Spread the word
‘We want to create a club for people who call London home; people who are here for a large chunk of the year,’ Will Woodhams tells Spear’s. ‘We don’t want to be a club that they only visit when they’re over for Wimbledon.’
The Pembroke, which opens on 1 September, has a joining fee of £1,000 (£500 for under 30s) and annual subs are £2,750 (£1,500 for under 30s), and I understand F&B will be keenly priced. ‘Our view is a member who can buy a white Burgundy for £49 will come back,’ says Woodhams. ‘Bottles of Billecart Salmon and Bollinger Rosé will be well under £100. It’s a challenging Cuban cigar market at the moment, but fortunately we ringfenced our allocation two years ago. We have an indoor cigar tasting room, which has ventilation that can suck your eyebrows off.’
It all sounds like the sort of fun, relaxed club that Bertie Wooster would have enjoyed. Will it encourage cricket matches in the coffee room and the throwing of bread rolls?
‘Really, the club only has one rule, which is to be unswervingly and unpretentiously polite to the staff. You can get away with murder, as long as you do it in a charming way. But if I were to catch you being rude to a waiter without grounds, I would throw a bread roll at you and then take you outside. We want a return to British hospitality, and that means wit and treating the staff as equals.’
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And who is financing this enormous enterprise? ‘We don’t like to talk about it,’ deadpans Woodhams, adding that he ‘thinks’ the owners of the building are ‘in Oman’. He does know enough, however, to confirm that the Omani entrepreneur Mohammed Zaman, who was listed on Companies House filings associated with the club is very much a ‘previous’ owner.
The important thing, he reassures, is that the mystery current owners are ‘committed to giving the fully UK-based leadership team full freedom and reign to operate the club’. Quite right.
The Pembroke’s location to the west of the Park Lane Rubicon may attract a less flashy clientele – perhaps, who knows, even some people who have to work for a living. As a result, laptops – perhaps the most divisive topic for private members’ clubs to manage – will be allowed.
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‘We’re very pro working, as long as it’s done in the right way,’ notes Woodhams. ‘We’ve bought a big table from a Bavarian castle. I dread to think the sort of fists that have thumped on it through history. It’s so big it’ll cater for 30 laptops. And if you close your laptop at 4pm, we’ll reward you with a mini martini.’
The Pembroke’s sense of fun was also on show when it placed a recent half-page ad in Country Life seeking a ‘butter sommelier’. Was this a publicity stunt? ‘No, we’ve found someone! I am obsessed with butter. We’ve bought a terrifyingly expensive silver and gold trolley that will serve cultured butters, Bungay butter, Normandy butter, Italian white butter, flavoured butter… We may even add a bit of butter to our espresso coffee, just to keep the cholesterol up. We’re only three doors down from the Cleveland Clinic, you know.
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Rinder’s rules
Speaking at Spear’s 500 Live, TV presenter and barrister Rob Rinder offered some sage advice on how those in the public eye can reduce the risk of negative publicity. ‘The first one is not to be an arsehole,’ he told the audience at the Savoy. ‘There’s no great alchemy other than doing that.’
The next step was to know when to take legal action against a libel – and when it was best to leave it alone to avoid ‘the Barbara Streisand effect’.
‘I do enjoy the fact that there is a legal effect named after a camp icon,’ quipped Rinder, though he emphasised its ‘very real’ consequences. ‘She tried to get her house removed from the Hollywood map and in doing so – in taking that litigation and seeking injunctive relief, it encouraged people to go and visit her house a hundred-fold. You have to be very, very careful about amplifying [matters] by engaging in litigation.’
Evergreen advice, if ever there were.
Get the picture
Picasso himself once said that, had Sir Winston Churchill not been so occupied saving Europe from the forces of Fascism, he would have had ‘no trouble making a living as a painter’.
So considerable anticipation greeted news of a planned retrospective of Churchill’s paintings at the Wallace Collection, even before it was a fait accompli. Of course, such ambitious exhibitions require support, and so the museum’s director, Frenchman Xavier Bray, sought the help from wealthy would-be benefactors, including Sir Len Blavatnik, via his family foundation.
According to Bray, Blavatnik munificence would be forthcoming – but on one condition: that the exhibition include a work by Churchill that had once been owned by Angelina Jolie.
The work in question, The Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, is significant. Thought to be the only painting he made during the Second World War, it was given by Churchill to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Years later Brad Pitt acquired it and gave it to Jolie as a present. Following their divorce, Jolie sold the painting at auction in 2021, where it went for £7m (£8.2m with fees), a record for a work by Winnie.
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The current owner, whoever they are, was tracked down and kindly agreed to loan the painting to the Wallace. And, as promised, the Blavatnik family came in to support the show, which opened in May. But why were the Blavatniks so interested in Angelina Jolie’s painting in particular?
Someone close to the family suggests Monsieur Bray may have embellished his story, which was part of an entertaining speech at the private view.
‘The work may have belonged to [Jolie] when the Wallace Collection was first sourcing paintings several years ago, but it wouldn’t have been this element of the provenance that attracted the Blavatniks to the piece,’ says my source. ‘It happens to be one of the more consequential pieces in the show, given that Churchill painted it for Roosevelt.’ Now that was a special relationship.
Island mentality
The Cotswolds are full.
And Hedgehog, not for the first time, blames the Americans. After Ellen DeGeneres’ relocation, JD Vance’s infamous vacation, and Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s plans to build a retreat near Wigginton, it has become almost impossible to book somewhere decent to stay for a weekend away without planning months in advance.
The problem has become so severe that it now affects not just impecunious scribes, but even those at the helm of great international hospitality empires.
Sanjay Maniku’s uncle began the Maldivian tourism industry in 1972 with its first island resort, and now he and his family own 14 resorts in the Indian Ocean destination – including the $5,000-a-night 26-room Nautilus Maldives and the 270-key Kandima.
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But, Maniku tells me, even he faces a challenge to find a place to stay when he visits the Cotswolds. ‘There’s a dearth of good places to go,’ says the 48-year-old entrepreneur. ‘When we come in the summer we struggle to find places. You can’t get in at short notice anywhere.’
So, could a Gloucestershire outpost be on Maniku’s to-do list? It might help him (and the rest of us) with the capacity issue. He ‘would look at something in the UK’, although Italy and Switzerland are ‘maybe higher on the priority list’.
‘I think both Kandima and Nautilus can travel,’ adds the Singapore-based Anglophile, who was raised in Britain and studied at Imperial. ‘Once we have convinced UHNW customers that [the Nautilus] is something to buy into, then getting them to try other locations, I think, will not be that difficult.’
If he does put a stake in UK ground, incumbent hoteliers had better watch out: there are some 190 resort hotels in the Maldives and, as Maniku makes clear, they know their onions: ‘It’s probably the highest standard of hospitality anywhere in the world at the moment and so, even at the entry-level properties, you will probably get a better service than in the UK.’ Nautilus Oxfordshire, anyone? Let’s hope they have enough sandstone for all those stilts.
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Something in the air
For all of the speed, comfort and privacy afforded by private air travel, it is occasionally lacking in opportunities for retail therapy. No more! Step forward upper-crust jeweller David Morris, which is running a pop-up boutique at Farnborough Airport until 12 July.
One might expect those flying private to be the biggest spenders of all, but context is king. The minds behind the brand for Bond girls and British royals have deliberately chosen to sell a more ‘affordable range’ at the boutique, with prices ranging from £850 to £15,000.
It’s all designed to appeal to ‘self buying independent women on the go’, Cecily Morris tells me. The third-generation jeweller adds the standout piece is a necklace worthy of the red carpet: ‘Most recently, Zendaya [pictured] wore it to the premiere of The Drama in Paris.’
Morris is ‘hopeful’ that the duty-free dimension might encourage some to take the plunge while waiting for their Embraer Phenom 300 to be restocked with Dom Pérignon, but is tight
lipped on her own holiday plans. ‘It’s more international, so I’m not sure whether Farnborough would take me there,’ she says. Perhaps we’re gonna need a bigger jet?
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