Nick Jones built Soho House. Now he wants to fix luxury hotels

For a man who built one of the most copied brands in the world, Nick Jones’s latest idea begins with something pleasingly ordinary in Britain: irritation.

In particular, the irritating and expensive absurdities of hotels. The queue at check-in. The overpriced KitKat. The suitcase strewn in the corner of the room because nobody has thought of where it should go. The feeling, in a supposedly five-star space, that every minor comfort should be turned into a revenue stream.

“There are a lot of annoying things in hotels that are unnecessary,” Jones tells me, sitting in Bobbi’s Bar at St Clement, his new hotel on the Thames. Then he corrects himself. “Not just other hotels – hotels I’ve done, too. Let’s not exclude them.”

St Clement is Jones’s first major project since stepping back from Soho House in 2022. The private members’ club he founded above Cafe Boheme in 1995 grew into a global shorthand for a certain kind of creative-class cool: velvet sofas, boho-chic rugs, lamp lighting, laptop lunches, famous people pretending not to notice one another, and the suggestion that to be allowed in was to be understood. And to be cool.

It changed hospitality as much as it changed members’ clubs. Then, inevitably, it became big enough to be accused of changing into something else.

In recent years, Soho House has faced criticism over overcrowding, declining service and whether a club can still feel exclusive when there are dozens of them around the world. Some suggest it has become “a victim of its own success”; others ask whether it has lost its lustre altogether.

Jones will not be drawn into any of this kind of sniping. Ask him what St Clement means after Soho House and the instinct is to protect the old flame. “I still love Soho House, and I love the people who run it”, he says, adding that when it comes to his new project, the first thing he has done since stepping back fom The Houses, the headline is something “new in London”.

Later, off tape, he puts it even more plainly: “I was the first ever member and I’ll always be a member. I can go whenever I want.” That is loyalty, certainly. It is also a distance. Jones may not wish to say Soho House lost its magic as it expanded, but St Clement suggests he has spent a great deal of time thinking about what gets lost when hospitality stops feeling special as well as generous.

His answer is not another members’ club. It is not even, he insists, a grand hotel in the old sense. It is a 90-room (including 15 river-view suites) hotel at 180 The Thames. It’s designed by Eagle + Hodges, a studio that specialises in the kind of rooms that look relaxed only because a terrifying amount of money has gone into making them so. The beautiful all-day restaurant, Cafe Clement, is already open. Bobbi’s Bar is open until 3am. Florence Knight’s rooftop restaurant Lunette arrives in September. There is a health club with a 25-metre pool, gym and spa. There is an entire ecosystem of restaurant, bar, grocer, bakery, cafe, wine bar, private events space and expensive home decor shop.

So yes, it has Soho House DNA everywhere. Of course it does. But the pitch is different. Soho House was about belonging. St Clement is about not being annoyed.

Or, as Jones puts it: “Good old-fashioned hospitality done in a slightly more relaxed way.”

There is no long, fussy check-in desk, no sense of being processed on arrival. The minibar is included. Laundry is free. The bathroom is stocked not with afterthoughts, but with things one might actually need, all beautifully packaged: proper dental care, sunscreen, shaving cream, beauty bits, toiletries.

This, he says, is the point. “It’s that sense of generosity I think people really notice. We’re not trying to nickel and dime you wherever you go.” Rooms start at £600 a night, which in Jones’s world is “reasonable” for London.

But this is a departure from the usual luxury hotel trick of being oddly brilliant at making you feel both pampered and quietly fleeced. They will call you sir, lay out six pillows and then charge you for a bottle of water with all the charm of a motorway service station. Jones thinks the modern guest is less impressed by that sort of thing.

“I think good service and nice things don’t have to be surrounded by marble and chandeliers and bowler hats and yes sir, no sir.” So St Clement has all the old hotel pleasures, but without the old hotel costume drama and fuss. Like “if Claridge’s and Chiltern Firehouse had a baby”.

This matters because the man is not new to hotels, despite being flattened in public memory into “Soho House founder”. He started out as an apprentice at Trusthouse Forte. Before Soho House, before the Farmhouse and The Ned and all the rest, there was proper hotel training, then restaurants, then that room above Cafe Boheme. St Clement is not so much a pivot as a return.

“It feels full circle being in the lobby saying hello to guests again,” he says. “My intention with Soho House was always to give a room full of people a good time, and that’s my intention here, too. That hasn’t changed. It’s just in one place, rather than lots of places.”

Jones stepped away from Soho House in 2022 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer – he’s made a full recovery – an experience he says changed his perspective on life and business. “Whenever you go through anything like that, you look at everything differently,” he says. “I’ve been lucky enough to be doing restaurants and hotels all my life. It’s my hobby and passion and I’d rather do this than play golf.”

His wife, Scottish television presenter Kirsty Young, has been supportive, he says, not least because restaurants and hotels are something they share. “It’s a passion we both have, as a couple, but I’m not here all the time. We have a brilliant team for that.”

Still, one suspects “not here all the time” means something different to Jones than it might to the rest of us. He doesn’t want his presence to become the sort of overbearing boss-in-the-building event that makes everyone stand a little straighter. And yet, the pull is obvious. “I want to be able to come in and look at all the details and talk to all the team and be at the odd hangout, because I like saying hello to people.”

Which seems both fitting, and odd, since Jones has spoken before about being shy. Does that help in hospitality, or make it an odd career choice? “I’ve worked hard against not being shy, because it can appear to be aloof and rude,” he says. “I think you can push your way out of it, but I suppose it’s helped me to be very observant.”

He tells his four children (aged from 18 to their early thirties) much the same. “Look, just say hello to people, look them in the eye, smile and ask them how they are. That’s a good start.” At St Clement, this is not entirely theoretical parenting advice. His son Oliver, from his first marriage, works in the restaurant and, Jones says wryly, rather likes the late shifts. His daughter Freya, whom he shares with Young, is an artist.

When I point out a painting in the lobby that I like, he chuckles. “You’ve got a good eye,” he says. “That’s my daughter’s. I paid a small fortune for it.”

If the hotel is the grand statement, Cafe Clement is the more revealing one. It opened first, ahead of the hotel which opens fully in September, and anyone can book in for lunch and dinner. Jones is adamant it should not suffer the grim fate of many hotel restaurants: technically impressive, perfectly upholstered, spiritually dead.

“We want it to be a cafe restaurant for London, and thankfully it has become that already,” he says. Audaciously, perhaps. It’s been open three weeks. “Hotel restaurants have improved a lot, but I don’t view us as one. I just view us as another restaurant for Londoners.”

The name, inevitably, recalls Cafe Boheme, though Jones says that was not deliberate at first. “When I did Cafe Boheme 35 years ago, there weren’t places like that,” he says. “There were either pubs or restaurants. There was nowhere you could go and read a newspaper.”

Cafe Boheme still opens at 8am and closes at 3am, and is still filled with people at the bar with books and drinks and optimism, “which I always think is a sign of a great place”, he says.

That idea feels central to Cafe Clement. “I want people to come here once or twice a week, not just on their birthday. To sit at the bar with a salad and a water. That’s what a good cafe is. It’s up to the customer to decide how they want to use it.”

It is also, in its way, a challenge to the current mood of London . Restaurants are under pressure, costs are up, customers are cautious, nights are earlier, Mondays are darker. Jones has watched all of this happen, and thinks hospitality has sometimes been too quick to surrender the habits that create regulars.

“If it’s a bit quieter at night, they close earlier. It’s quieter on a Monday, they close on a Monday. That is not necessarily the smartest move.” Bobbi’s Bar will stay open until 3am, and there are rumours of a 5am licence, though Jones won’t confirm them. “It might be that on some mornings there are only 10 people, but you still want to know that it’s open.”

There speaks the old Soho house instinct: not exclusivity exactly, but the glamour of spontaneity. The feeling that anything could happen and this place is where it might, even on a Monday. It’s the opposite of death by planning and booking.

This is not revolutionary. The best hospitality often relies in knowing somewhere is there whenever you want it to be. A bill that does not insult your intelligence. A restaurant where the room has a pulse and the food just happens to be good, too. A bar that is still open when everyone else insists they’ve already gone to bed.

“In a time when people are more down than they’re up, hopefully a place like this makes people feel glad to be in London again.” When St Clement fully opens its doors, the vibe shift will be complete.

Hannah Twiggs