“WE BUILT MAXWELL SOCIAL FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS, NOT JUST ANOTHER PLACE TO BE SEEN.”

— DAVID LITWAK, FOUNDER

MAXWELL SOCIAL
DESIGNED TO CONNECT

THE ARCHITECT OF COMMUNITY

AT MAXWELL SOCIAL, DAVID LITWAK IS RUNNING THE MOST COMPLEX SYSTEMS PROBLEM OF HIS CAREER. THE SYSTEM IS PEOPLE.

Jacob Brown meets me at the door on Watts Street with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what I'm about to feel. Brown is Maxwell Social's creative director, and he has clearly done this before. The unhurried pace, the slight smile as he watches me take in the entrance for the first time. I step through, and the city disappears. Not gradually; Immediately. The sound of Tribeca, the delivery trucks, and the hum of lower Manhattan, simply stops. What replaces it is something softer: the faint scent of flower arrangements placed throughout the space. The light is warm and directional. Stage red velvet curtains frame every doorway, floor-length and dramatic, catching the light in that particular way that makes a room feel like it belongs to another era. The space is grand. There is no other word for it. It is also, somehow, warm and welcoming. The decoration is layered and abundant. You notice something new every time your eye moves, but it's been done with taste and restraint, feeling curated rather than cluttered. This is a place that has been carefully considered while pretending it hasn't been. At the center of the Grand Room, a long dining table has been set for the evening, the kind of table that implies a dinner party of consequence. It spills naturally into the adjacent library, where books line the walls two stories high and the boundary between eating, reading, and talking becomes unclear. I stood there for a moment longer than I had planned to. Brown moves me through the kitchen next. A chef's dream of leathered marble, Jennair appliances, and Ruffoni copper pots hanging in a row. And then into the Explorers Room, which is its own particular universe. The hand-painted Galapagos wallpaper wraps the room in something between an adventure novel and a fever dream. The bar is built into a hot air balloon basket. A two-floor library rises above it. It is, objectively, too much. It is also completely wonderful. By the time we reach the Garden Room, lighter and flooded with afternoon sun, I have stopped trying to summarize the place and simply surrendered to it. I settle onto a couch. A few minutes later, David Litwak walks in.

It's 1:30 in the afternoon, and Maxwell Social is already alive with the particular controlled chaos of a place that takes hospitality seriously. Staff weaves between tables, adjusting settings, folding napkins, carrying flowers. Delivery men wheel in crates through the front. An elegant well-appointed woman in an impeccably cut coat moves slowly through the rooms with the practiced eye of someone who has thrown many important parties and knows exactly what she is looking for.

Litwak arrives in a light jeans shirt and dark chinos, unhurried but already mid-thought. He's lean and sharp-eyed, the kind of person who listens to your question just long enough to know where it's going before his answer is already forming. He speaks fast with the momentum of a witty mind. Ideas tumbling into each other, pivoting mid-sentence when a better analogy surfaces, circling back to nail something he half-said two minutes ago. When the subject is Maxwell, which is to say when the subject is everything, there's a current running through him that doesn't quit. 

He is, he tells me, an electrical engineer by training. A UC Berkeley graduate. A career entrepreneur. None of which explains why he opened a members' club in a 150-year-old Romanesque Revival brownstone on Watts Street in Tribeca. Except that it completely does. "Social life is so many interconnected things," he says, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. "Status, real estate, design, programming. How many couches versus one-on-one tables, how you design the flow of a room, how many parties versus pizza nights versus intimate dinners." He ticks them off quickly, not reading from a list but pulling from somewhere he's clearly spent a lot of time. "It's a massive, massive system problem. And I think any good engineer, any good entrepreneur, ultimately loves solving systems problems."  

didn't grow up in a church or synagogue either. The Italian American men's clubs, the Rotarians, the Elks, the Moose. These were places that functioned as second homes for generations, built around shared identity, regular ritual, and genuine contribution. Then they faded. And nothing replaced them. "Our society has been without this structure for so long that it's become an unknown unknown. People want it, and when they find us, they often recognize it immediately. Like, oh, this is what I was missing. But they couldn't have told you that before they walked in."

The woman in the impeccable coat reappears briefly at the doorway of the Garden Room, peering in with quiet assessment before a staff member glides over to guide her elsewhere. Litwak barely clocks it. He's already onto social media. There's a phrase, coined by the researcher Sherry Turkle, about the particular loneliness of modern urban life: being alone together. Surrounded by people, connected to hundreds, genuinely close to almost no one. Litwak knows the concept well, and he thinks it describes something that has only gotten worse. "I'm not one of these people who thinks social media is the devil," he says, hands moving now, qualifying before he pivots. "But the idea that it's a substitute for IRL is proving more and more false. We're on the verge of a huge reaction. AI is calling our bluff. So much of online activity isn't genuine. And now we're about to take it to its logical conclusion, where it isn't even humans generating the content anymore." He reaches for an analogy, finds one fast. Digital connection, he says, is empty calories. You can survive on it for a while. It even feels good in the moment. But it isn't nutrition. "The dopamine you get from real human connection — from a conversation that actually goes somewhere, from cooking a meal with someone and sitting down to eat it — that's different. That lasts. Social media gives you a spike. Real community gives you something to come back to."

And coming back, he'll tell you, is the whole point.

The standard playbook for a modern social club is well understood: great food, a beautiful space, a hard-to-get membership, some celebrity adjacency to generate the velvet rope effect. Soho House invented it. A generation of imitators refined it. Litwak calls these places "subscription spaces" or "gated restaurants." He is not complimentary, and he doesn't slow down to soften it. "They've put a velvet rope in a particular way and let in a bunch of Instagram-worthy people. Many of them have 'do not approach' rules. You're literally not supposed to talk to someone you don't know." He shakes his head slightly, the way you do when something still baffles you even after you've thought about it for years. "They were private clubs, not social clubs. You were meant to go there with your existing friends, feel exclusive because Taylor Swift was in the corner, and leave. That's a rebrand of the nightclub," he says, throwing his hands up.

The obvious question lingers beneath the critique. If community cannot be bought, it still has to be chosen, and choosing inevitably means excluding. Every great social institution in history has defined itself as much by who was outside the room as who sat inside it. Maxwell’s interviews, cohorts, and cultural filtering are designed to create belonging, but they also raise a tension: can a space built on intentional selection avoid recreating the very social hierarchies it claims to replace? Litwak doesn’t resist the premise. In fact, he seems to accept it as unavoidable. The deeper problem, he argues, isn't aesthetic. It's structural. Every one of those clubs is built on a hospitality business model that is fundamentally incompatible with community. Restaurants need to flip tables. Clubs that hemorrhage money need to accept members they don't really want. And when you're not selective, you can't build the thing people actually came for. "There's plenty of spas in New York. There's plenty of restaurants. People did not sign up for the Italian American club because it had a Michelin-star risotto. They signed up for the people."

Maxwell charges less than most “competitors,” by design. Members go through four interviews. The space has no full-time kitchen staff because members cook in it together. Programming is largely member-run: debate nights, pizza parties, Shabbat dinners. There is a Member Council that plans events and shapes the culture of the house. And here is the belief at the center of all of it, the one Litwak returns to again and again, the one that makes Maxwell genuinely different: you cannot purchase community. You have to earn it." Every successful community model in history required contribution. Whether you were teaching Sunday school, cooking the Shabbat dinner, or helping plan the Italian American festival. You had to do something." He leans back, more emphatic than animated. "The idea that you can be a passive consumer of community is hilarious to me. It has literally never worked. Not once. It doesn't matter what you pay. If you don't show up to your best friend's wedding, he's not going to be your best friend anymore." He spent the first year of Maxwell not fully believing his own conviction. A paying customer, he kept thinking, I should be doing things for them. But every time he gave members more ownership, more responsibility, more freedom to shape the space, they rose to meet it. "Some of our members now want to bartend." He laughs, quick, genuine. "Why didn't we do that earlier? Every time I thought we'd hit the limit of how much to empower them, the limit turned out to be further than I realized. People want to be put to work. That is the most contrarian thing we believe and it keeps turning out to be true."

“THE GOAL WASN’T EXCLUSIVITY. IT WAS ENERGY, PUTTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE SAME ROOM AND LETTING MAGIC HAPPEN.”

So what kind of people does Maxwell want? The answer is less a list of criteria than a philosophy of selection. "We're asking one question," Litwak says, tapping his knee once for emphasis. "Do we want to be across the dinner table from this person frequently? That's it. You can't always label the algorithm by which people build their friend groups. But you can build the structure by which it chooses itself." He reaches, naturally, for an engineering metaphor. The membership base, he says, functions like a neural network. You don't program the output directly, you design the inputs, set the conditions, and let the pattern emerge. At a certain scale, the community becomes self-sustaining, selecting its own next members, reinforcing its own culture.

Every new member at Maxwell enters in a cohort of roughly thirty people. Over three months, those thirty are introduced to each other through a structured sequence of dinners, events, and rituals. By the time they're folded into the wider house, they already have a web of relationships inside it. The idea is that when you walk into Maxwell on a random Tuesday, it feels less like entering a venue and more like walking into a party where you already know half the room. "We onboard members so that when they walk in, it actually has that feeling of Cheers, where everyone knows your name. Now there are a ton of bars that launch with that tagline. But if you ask what they actually did to make it true — did they change any structure, did they rethink the business model — the answer is usually nothing. We changed the fundamental way we operate."

Maxwell is one location. Litwak wants a thousand in twenty years. He says it without hesitation, and then immediately explains why it can't look like what I was imagining. Ambition on that scale carries its own paradox: the moment community becomes replicable, it risks becoming a product again. "When Soho House is at 35 locations, what are you paying for?" He tilts his head slightly, rhetorical. "It completely ruins the illusion that you're paying for community. If you're trying to build local community, a Cheers where everyone knows your name, you cannot have 150,000 members worldwide walking in and out." The model he looks to is not hospitality. It's religion. It's Greek life. It's the fraternal orders. "Churches understood this. Fraternities understood this. At Berkeley, if you wanted to be part of Greek life, you didn't just join Greek Life, you joined one of 26 houses, and those houses were all independent and distinct. There was a system, but each chapter was its own thing." Maxwell will never have universal membership. A member in Tribeca will not automatically gain access to a future location in Los Angeles. They would have to apply. Each house will be shaped by its own members, carry its own culture. Connected by a shared system and a shared set of values, but not interchangeable. "Scale the system, not the entity." He says it like a mantra, because it is one. Like a good engineer, he leans back, satisfied. "We are building a template. This is the first one." 

“PEOPLE DON’T COME HERE JUST TO SOCIALIZE. THEY COME TO COLLABORATE.”

By now, the Garden Room is humming louder. More staff, more movement, the low percussion of a space being readied for an evening that matters. Litwak doesn't seem to notice. He's arrived at the part of the conversation he's most animated about. The part where Maxwell stops being a club and starts being an argument about the future. After every major technological revolution, he tells me, the same thing happens: people gain time, lose structure, and reach instinctively for meaning. The Industrial Revolution gave workers the weekend. Almost immediately, organized sports exploded. Fraternal organizations swelled. People searched for community because the old anchors — the farm, the village, the parish — had dissolved.

AI, he believes, is about to do the same thing at a scale we aren't remotely prepared for.

"We could go to a four-day work week. Some version of universal basic income might emerge. People are going to have more time and less external structure telling them who they are and why they matter." He's fully forward now, speaking faster than usual. "And when that happens, they are going to search for meaning — hard."

But here's the sharper point, the one that ties everything together: the crisis AI is creating in our professional lives is the exact same crisis Maxwell is already built to solve in our social ones.

"The biggest question in AI is: what is the purpose of life if not to work? We understand that work gives us meaning. But we don't apply that same logic to community." He pauses, just briefly. "If you don't work on your community, if you don't invest your time, show up, contribute, there is no meaning to your community. You're just part of a chat group. A subscription space. You're typing into a void. People are going to rush into building community," he says. "The search for meaning is going to accelerate. And the answer, the real answer, is the same one it's always been." He straightens up, already moving on to the next thought: "You have to show up. You have to do something. You have to earn it."

Outside the Garden Room, someone is arranging candles on the long dining table I had admired an hour earlier, the one that spills into the library. The woman in the coat is gone, presumably convinced, probably already planning her event. The space that smelled of flowers and felt like someone's eclectic home when I first walked in is becoming something slightly more formal, slightly more dressed up, as the evening approaches. Litwak glances around, satisfied in the way that someone is when they see a thing they built doing exactly what it was supposed to do. A conversation starts at the end of the table, then continues as another person joins in. Somewhere in the library, someone is laughing, not loudly, but with the ease of not needing to be heard by everyone else.

No one announces the beginning of the evening. It simply happens.

Maxwell Social is located at 135 Watts Street, Tribeca, New York City.

Editor-in-Chief Kevin Sinclair, Article David Gargiulo, Creative Director Jacob Brown (Maxwell), Founder David Litwak (Maxwell), Location Maxwell Social.