which honed his sense of competition. Goldman Sachs offered him a job, but he took a lower- paying gig developing urban market- places in the Washington area. In 1984 he moved to Albemarle Street


NW, a successful 25-year-old Harvard grad, and realized he needed to start his life over. For all his outward striving, his re- pressed sexuality was undoing him. He’d always felt isolated, from high school to college to the workplace. Moving to the District was a second chance. He with- drew from his prior life. He went to gay bars, which revolted and excited him at the same time, but scrambled to quash rumors at the office. Believing that cor- porate life would keep him fully closeted for years, von Storch decided to start his own business. He had $20,000 of his own money to invest, borrowed and raised $1 million, and opened the Dako- ta nightclub at 1777 Columbia Rd. NW in 1987.


“I was trying to think — ‘What can I do


that allows me to live in the world that I want to live in?’ ” von Storch says. “I re- member, after we had been open a month, walking around after closing one night and feeling a real sense of freedom, thinking, ‘I can be who I want to be.’ ” The Dakota was one of the first up- scale clubs in Adams Morgan, which, in the conservative eddy of the Reagan ’80s, was enduring a “Georgetowniza- tion” that revitalized commerce but ran- kled residents. Lines stretched down the block from the Dakota. Computer-con- trolled lights raced around a catwalk over the dance floor. Speakers thumped house, late disco, Madonna and the Thompson Twins. Von Storch organized gay nights a couple of times a week. He dated, and one night in 1988, when he was 29, he brought a friend home. He was out of condoms. “Don’t worry, it’s cool,” the friend said. “I will always re- member that,” von Storch recalls. “ ‘It’s cool.’ ”


Five or six weeks


“He created places people wanted to explore and


exist in.” — Perry Smith on former boss David von Storch, left


later, he came down with a bad flu. He went to the Whitman- Walker Clinic on 14th Street NW. After he got the test results, he walked through Georgetown. He was in shock over the vi- rus infiltrating his body, beyond his con- trol. Overcome, he collapsed to a curb between two parked cars and hung his head between his knees.


“I remember no one came up and said anything,” he says. “I finally said, ‘Well


that’s it, so deal with it.’ I got up, brushed off my shorts and that was when I start- ed to realize that my life had changed and there was nothing I could do about that.” He tried experimental drugs as they became available. He obsessed about his diet, swearing off fried foods. He came out to his parents by revealing his diag- nosis. He remembers his father saying “We’re not ashamed of you” and his mother crying over the kitchen stove. The whole saga — the powerlessness, the dismantled secrecy — rocked him to the core. He pledged himself to a Dupont Circle


gym, which in the late ’80s and early ’90s was not exactly a vibrant, motivating destination.


Ironically, the Vida Fitness at 15th and


P was built underground, like the gyms of yore. But inside it feels like a hidden kingdom of alpha males and females who have escaped the chaos outside to sculpt themselves amid clubby music, soft light and inspirational placards that read EXCEL, FOCUS, EMPOWER, BAL- ANCE, DEDICATION. In 1996, around the time Jefferies set up shop in his building, von Storch start- ed a regimen of HIV medication that continues to render his viral load unde- tectable. The diagnosis “probably only fueled his desire to make money so he would have the resources to fight the fight,” his brother Stephen says. “That was a time when he would’ve been of the last generation of people who suc- cumbed or the leading edge of the gener- ation who would survive. He was right on the cusp.” Year by year, business by business, dol- lar by dollar, person by person, von Storch built the world he wanted to live in.


“I think he’s model gorgeous, and his personal style helps create an aspiration- al brand,” says PR maven Hilary Rosen, who has known von Storch for 20 years. “He created places people wanted to


explore and exist in,” says Perry Smith, a managing partner of Matchbox pizza bistro who worked as a doorman at the Dakota in 1987. “Go back to the whole thing about the catwalk he had [at the club]. People would go up there and spend more money and more time be- cause they could sit and watch people. He’s done the same thing at Vida. He provides a nice, comforting, insular type of space.”


On a recent weekday, von Storch is up on the roof of 1612 U, with its panoramic view of the city: the 17th Street strip to the south, a busy U Street running east and west and, in a straight shot from the present to his past, his old neighborhood of Adams Morgan to the north. In a year, if all goes according to plan, Results will be out, the building will be renovated and this 13,000 square feet of rooftop — now all pebbles and rusty ductwork — will morph into an exclusive escape, an elevated throne for the longtime D.C. businessman. As usual, there are other things on his mind. He has a meeting the following day with a major cable network in New York. There, he will meet with suits who think his life could be compelling but want more time to consider it. This will both please and frustrate von Storch. Ev- erything, for him, is urgent. So next month, when construction


starts at 1612 U, he will keep the cameras rolling on his own dime. It’s important to capture the moment they break ground, he says, because that’s when things really “get serious.” zakd@washpost.com


ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM To which area gym are you loyal? Take our poll at


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