Deploying £30 million, designer Rifat Ozbek, and a stuffed giraffe, Robin Birley has updated the classic London club for a new generation—just as his late father, Mark Birley, did with celebrated Mayfair haunts Annabel’s, Harry’s Bar, and Mark’s Club. As Loulou’s is inaugurated by a party for Birley’s mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, A. A. Gill learns that the latest playpen for England’s ruling class is also a shrine to quality, wit, and beauty.
PARTY ANIMALS Helena Asquith, Gabriela Asquith, and Lady Natasha Howard. Right, the stuffed giraffe greets guests as they enter the Madagascan Bar at Loulou’s.
The thing you need to remember, the thing about a club, is not who they let in. It’s who they keep out. That may sound like semantics to you—half full or half empty—but then, you’re probably not an Englishman. They do mind. They don’t want to be sipping their Pimm’s in the half-empty room. An American asked me, “What is it with the English and clubs? The need to belong? To pay to belong? To mix only with the people they’ve always mixed with? And the children of the people their fathers mixed with?”
Well, what can I say. We like gangs. English life is a series of unlabeled doors. Someone once pointed out that if lunatic asylums required a waiting list and a tie there would be a queue of Englishmen ready to put their names down. If you don’t know what’s behind the doors, then you don’t belong in the rooms. Some of the clubs are straightforward. You put yourself up or, rather, a friend who is already a member puts you up and gets another friend who is also a member to second you. Then they put your name in a book and the book is left for people to object or support you. And then your name goes to a committee, and it may let you pay your money so you can be very, very grateful. Of course, if you are blackballed—that is, rejected—it used to be that your friend the proposer and his friend the seconder would have to resign, and all your lives would be ruined.
Clubs are serious things. For men of a certain age and class, memberships in their clubs are the cornerstones of their lives, of their existence. And they’re not always the ones you pay to join; there are any number of clubs that have no book or list or rules or committee. The secret clubs that belong to schools and regiments, to medicine and the Inns of Court. There are restaurants that barely have a table for hungry cold-callers, and there are the tailors that won’t make your suit for a year. They call the House of Commons the second-best club in London, the best one being the House of Lords. You won’t get to be a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club in a single lifetime, and a test match can seem to take up at least two natural spans.
All this, your usual table, the smile-and-nod staff, is what they call the “establishment.” A sort of club of clubs. So the opening of a new club is a red-letter moment. It is a brave or a foolish or a foolishly brave thing to undertake. Not a queue-outside, snort-and-sweat, grinding, flashing, bop-till-you-pull club, but a real, old-fashioned, handmade club. Fifty-four-year-old Robin Birley is clubbable aristocracy. His father, the late Mark Birley, was a man who gently remade clubs for the 20th century, giving swinging, sober London Mark’s and Harry’s Bar and Annabel’s, which was named for Robin’s mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith. Robin’s new club is called Loulou’s, after his aunt Loulou de la Falaise, the fashion designer, who died last year. The club has restaurants and bars. It serves breakfast and lunch as well as dinner and supper and tea, of course. There are rooms for dancing and for sitting. There are corners for cogitating or snoozing or minding your own business. It’s all set in the corner of Mayfair known as Shepherd Market. This being London, there are no shepherds and there is no market. It is a little knot of streets opposite the Saudi Arabian Embassy that have a couple of discreet restaurants, a cinema, some old-fashioned pubs, and a lot of doors with a lot of bells all primed to ring girls with single names. Shepherd Market is the traditional, polite red-light area for men in suits. This is where ladies of the evening ply a nostalgic trade to civil servants and Cabinet ministers who come for a half-hour’s spanking and “ ’ow’s yer father?” with a biscuit after. This is where knights of the shires drop off their ashen sons to have their virginities disposed of by matronly women. It is heritage vice. The new club is a large, freestanding building that used to be called Tiddy Dols and was, by taxi drivers’ accounts, an aviary of entrepreneurial gentlemen’s relief.
Birley is a languorous man who looks like he’s not quite sure where he ends and the world begins. He travels with a pair of blue whippets whose etiolated forms exaggerate his own long parabola. He folds himself at the head of the table and adjusts his snowy cuff. He talks about his vision of comfortable clubbiness. If life were neat and crisp and even and laid out like the cutlery on the linen, then he would now be running his father’s clubs, a calling he felt he was born to fulfill. But before his father died he whisked away the cloth and silver and sold the empire for a great deal of money. And with it the Birley family name. It was a blow. Robin is quietly candid about his disappointment. “I loved the clubs and all the people who worked there,” he says. “So many of them have remained loyal and come with us.” There has been a small exodus, like the Great Escape, of old staff who were with Birley Sr. for years and have now come to work for Jr. His new old club. The chef, Alberico Penati, formerly of Harry’s Bar and one of the best Italian chefs in London, has waited for years to come back and cook for a Birley. Loyalty is high up on Robin’s list of virtues, as is quality. He talks of quality as if it were a benign, patrician religion. There is no end to the things he will do for quality: he’s building it a temple. He gets his fish from France and his meat from Milan because there the people understand, truly understand, you understand, quality. If you mention cash, he grimaces. Cash is like ice on a sensitive tooth. Cash is an atheist when it comes to believing in quality.
By his own admission, Birley spent £30 million on this club. Trusting the design to Rifat Ozbek was the act of a zealot. Ozbek is a fashion designer who has never designed “so much as” the interior of a bathroom. What he and Robin’s millions have come up with is a series of rooms of sublime, dazzling beauty. Light, bright, and glittering, they are elegant and debonair, collections of wit and exuberance like Diaghilev wrestling with Jackie Onassis in scented risotto. There is a giraffe’s head and neck rising out of the floor, a bar made of shells, and an illuminated peacock. Effulgent, glamorous wallpaper, bathrooms in which you would happily spend a first date, and a restaurant of deep, glowing crimson with scarlet shaded lights. It’s like sitting in a fairy story or being swallowed by a dragon or perhaps being Mme. de Pompadour’s crystal dildo. It is a joy to be surrounded by so much color and pattern, so much élan and panache. For so long every new dining room has welcomed us with subway tiles, low-watt bulbs, ironically framed photos, and exposed industrial guts. Loulou’s interior is the sort of classy hedonism that tells you that we’re snuggling in for a really long depression.
To christen his new club, Birley throws a birthday party for his mother, Lady Annabel, and a long gossipy table of Goldsmiths and Rothschilds with the merest slurp of Guinnesses. The rooms fill with founder members and the carefully invited. The bars hum; the waiters sidle with high trays. On the small dance floor men fluff their jackets and do wedding dancing. I’ve known most of these people most of my life. They are the denizens of the establishment for many, many well-appointed, anonymous, leathery rooms. I knew their fathers and their first husbands. I can point out their mistresses and their cousins and their aunts, their horses and their dogs and their counties. They are the abiding, amused oligarchs of old England. The girls remain eternally beautiful and flushed, the men good-humored, and if they can’t manage amusing, they are then amused. They’re not exclusively upper-class by any means; here are the self-made, the machine-made, the handmade, and those made by luck and looks. They all share a clannish insouciance. Those who are noticeably absent, not listed, are the gossip-column stars, the inhabitants of blogs, the nebulous, disposable electric celebrities. Though Mick Jagger giggles in a corner and Kate Moss turns dreamy circles on the dance floor, this is not a collection that would excite a tabloid editor. These are the people who are famous to one another—legends in their own clubs—and that has always been enough.
You ask why the British are so fond of clubs. Well, it might be that they are home from home, an improvement on cold nagging and leftover dinner with the dog. There is a love here that the English have difficulty conjuring up on their own. There is the promise of companionship and camaraderie, of conformity and constancy, a place to do as our fathers did. I stand in the courtyard with its Gothic fountain and Victorian flower theater talking to a black-tied David Tang, a man who runs clubs and restaurants in China and London. He does a quick, expert mental calculation and says, “It’s impossible to make that money back. How can he do it? I wish him luck. I want to be able to come here.” But, for Robin, it’s not about profit or cashing in or making a fortune. He had a fortune. It’s about making something; it’s about creating a place for all this loyalty and all this quality, an oasis, a chapel, a reserve against the terrible mediocrity and slovenliness outside. “There will be a picture of my father here,” he says. “And on opening night we will raise a toast to him.” What’s £30 million for the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods?Continued (page 2 of 2)
You ask why the British are so fond of clubs. Well, it might be that they are home from home, an improvement on cold nagging and leftover dinner with the dog. There is a love here that the English have difficulty conjuring up on their own. There is the promise of companionship and camaraderie, of conformity and constancy, a place to do as our fathers did. I stand in the courtyard with its Gothic fountain and Victorian flower theater talking to a black-tied David Tang, a man who runs clubs and restaurants in China and London. He does a quick, expert mental calculation and says, “It’s impossible to make that money back. How can he do it? I wish him luck. I want to be able to come here.” But, for Robin, it’s not about profit or cashing in or making a fortune. He had a fortune. It’s about making something; it’s about creating a place for all this loyalty and all this quality, an oasis, a chapel, a reserve against the terrible mediocrity and slovenliness outside. “There will be a picture of my father here,” he says. “And on opening night we will raise a toast to him.” What’s £30 million for the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods?Continued (page 2 of 2)
