the property developer the cigar lover

The property developer
A
acquisitions men
Your collectables reveal more about you than your
buying power – Nick Foulkes exposes the man behind
the mantiques. Illustrations by Chris Burke
couple of years ago, you would have had no trouble telling – to the
penny – how much the property developer had spent on his gemset
(yes) GMT Master and red (inevitably) Ferrari 458 Italia. As far as
he was concerned, things had to be new, new, new – next year’s
model, if possible, like the houses with marble floors, underground
pools, cinema rooms and iPad-controlled security and climate systems that he
installs behind blameless Belgravia stucco. In fact, he was on his way to visit
just such a site when his Ferrari succumbed to the wheel-arch-adhesive fires
that plagued early examples of the 458 and spontaneously combusted outside
the Gauntlett Gallery. Luckily for him, Richard Gauntlett was in at the time
and rushed out with an old Le Mans car-fire extinguisher. While he was waiting
for the smouldering remains of his once-proud supercar to be towed away, his
eye was caught by the automobilia and esoterica that are Gauntlett’s stock in
trade. It was a Damascene moment. Everywhere he looked, he saw something
that he wanted to have – the vintage James Bond and Steve McQueen film
posters, the large tripod-mounted military binoculars, the full-sized ex-casino
roulette wheel – he took the lot. Since then, he has been getting his eye in. He
does not drive the Ferrari any more, preferring the vintage Bentley that
“Gaunty” persuaded him to buy, and the gemset GMT has been swapped for a
steel Paul Newman Daytona. Still, there are times when the old love of bling
resurfaces, as it did with the double-life-sized machine gun, which, as he never
tires of telling anyone who will listen, enabled training officers to demonstrate
the functions of the weapon to large groups. The only difference is that the
property developer has had it gold-plated.
The Cigar lover
H
e had a career in some arcane branch of finance
that involved repackaging toxic debt and flogging it
to large pension funds. While pondering his next
career move, he has been pursuing his lifelong love of
cigars. His flat is a shrine to the handmade Havana
and the holiest of all his relics is a Dunhill Aquarium with a pair
of matching lighters that were supplied new by Dunhill to a
British industrialist in the 1950s – as far as he is concerned, it is
a bit like having the Ark of the Covenant and a pair of Holy
Grails. Truth be told, he was going to quit his bank job anyway,
and he has used his redundancy to set himself up as a cigar
consultant. Ever the entrepreneur, he noticed that, far from
putting an end to cigar smoking, increasingly heavy legislation
created a business opportunity and he has positioned himself
as the man to navigate the regulations. He can offer hotels,
restaurants and clubs advice on the criteria for becoming a
specialist tobacconist and whether to open a sampling room or a
COSA (Comfortable Outdoor Smoking Area). In addition, he
can help with anything from staff training to the installation of
extraction systems. But his real joy is to source hard-to-find
Havanas and it is his knowledge of cigars themselves that is
really impressive. His command of the statistical information is
prodigious: give him the name of a cigar, even pre-Revolution,
and he can give you the length, ring gauge and factory size.
He can recite all the limited-edition and regional specials that
have ever been made in order of date of production or, if you
prefer, in ascending or descending ring gauge. And he makes
it his business to be bang up-to-the-minute on the latest
developments. For instance, he was one of the first people in the
UK to learn that certain Cuban plantations were experimenting
with black shade‑grown wrappers. His tips for investing in
cigars (right now, he is into Cohiba 1966 and Sancho Panza
Sanchos) are worth following – indeed, those pension funds
would have done rather better if they had invested in Havana
cigars rather than high-risk debt.
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The tax exile
T
he tax exile has succeeded in making a large amount of
money without getting his head above the radar. Of course,
it has meant severing ties with English life, selling his house
in Chelsea a couple of years ago and returning to Britain
only during the shooting season, when he takes Castle Hill
for a week of some of the best sport and most lavish entertainment.
The rest of the year sees him languishing in one or other of the
ghettos quarantining those who have a serious allergic reaction to
paying tax. First, he settled in Monte Carlo, but found that, while
good for his bank balance, it was, well, a trifle dull, so, while keeping
his flat in Monaco (and a man to turn on the lights, use the water and
generally make it seem lived in), he has decided to base himself in
St Moritz or Gstaad, where he is often seen in the lobby of the Palace
hotel, buying champagne in the GreenGo or the Dracula, and trying
to become a member of the Corviglia or Eagle Club. The truth is that
time still weighs heavily on his hands and, having bought and
enlarged his chalet, installing such absolutely vital amenities as a
centrally heated garage for his collection of vintage vehicles
(necessary, since they are far too dangerous to use on roads on which
there is even the hint of a suggestion of snow), he has been casting
about for ways in which to fill its walls and his time and has become
an avid collector of old skiing posters. He remembered that Mark
Birley had been very keen on them and so far he has spent almost
£500,000 on vintage advertising material proselytising the delights of
Alpine life in the 1920s and 1930s. He finds the images so inspiring
that he might even take up skiing.
The fixer
nick foulkes is swellboy, the wag they
cannot gag. read his column only at
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Fashion designer
W
hen the fashion designer saw it in the
Pullman Gallery, he just had to have it. “It”
is a mid-1970s champagne cooler by Louis
Vuitton with a porthole fastening on the
top. Harold Robbins could have written an
entire novel about it. It is entirely sui generis and rather
magnificent – should the exuberant taste of a Greek
shipowner from the disco decade be your thing. If you are
at all au fait with the fashion designer’s work (his
menswear collections always look like a cross between
Jimmy Goldsmith circa Lord Lucan and Richard Roundtree
circa Shaft’s Big Score) and the essays in leather, smoked
glass, black lacquer and lambent brass that are his flagship
stores, you will know that this is an object that speaks to
him with an almost poetic fluency, wooing him with its
tales of the eastern Mediterranean in the days when the
popular image of a tycoon was Aristotle Onassis rather
than Roman Abramovich, and when the world of the “have
yachts” was still a small and exclusive place. Doomed to
have been born a little too late and a lot too poor to have
been part of that world, the fashion designer has
concocted his own fantasy of a time of exuberant joie de
vivre populated by a personal pantheon of perfection in
which the women were glamorous and stylish (think
Ira von Fürstenberg and Gloria Guinness) and the men
were rich and stylish (think Gianni Agnelli and Stavros
Niarchos). Over the years, he has made his backers a lot
of money peddling this reconstituted idea of a time that
probably never was. He hasn’t done too badly, either. But
not quite well enough to afford the yacht to go with his
nautical champagne cooler.
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W
ith his suits made by Huntsman, Caraceni and Rubinacci, and shirts from Charvet
fastened at the wrist by links from Van Cleef & Arpels, beneath which can occasionally
be glimpsed a Patek 2499, he considers himself a man of taste and nowhere is his sense
of style more conspicuous than his desk – a vast blond-oak art-deco boardroom table
that he bought at the Drouot in Paris. Hot-desking is very passé and, even when it
wasn’t, he did not much care for it. Instead, the fixer is an aficionado of the power desk. He “advises”
the CEOs of large mining, defence and energy companies, as well as the rulers of a few small but rich
countries run more along the lines of family businesses than democratic nation states, although
exactly what he advises them about is not entirely clear. But, as what he does for a living is,
intentionally, ill-defined, he finds it helpful to convey a sense of permanence and stability and has
discovered that this is best done with a well-arranged desktop. Indeed, the tennis-court-like
dimensions of his desk lend themselves not so much to tidying as to furnishing. Not for him a plastic
beaker of biros, a hearing-aid greige telephone and a computer screen plastered with so many Post-its,
it resembles the tissue-patchworked face of a man who shaved in the dark. His desk is an essay in
understated masculinity and sends a powerful message in the semaphore of cultivated and moneyed
taste. The small bronze elephant atop a plinth, its trunk extended, is indeed by Rembrandt Bugatti
and did cost him the better part of £100,000. The large Cartier easel clock was a more modest four(or was it five-?) figure sum and is in perfect working order, as is the heavy Dupont table lighter from
the 1960s. The gigantic, eminently serviceable silver-ingot paperweight carries the textured surface
characteristic of legendary silversmith Gerald Benney. In fact, about the only thing that does not
either impart beauty or functionality is the large computer screen – it has never been plugged in
but just sits there giving the impression that this is a place where work is done. Although quite
what sort of work remains really rather nebulous. ✦
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