‘Eggs, it literally comes down to eggs.’ It’s a filthy day in London, but billionaire businessman Chris Burch is warm and dry, perched on a curved cream-coloured sofa in an apartment high above the streets of Shoreditch as he mulls Donald Trump’s successful US presidential campaign.
‘Food has always been so cheap, and petrol has been so cheap, and when you raise those two issues, it makes people mad,’ he says. ‘And when the price of eggs doubled, it just got in their head. And I think it was the price of eggs.’
He may have slipped out of the Forbes billionaires list after 2014, but Burch is a long way from having to worry about the cost of groceries. An interest in people, their troubles and motivations has long been instrumental in his success.
In 50 years of business, the founder and CEO of Burch Creative Capital says he has never had a job, but he has invested in fashion, hospitality and technology ventures. He is perhaps most famous for his involvement with global fashion brand Tory Burch, the business he founded in 2004 with his now ex-wife, Tory.
Tory and Chris, who share three sons, divorced just two years after the business was launched. He tells Spear’s he and his ex-wife are ‘best friends’, despite years of legal wranglings over the business; the designer gave a ‘touching’ and ‘hilarious’ speech at his 70th birthday party in 2023.
Burch has now turned his creative eye to interiors, which is why he is sitting on a couch in a penthouse overlooking a London shrouded in grey clouds. He has invested in UK interiors brand Dara Maison, which is co-owned by interior architect Dara Huang, the former fiancée of fellow property entrepreneur Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, with whom she has an eight-year-old son, Christopher Woolf (Wolfie). (Mapelli Mozzi is now married to Princess Beatrice.)
Huang, Burch says, is one of the ‘very special and unique’ people that draw him into his ventures, and together they have designed the interior of the penthouse show apartment here at The Stage, a 37-storey residential tower of 412 apartments developed by Cain International and Galliard Homes that straddles the City and the street-art-daubed Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch.
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Downstairs is the site of the Old Curtain Theatre, made famous by Shakespeare and his band of players who performed here; it has been developed into a museum as part of Galliard’s development of The Stage.
The area’s cultural and industrial past is reflected in the apartment’s aesthetic.
Exposed brick walls and abstract prints are a nod to the style Burch has employed in his own New York apartment at 220 Central Park South, where a neighbouring apartment was sold to hedge fund manager Ken Griffin in 2019 for $238 million. The starkness of the brick is softened by the curves of the coffee- and cream-toned Dara Maison furniture and objets d’art.
Huang describes the design as ‘Chris’s mind mixed with a little bit of mine’. ‘Chris is a merchant at heart, always ahead of trends – whether in fashion or interiors. He brings a certain vibe, and I help bring it to life,’ she says.
Burch and Huang’s collaboration isn’t their first. ‘We’ve worked on many homes together,’ Huang says, including properties in Miami Beach and the Hamptons, after they met at a party in Paris.
Harvard graduate Huang, 41, is as elegant as her interiors – Tatler dubbed her one of the most glamorous women in design. She has worked on interiors for the Four Seasons, LVMH, Cartier, NIHI Resorts and Starwood Capital, and launched Dara Maison in 2023, which specialises in luxury statement pieces that are as much works of art as they are practical.
Burch began his entrepreneurial journey with his brother Bob, selling plain Shetland jumpers bought in Scotland to fellow students at Ithaca College in New York. ‘I placed an order for $20,000 of jumpers that were made in Scotland. And I took those sweaters back to the United States, I put monograms on them, and I sold them to all the college girls, and that’s my first career.’
The venture became Eagle’s Eye, and the brothers soon expanded it beyond the college gates. Within a decade it was making $140 million in sales and was being sold in more than 50 retail stores. The company was partially sold to Swire Group in 1989, and entirely in 1998, in a deal that valued the brand at $60 million.
According to Forbes, Burch made his first big investment as an early investor in Internet Capital Group, a venture capital firm that was valued at $50 billion during the dotcom era. Although the company went through liquidation in 2018 (by then known as Actua Corporation), Burch got out while the going was good and realised a return of almost 100 times his investment.
He has homes all over the world but does not own a place in London (‘I follow the sun,’ he says as he turns to look out of the rain-lashed window). He spends a lot of time in Miami, but his heart belongs to his magnificent 17th-century home in Senlis, a cobblestoned village outside Paris.
A previous foray into London’s property market, in Belgravia 40 years ago, ended quite unexpectedly. ‘I bought on Chester Street. Because I was so busy, I couldn’t visit England often. So, I hired a chef and his wife to look after the place. They were terrible cooks – young and inexperienced – but I didn’t have the heart to fire them.
‘About 10 years in, I got a phone call from the police. They said, “Mr Burch, we don’t want to alarm you; we know you have nothing to do with this. However, your house in Belgravia has been a cocaine centre for the past 10 years. Your chef, as it turns out, is one of the biggest Brazilian cocaine dealers, and his ‘wife’ is actually one of the runners. They’ve been moving a massive amount of cocaine out of your house.”’
He tells Spear’s the pair were handed a 50-year sentence. ‘Lesson learned: don’t buy a house in a foreign country unless you visit often!’
Burch surrounds himself with young, creative people and confesses to spending two hours a day on TikTok looking for ‘creative inspiration and ideas’.
‘These days I focus on seeing things from others’ perspectives – whether it’s someone walking down the street or experiencing an amazing hotel.’ (He declares the £18,000-a-night Haldane Suite at Raffles London at the OWO is the ‘most beautiful’ room he has stayed in.)
[See also: Spies and secret ops: How espionage has inspired London’s most exciting hotel]
Burch has his own hotel, NIHI Sumba in Indonesia. He is opening a new one in Costa Rica, which will be designed by Huang (‘she’s doing all my houses’). But his next challenge might be his hardest yet: ‘I gotta pick up golf.’
This enthusiasm for the fairways was prompted by a recent health scare. ‘I didn’t think I’d make it,’ he says. ‘I was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital… and I’m looking at my life, and I’m like, “Well, I have great kids, I’ve got great friends, and what will I do differently if I get out of here?” I said, “I only have one problem. I don’t have a hobby.”’
For a Florida-dwelling septuagenarian, golf is a natural choice, but Burch thinks he will be ‘too hyperactive for it’. He’s up at five every day – not following the entrepreneurial up-at-dawn manual for success, but because he suffers from insomnia (he laughs when it is pointed out his seven-shot iced coffee might not be helping).
‘I used to be driven by money, but now I’m more focused on creating beautiful, meaningful things. I’m curious by nature and love listening to people, asking questions, and learning. For me, success is about working with extraordinary individuals and helping them achieve their potential.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 94. Click here to subscribe
