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Superluxury Seats for Watching the Wizards and Caps

By Garrett M. Graff

For years the best seat in the Verizon Center has been the blue-green Barcalounger where Abe Pollin relaxes in the owner’s suite, but that’s changing as a new enterprise unveils the priciest seats in the arena.

These luxury-suite memberships run into the six figures. Photograph courtesy of SiloSmashers.

Collaborations, launched by management consultant Angela Drummond, seeks to meld the best of sports, entertainment, dining, and a private club. With rates as high as $250,000 a year for six people (three-year minimum membership required), she’s finding an audience.

The club was created when the Verizon Center ripped out eight luxury suites on the third level of the arena and Collaborations renovated the 5,000-square-foot space into a venue one could easily confuse with a power setting like the Tower Club in McLean. Dark-paneled walls and an expansive bar overlooking the National Portrait Gallery greet the club’s members, who can amuse themselves during events with a pool table, conduct business in a conference room, dine in a room on food prepared by a chef hired from the Ritz-Carlton, or just watch the game from large leather seats. Don’t want to sit for the game? Flat screens broadcast the entertainment throughout the club—even in the men’s restroom.

Drummond says she hopes to sell 60 to 70 memberships—she’s about a quarter of the way there—targeted toward such dealmakers as developers, lawyers, recruiters, and government contractors.

Comments

Was just there last night. Great place and got to go courtside but there was hardly any one else there!

Posted by: Eric | Mar 16, 2008 11:27:27 AM

15 memberships so far? What a failure. This area will make a nice stadium club in a few years once the Wiz gets the area back. Didn’t anyone do some simple market research?

Posted by: Martin | Feb 29, 2008 08:41:36 PM

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