‘It’s not easy being me’
The hotelier on Presbyterian guilt, attention to detail and working in disaster zones
Hotelier Gordon Campbell Gray talks to Clive Aslet
GOrdon CAMPBELL Gray doesn’t play golf and isn’t too keen on whisky, so opening a hotel next to a superb links course on the Isle of Islay, with its nine distilleries, may sound like the wrong project for this hyper-energetic hotelier, famous for international chic. yet the result is The Machrie: light on tartan, high on the relaxed, contemporary design aesthetic that is his hallmark.
dressed impeccably in white trousers and with flowing grey locks, Mr Campbell Gray looks like the sort of aristocratic Scotsman whom pompeo batoni would have painted on an 18thcentury Grand Tour, but his attention to detail borders on the obsessive. He can’t escape it: ‘If I ever wrote an autobiography, it would be called It’s So Tiring Being Me.’
This isn’t the only side to Mr Campbell Gray’s personality. The creator of One Aldwych in London, the Le Gray in beirut and Carlisle bay in Antigua, among other hotels, despises extravagance and waste. This is partly a legacy of his renfrewshire childhood: ‘My father was quite tough on us; the mood was Victorian. My brothers and I bounced into life with the best possible start, but there was always a sense of frugality. It was very Scottish.’
His upbringing left him with a sense of presbyterian guilt. ‘If I was sitting in my office reading the newspaper and a member of staff came in, I’d feel absolutely caught.’
The puritanism of his early years was reinforced by exposure to scenes of the direst human want. A lifetime’s association with Save the Children (he’s a vice president), which celebrates its centenary this year, began with the bangladesh famine of 1974.
At that point, he’d risen to be purchasing manager at the Intera Continental Hotel, London. One evening, he had dinner with the flamboyant aunt whose love of Claridge’s introduced him to the glamour of hotels. ‘I glided back and switched on the news. I saw the food queues. I rang Save the Children the following day. They said they could use somebody to arrange transportation of medicines—would you like to think about it? I said: “no, or I might change my mind”.’
After two years living in primitive conditions at the mouth of the Ganges, he fell ill and was flown to bangkok. ‘They put me in a Christian hospital. That was when I lost my faith. every morning, breakfast would come on a tray with a little piece from the bible: “The Lord spreads his love through the whole land.” not in bangladesh, He didn’t.’
Once recovered, he ran the Save the Children operation in Morocco: an orphanage and farm near Fez and a school and an atelier making artificial limbs in Casablanca.
When a friend encouraged him to apply for the post of foodand-beverage manager at a hotel in belgium, he got the job. ‘I told my mother I was coming home. She said: “you’ve had a call from Save the Children.” There had been an earthquake in nicaragua and they needed somebody to organise the relief operation.’
There was no contest between the Sheraton in brussels and disaster relief. To his family’s disappointment, he flew to nicaragua. It was there, watching film of The prince of Wales’s wedding to Lady diana Spencer at the british embassy in Managua that he met a girl in a polka-dot dress; they got married three weeks before the revolution, in an atmosphere of kidnap and shootings. (They have since divorced.)
The 1980s dawned and it was time to return to britain. In those days, a bank manager had the authority to trust his judgement in backing a young man who wanted to buy a hotel—that trust meant Mr Campbell Gray could acquire The Feathers in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The time was right: a fleet of Austin princess limousines from the Savoy Group would ferry Americans for a day in the country.
The hotelier lived happily in the Cotswolds, keeping a black horse called beluga.
When, after seven years, an offer was made for The Feathers, Mr Campbell Gray sold up and spent a year in the Hamptons on Long Island in the USA. ‘I read Middlemarch and did all the things I hadn’t time to do before. I lived on the beach. If you’ve been brought up on the west coast of Scotland, a year on the beach in the Hamptons is as near to paradise as you’re likely to get.’
Initially attracted to the shinglestyle houses from the Hamptons’ early years, he came to admire the scattering of modern houses that had been built there. They set the design aesthetic of One Aldwych. This was the ‘big leap’, he says. ‘I wanted it to be a modern classic. The hardest thing was finding the building. Then, I passed what had been a bank, empty for two years, and thought “That’s it”. From the lime segment in the ice cube that went in the vodka, everything was thought through. I shall never put more love into anything than that hotel.’
The sound engineers initially said it was impossible to play Mozart under the water of the swimming pool. ‘Finally, I said to them: “I’ve just been staying with friends in California and they had music playing under their pool.” Within two weeks, it was done. The truth was, I hadn’t been to California at all. I called their bluff.’
Mr Campbell Gray was turned down by 65 financial institutions. When the physical work was about to start, he spent a month travelling around the world’s best hotels to check that no trick had been missed.
‘I was sitting in Singapore Airlines’ first-class lounge with a glass of Champagne and rang mother. I burst into tears. Three months before, I’d thought I was going to lose everything because I hadn’t closed the deal.’
The only idea he adopted from the trip was not to have electrically operated drapery: ‘We’re all capable of drawing curtains.’
He’s now 71 and The Machrie is his first venture in Scotland, where he owns a 19th-century house on an Argyll loch. ‘It took a long time to want to come back, but it’s my natural habitat.’ Clive Aslet
‘I shall never put more love into anything than One Aldwych