Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, in the club’s new Barcelona location
From the January issue: It was 1996, shortly after he’d sold his shares in Virgin Entertainment, when Robert Devereux sat down to lunch with an old friend at 192, a famed celebrity haunt in London’s Notting Hill.
“We were expostulating about the state of English country house hotels — how old-fashioned they were — when he said I should meet Nick Jones,” Devereux remembered. “My friend said Nick Jones thought exactly the same way and was about to buy a property in Somerset.”
Devereux — who has four children with his ex-wife, Vanessa, Virgin founder Richard Branson’s sister — eventually became one of the early investors and the chairman of Soho House, the trendy members-only club that Jones founded in 1995 in a townhouse in the London neighborhood with the same name. [More]