Soho House founder: ‘Workaholism is as bad as any other addiction’

To stay or eat at one of his establishments – first it was the French-tinged Cafe Boheme, then Soho House, Babington House and, in 2004, Cecconi's, the relaxed but glamorous Italian – was to feel hooked into the world's most adrenalin-pumped arteries. Soho House, which eventually spawned 48 hotels around the globe and an interiors side hustle, influenced the taste of millions and raised Britain's hotel game immeasurably. No snob, in 2019 he opened the first of three Mollie's Motel and Diners, where rooms cost from £79 a night.

How revealing, then, to observe him deliver a pep talk to 20 or so new staff in an unfinished room of his latest venture, the St Clement hotel on the Thames. Dressed casually in a neat cotton bomber jacket, slim trousers and trainers, his light blue eyes swim back and forth across their sockets in his pale but boyish face. Four years ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, stepped away from the grind of Soho House (no more flying around the world) and decided to embrace the unfamiliar possibility of being bored. He claims to have loved spending more time at his Oxfordshire home with his wife, the presenter Kirsty Young, cooking roasts and reading books.

Given that he's now staking his reputation on yet another very public experiment, it's clearly not possible to keep Jones in restful limbo for ever. Paula Fitzherbert, global head of communications at Maybourne, the group that owns Claridge's and the Connaught, who has known him for a quarter of a century, recently visited him at St Clement, where she found him serving breakfast from silver salvers.

"My staff probably wish I wasn't so hands-on," he tells me, although being hands-on comes with the territory. He's obsessed with detail and delivering five-star service, but also gifted with a talent more quixotic. "He's always had that rare knack of getting the vibe just right at the right time," says Fitzherbert. "It's probably one of the trickiest skills in the whole industry."

St Clement has only recently opened, but everyone's talking about it. When I peek in Café Clement, the ground-floor restaurant, at midday on a Wednesday, it's humming with diners soaking up sunshine on the deck overlooking the river. "I wanted to create a restaurant you'd be happy sitting in when it's empty," says Jones. Mick Jagger, long before it officially opened, booked it for the Stones' summer album launch. Adele, Paul Mescal and Stanley Tucci have already been in…

… Echoes of when David Bowie turned up at a hard-hat party at Soho House New York before it opened in 2003 in the Meatpacking District, in those days a gritty, best-avoided grid. Or when Leonardo DiCaprio arrived at a Bafta party Jones was co-hosting at Cecconi's with his own sandwiches, wrapped in silver foil. "Nothing fazed Nick," remembers Fiona Golfar, who first met him when she worked at Vogue. "He's very nimble on his feet. Hotel not ready? Throw a party on a building site. Guests arrive with an extra plus eight? Set another table. That playfulness is very galvanising."

Jones feigns amnesia on the sandwiches and insists several times during our interview that celebrities are not the point; pragmatism is. "I was trying to rustle up interest," he says of the Bowie coup. "New Yorkers really didn't get the idea of a members'-only place initially. It was wildly over budget and schedule. I genuinely thought we were going bust." Soho House New York eventually became such a hot ticket that it served as a plot device in Sex and the City.

St Clement is worlds away from the Savoy nearby, where Jones's father took him as a treat when he was a boy, and from the Mayfair-meets-Dubai glitz of some of the capital's recent offerings. Furnished with vintage and bespoke interiors, its large, soothing figurative painting in the lobby is by his eldest daughter, Freya, 25, from his second marriage, to Kirsty Young. Ollie, his 31-year-old son from his first marriage, and a graduate of the River Cafe, oversees Café Clement. (Natasha, his daughter from his first marriage, is a corporate strategist.) It's cool, cosy – and in this unexpected spot of London, thanks to Mark Wadhwa, the property developer who first met Jones when he asked him to install a Soho House in a building he had acquired in Berlin in 2010.

They have worked together ever since, unable to resist neighbourhoods that might, if you're an optimist, be described as sleeping beauties. This stretch of WC2 is a case in point – drab and bypassed until 2012, when Wadhwa acquired 180 The Strand, a disused office block, and willed it into a fashionable hub with a spa, gym, restaurants, work and events spaces, which finally cohered when a Soho House, 180 House, opened there in 2022. "One of the things Nick always does with his hotels is make guests immediately feel part of the city," says Wadhwa.

For all the thoughtful add-ons, St Clement's crowning glory is its glorious river views, taking in everything that still makes London thrilling – from the City, the National Theatre and the London Eye to the Houses of Parliament and St Paul's, and as far as Crystal Palace to the south.

Even more ambitiously, next door, also overseen by Jones and Wadhwa, there's a block of 98 fully serviced apartments for sale, priced up to £25m for the penthouse. You can buy them empty, or kitted out, à la St Clement, down to the last thread count.

Some would say this is a crazy time to open another five-star hotel in London, even for someone with as stellar a track record as Jones. St Clement, named for the nearby St Clement Danes church, designed 344 years ago by another architect of London life, Christopher Wren, is the seventh significant high-end hotel to launch in the city in the past two years alone. Meanwhile, along with house prices, tourism is down, buffeted by the scrapping, in 2021, of tax-free shopping in the UK for international visitors, and erroneous but peskily persistent claims on social media that London is the most crime-ridden spot on the planet. More than 100 of the world's top travel agents have told Jones that since the UK abolished duty free, their clients are bypassing London in favour of Paris.

Back to the pep talk, during which Jones drills down on all the things that might go wrong during St Clement's early days. "There'll be blocked drains, air conditioning that doesn't work, a fire alarm going off by mistake, electricity going down…"

So much for glamour.

"Don't get hung up about the cock-ups," continues Jones jovially, to the latest batch of the 300-strong team so far working at St Clement, an encouragingly young cohort. "We'll get through them. Remember, most of the guests will be kind. We're going to have fun."

Fun was categorically not on the agenda in June 2022, when, a year after Soho House floated on the New York Stock Exchange, routine blood tests showed that Jones, then 58, had raised PSA levels. An MRI revealed a large tumour in his prostate. Even the optimist was shaken. "Until I knew it hadn't spread, yes, I felt frightened. I realised everything turned on that one phone call. If it had gone the other way, I would have been managing five or six years more of life at best." He had a prostatectomy and stepped back from Soho House. His wife knew a thing or two about loosening the reins on a stellar career. In 2018, diagnosed with fibromyalgia and, later, rheumatoid arthritis, Young retired from Desert Island Discs, to the dismay of millions of devoted listeners.

After he recovered, Jones campaigned for routine prostate cancer testing by sharing his personal story across the media, which must have felt uncomfortable at times. It's not easy advocating for institutional change, as he has discovered. The Government has decided against rolling out a national prostate-screening programme, which infuriates him. "The National Screening Committee has let a lot of people down. These so-called experts are looking at the wrong data. A lot of them are institutionally wired not to like screening."

He's funnelling some of his frustration into organising a fundraiser for Taking Action on Addiction for the Forward Trust, with his old friend, film producer Lisa Bryer, with a dinner in November at St Clement. "He's incredibly generous, to his friends and to charities," says Bryer. "Addiction charities have a hard time getting people interested. Nick knows that and he's always happy to step up."

Jones's own addictions were never drugs or alcohol, but work. "Workaholism," he says, "can be viewed as something people look up to. 'Ooh, you're a workaholic,' but it's as bad as being any sort of addict."

Golfar calls him a "new project-aholic", but Jones believes he has something different to offer. "I always start by asking, 'If hotels didn't exist, what would be on your wish list?'"

On his: no exhausting queues at reception on arrival. Guests can check in on WhatsApp or by messaging (he trialled this at Mollie's Motels). Also a swish gym – St Clement's Health Club is due to open in November (cream reformer Pilates beds, sauna and steam rooms with river views, as there should be for a minimum of £6,000 a year). For those who prefer to work out in private, ottomans at the end of the beds are equipped with exercise mats and weights.

He and Wadhwa must have nerves of steel. "London's undoubtedly going through a challenging time," Jones says, leading me up to a two-bedroomed loft-style suite with wraparound balconies and cream sofas the size of a glider, and sipping, for the first time, from a flask of water flavoured with electrolytes that he's been carrying around. "But it's still the greatest city in the world. It always bounces back. You've got the best judicial system in the world in this country, great schooling, incredible creativity. Yet all we do is talk it down. You could say this is exactly the time to visit and invest here. Properties are available and they're not as expensive as they were."

He's all too aware of the need to talk the country up. "If the Government could do three things that would improve the situation immediately, it would be to reinstate tax-free shopping, which has cost billions in lost revenue, cut National Insurance, which has made it so expensive to employ people, and bring hospitality taxes in line with the rest of Europe. Currently UK businesses are paying far more than in other countries."

When I ask him to assess the performance of Andy Burnham so far, he says, dryly: "Well you have to be optimistic, don't you?" Then again, he met and liked Rishi Sunak, and it was Sunak's party that later scrapped duty-free shopping.

My first-ever glimpse of Jones was when I was working on a story about the Cannes Film Festival in the 2000s and staying in a villa next to his and Young's. My assignment was splattered by monstrous Hollywood publicists. Theirs seemed to be one long party. In the evenings, I'd catch sight of them clinking champagne glasses and giggling in their Jacuzzi.

"I'll have you know, it was very stressful,'' says Jones. "During May, Soho House London was empty. Someone explained to me that the members were at the festival, so off we went. I was terrified no one would come to the pop-up."

Jones and Young didn't meet until 1998, after his first marriage ended. Young was staying at Babington House in Somerset. "He fell head over heels the minute he met her," says Bryer.

Despite not getting together until the end of the decade, somehow they became an intriguing emblem of all that was glamorous and exhilarating about Cool Britannia. Young, then Channel 5's principal news presenter, was all lightly worn knowledge and authority; Jones, the ultimate social mixologist. Both good listeners, they married in 1999, had two daughters, Freya, the artist, and Iona, who's studying at the Courtauld Institute, around the corner from St Clement.

Affable and relaxed, Jones takes on a guarded, semi-affronted air when asked about his personal life – perhaps because of early tabloid experiences in the Nineties, when he was cast as a millionaire playboy. ("Wide of the mark," according to Bryer. "He's not even particularly interested in money.") Quizzed on the secret of successfully blending two families, he says: "I am very lucky to have Kirsty. She's a brilliant mum for all four of them, and, really, they all view themselves as just one big family. They love being together."

Born into Home Counties comfort – his father had his own small insurance brokerage – and despite being shy, Jones says he was "one of those weird people who always wanted to work in hospitality". Academic work was a struggle, because of his dyslexia. "I can't really do a whole woe-is-me on that, because unusually for the time, my mother picked up on it early, had me tested and I ended up at a school that was very sympathetic." At 13 he found a weekend job behind the bar of a local sports club. He skipped university, embarking on a three-year Trusthouse Forte apprenticeship scheme in the early Eighties. "Eighty-hour weeks, lots of dishwashing and learning self-discipline," he says. Unlike the pep talk he's just given, fun wasn't mentioned, "although in its way, because of the camaraderie, it was fun".

Almost half a century later, he's still passionate about hospitality as a career. "We've got a big problem with the young on benefits, yet we still can't fill vacancies in hospitality." He sits in on the last five minutes of every single interview with new candidates. "Even if you view hospitality as a stepping stone to something else, it teaches you amazing lessons – how to work with a team, talk to people from all different walks of life, deal with customers… For shy people, it's probably one of the best lines of work you can be in."

Has he talked to the Government about this? No, I think there are lots of people beating this drum, and they've heard quite enough from me about prostate cancer.

Five hundred years ago, this bend in the Thames where St Clement now nestles serenely was called the Golden Mile for its palaces. It's less than three miles from where 19-year-old Zac Brettler, the central character of London Falling, a global bestseller set among the oligarchs who inhabited the capital until recently, fell to his death in 2019. Jones, in his new reading phase, loved the book, but thinks most of the dirty money that washed through London has gone. "That's a good thing, obviously. But we shouldn't discourage all rich people from coming here."

The big question is: can lightning strike twice, especially as the mood in Britain is so much more downbeat than when Jones first began chalking up hits? If anyone can do it, surely he can.

Lisa Armstrong