Losing at Monopoly?

When Andrew Davis was a young entrepreneur, he very much liked to impress business colleagues, and they in turn were impressed by him. They had good reason to be. It was the very late Eighties, and this self-assured then 20-year-old - now the multi-millionaire owner of some of Britain's most famous and exclusive hotels - had managed to take ownership of a beautiful mansion, Bridwell Park House, set among the rolling hills of Devon.

Apart from entertaining clients in his expansive rural pad, which left Davis bereft when it burned down shortly after he bought it, he also told associates that he spent much of his time at another home, the Pesthouse Estate near Godstone in Surrey.

One day, a business associate, beguiled by this garrulous, eager upstart, decided to check out "the Surrey estate". "What I discovered was a perfectly pleasant but timberframe cottage, two-up, two-down, set in a few small acres," he said yesterday. "It had big flashy gates in front but it was hardly what you'd call a country estate, which is rightly or wrongly what I'd thought it was. But somehow that was very Andrew."

You hear this a lot - "it's very Andrew" - when speaking to people about Davis, a loquacious, dapperly-dressed firework of a man. "He was the ultimate wheeler-dealer," one business partner of 20 years says of the young Davis.

Another describes him as possessing "the sharpest and quickest of minds, and a man who likes to shake things up". But this week, Davis, 40, is making waves of a rather different, and not exactly welcome, kind. Three of his extensive portfolio of boutique hotels - Cliveden in Berkshire, the former Astor home alongside the Thames, Ston Easton Park near Bath and Sharrow Bay in Cumbria, all of them once among the most desirable of country house hotels in Britain - have suffered the ultimate of put-downs.

In a humiliating snub, The Good Hotel Guide 2005, the leading arbiter of independent hotels in Britain and Ireland, has deemed them not even worthy of a mention. All three - once renowned as bastions of exquisite taste and impeccable service (at an exorbitant price, of course) - are currently the leading lights of Davis's empire, the Von Essen Hotel Group, said to have a gross value of up to £120 million and whose turnover for the last financial year is expected to reach £50 million.

According to the guide, however, none of them now exactly "sparkles" under the new management. Even more embarrassing, according to the guide's editor Desmond Balmer, Cliveden, the infamous backdrop to the 1960s Profumo Scandal, "has not shone as a hotel for the past five years".

And of Sharrow Bay, the very first country-house hotel in Britain when it opened in the late 1940s and where Sir Paul McCartney proposed to his wife Heather? "We have dropped it," says Balmer, simply.

The guide's damning verdict comes at a difficult time for Davis, who is said to be in the advanced stages of buying a leading London hotel, thought to be the Lanesborough, by Hyde Park.

It also follows, we can reveal, a plethora of problems which have dogged Davis's hotel empire - and others in his group such as the Royal Crescent in Bath - since his company purchased them.

Two of Davis's hotels, Ston Easton and Bishopstrow House in Wiltshire, have a number of county court judgments against them. Ston Easton has faced a total of 12 judgments against it since February 2001 for sums ranging from just £262 to more than £4,000. Davis became a sole director of the hotel in June 2000.

Similarly, Bishopstrow House has five CCJs against its name since January this year, while a credit agency assessment shows that the hotel has been getting worse at paying its suppliers. One report states that Bishopstrow "pays slower than the industry average" and has a "significantly worsening payment pattern".

Of course, every hotel and its suppliers - whether it be for food, wine or laundry - has frequent contractual disputes. But Davis's Von Essen Group - as the Good Hotel Guide's excoriating verdict painfully illustrates - is fighting to protect its reputation on a number of fronts.

One former senior member of staff at Cliveden said he was "not surprised but very saddened" by the hotel's ejection from the guide. "It's amazing how quickly it has gone downhill since von Essen took over. Cliveden epitomised everything about good British hospitality, but now you get the impression that the new owners don't give a damn," he says.

There have been reports of peeling paint and poor service, and its once-renowned spa, one of the first of its sort in the country, has more recently been criticised as "tired". Despite reports that Davis and his management would invest millions in updating the spa, enquiries made yesterday discovered that long-promised work on refurbishment, essential for a hotel of this price bracket, has still not begun.

A member of the Royal Crescent Hotel spa club said she, too, was "saddened" by the deterioration of what had been world-class hotels. "Members are continually grumbling that it's not like it used to be."

This is not the kind of publicity Davis - said by former business associates to be in equal measure "engaging" and "fiery" - will welcome.

In a very real sense, he has become the victim of his own success - his defenders claim, rather, that he is the object of envy - not least because so very little is really known about him, and so much that he appears to have said about his own background seems either opaque or unsubstantiated.

Davis himself has hinted in press interviews that he went to Gordonstoun, the Scottish public school attended by Prince Charles, but that he and the school "did not work out" together; however, the school itself apparently has no record of him ever having been there.

He is also reported to have built much of his empire on a family inheritance from a relative of his mother's, a mysterious Baroness von Essen, but her titled credentials are unclear. One former associate who has met her said yesterday: "She's a very pleasant woman, just like anyone's mother, but she hardly came across as loaded."

The manner in which he acquired his hugely-impressive portfolio - Davis, himself, claims to have built much of it on sound investments in art, property and diamonds - equally remains bewildering. "This boy is buying up virtually all the big hotels in Britain, and none of us knows how he is doing it," one associate claimed yesterday.

Today, his business interests cover some 36 company directorships, including catering firms, a helicopter hire firm, of which he is extremely proud, and real-estate management. In many of the companies, he is listed as the only director.

But it is his private life that Davis - the son of a Surrey-based company director and housewife - is particularly discreet about. His almost-constant male companion is Andrew Onraet, 35, who originally moved in to Davis's five-storey Knightsbridge home in 1998. Prior to that, Davis appears to have married once, though he is now divorced, and is the father of a 10-year-old son.

One former business partner describes Davis and his male companion as an unlikely pair. "You'd never know they were together. They almost seemed more like employer and employee." Andrew Onraet is actually an architect employed by Davis's hotel group.

"Whenever Davis spoke about him, or anyone else did in his company, he was always referred to as 'The Architect'," one social acquaintance said.

But they are frequently seen out together. At a dinner party at the Berkeley Hotel (not one of his portfolio), the two were happy to mix with guests who included the River Café's Ruth Rogers. "Onraet comes across as the very antithesis of Davis, which is maybe why they have a good relationship," one social friend said.

The son of Michael and Janet Onraet and the youngest of their three children, Onraet grew up in Surrey and is described as diminutive, softly-spoken and boyish-looking. Yesterday, his sister, Suzanne, 37, who lives in Wokingham, spoke admiringly of Davis, the man she was introduced to by her brother. "He is just running a business," she said, "and the fact is that he has been successful at doing so. There is no mystery beyond his success."

It is also fair to say that Davis is engaging company, although those who have met him socially also talk of a man who can at times be somewhat over-bearing. But he is also shrewdly adept at social networking, especially if it benefits his business, and he is said to be loyal to his friends.

A case in point is the glamorous figure of Baroness Marie-Claire von Alvensleben, an author of Swiss and Belgian extraction who is a well-known figure on the charity circuit. They first met when the baroness was running a short-lived lifestyle magazine in Britain, and Davis asked her to help him by writing-up a "nice little article" on his hotels.

Ultimately, the magazine folded before she could oblige. But the pair continued to meet - wining and dining, visiting art exhibitions and attending concerts - and the baroness began to enjoy his patronage in the form of stays in his "very special" hotels.

Not surprisingly, the baroness talks of a fine man who has "a lot a crap" talked about him. "He works very hard but we have a lot of fun together," she said.

Above all else, as Davis has established himself as a behind-the-scenes London figure (who will become more so if the purchase of a major hotel in the capital goes through), those who have come across him do describe him as an engaging and colourful figure.

The one problem, as he seeks to expand his empire, is that many of his guests do not feel his hotels are quite as beguiling.