ONLY CONNECT
Riding the new wave of private members’ clubs
When Soho House opened in the mid-Nineties, its effect on society was transformative. At the time, private members’ clubs were stuffily traditional bastions of male privilege. Soho House, by contrast, explicitly requested you not to wear a suit and tie; being young and female was considered an asset, rather than a barrier to membership; and it served drinks into the small hours at a time when pubs still closed at 11pm. I was invited to join the committee in these early, heady days, and I still remember the glee with which we met to reject applicants we considered too rich, too Establishment or too old. Perhaps it’s no wonder that Soho House’s formula has been exported all over the world: there are now 18 outposts, with more in the pipeline. Yet it seems our appetite has not been sated. In London alone, last year saw the opening of the Devonshire Club in an 18thcentury warehouse near Liverpool Street; earlier this year came the Ned, launched in the disused Midland Bank building by the Soho House group to cater for precisely the sort of moneyed City coterie it originally excluded, with an all-hours cocktail lounge situated in what was once a security vault, seven restaurants in the banking hall and a fully equipped gym. Over in Shoreditch, the Curtain appeals to a music-minded clientele with soundproofed rooms, a full programme of live events and a branch of Harlem’s Red Rooster restaurant that does gospel brunches at the weekend; while Ten Trinity Square in Tower Hill is luring in well-heeled members with a beguiling combination of fine wine and philanthropy. Naturally, Mayfair’s long-established clubs are also smartening up their act in response. The venerable Mark’s Club has been refurbished under the eagle eye of Darius Namdar, previously the maître d’ at Chiltern Firehouse, and is attracting a younger crowd with a carefully curated events programme. A newly relocated Annabel’s, owned by Richard Caring, is being expensively reimagined for a new generation of pleasure-seekers with a ‘cocktail laboratory’ and hydraulic dancefloor; while the Arts Club in Dover Street is not only overhauling its own nightclub and putting a retractable glass roof over the garden, but has bought the former Dover Street Market site opposite to transform into a private extension featuring a health club in partnership with Austria’s famed medical spa, the Lanserhof.
Partly, of course, the explosion in the club scene services an increasingly mobile workforce that prefers to do business from a comfortable sofa, flat white to hand, than an office desk. ‘I also wonder if it’s a reaction to our preoccupation with the digital world,’ says Alice Chadwyck-Healey, the Arts Club’s executive director. ‘While we all communicate by email, video conference, Instagram, people still want human contact, and it’s very natural to be drawn to an environment where you find kindred spirits.’