The House Master

Nick Jones, the man behind the Soho House empire, turned 40 in September yet there's still something of the freshly scrubbed Just William about him. He has an eager, innocent poshness and, even though he's suited and booted, I slightly expect him to be wearing short trousers when he stands up to say hello.

Jones owns a coterie of restaurants and clubs - including Soho House London and New York, Babington House in Somerset and the Electric Cinema and Brasserie on Portobello Road - which cater to the smartest and most demanding clientele in the world.

His wife, newsreader Kirsty Young, is an impressive small-screen personality, yet Jones is not the suave sophisticate his lifestyle would seem to imply. But for all his bumbling charm, he has changed the face of private members' clubs in both London and New York.

There was no guarantee that London's Soho House would be a success - the West End already had the Groucho Club with its glitzy celebrity members and Jones had no previous experience in attracting famous customers. And yet he seems to have a knack for catering to the whims of the sophisticate, for making celebrities feel safe - they know that when they stumble out drunk, in the company of someone they shouldn't be with, no one will have alerted the paparazzi.

Jones opened Soho House in 1995. It was just post-Four Weddings and a Funeral and the British film business had gone from a cottage industry to one that was being taken seriously internationally. The mood was celebratory and Jones was poised to oblige.

But his career flirted with disaster before solidifying into success. 'You have to remember that it was over 20 years ago that I decided to go into catering. This was before Conran had changed the perception in London and catering was what you chose if you had no choice. From an early age, though, I was fascinated when my mum entertained. She's was a great cook in the Robert Carrier way - a brandy snap!'

Jones was born in Cobham, Surrey. His mother died last year but his father, an insurance broker, is 'still very much around. And I've got two younger brothers [pronounced bruvvers but in a smart way] who were both involved with the family business and an older sister who's a psycho... psycho... psycho-whatever-it-is... oh, a doctor.'

He is quite badly dyslexic and even in conversation I sense that he has to grope for words and syntax. 'A lot more has been discovered about dyslexia since I was at school but I've never been embarrassed about it, I just found it very difficult to read and write. Because I went to private school I was lucky enough that they noticed what was wrong with me. I went to Shiplake College which specialised... well, when I say that I don't mean that it was just full of people wandering round going, "Duh. I thought I was in the dining room but now I'm in the gym." '

He has two children, Natasha and Oliver, now ten and eight, by his first wife, Tania, and a two-year-old daughter, Freya, with Young. 'Kirsty is far brighter than me,' he says, 'and Freya can already do her alphabet. Natasha and Oliver are more like me and I feel sorry that they're slightly struggling at school, but they've got great little personalities and good common sense so they'll be fine. I also think, and I have no proof of this, that if people are brilliant at school they can struggle later. They can develop a false sense of protection, whereas if you have to fight a bit you're readier for the big, wide world.'

I assume that, because of his academic setbacks, Jones hated school. 'No, I loved school.' Presumably because of the sport? 'I was quite hopeless at sport actually.' The girls? 'I was a late developer. I'm sure I got off with one or two at a Sixth Form dance but I knew I'd catch up later. I was a happy person.' Indeed, you will rarely come across such a cheery soul and the entrepreneurial determination sits oddly with such a carefree manner. He did his apprenticeship working in kitchens and waiting tables and even worked as a chambermaid for three months in the Westbury Hotel in Conduit Street. 'I think you have to know how to relate to everyone. It's such a team business and if one part of the team malfunctions then whatever else goes right, the customer will remember the bad bits.'

His first business venture was full of bad bits. He developed a concept for a series of restaurants called Over The Top. 'The premise was that you'd choose a piece of meat - chicken or steak or whatever - and then you'd pick a topping. We had several flaws in the concept. The biggest flaw was that all the toppings were disgusting. So actually you started off with quite a nice hamburger which you really f***ed up with this revolting topping. I remember sitting in one of the restaurants in the middle of the lunchtime rush and the place was empty. I couldn't blame the recession because people still eat in recessions - it was empty because it was shit.'

Jones's main motivation in moving on from this was not to go bust, despite owing millions, because 'then I would have owed the veg man a lot of money and the meat man and the printer. I really feel that there are laws in this country which make it a bit too easy to go bust and reopen and then everyone suffers.'

So Over The Top, Soho, on Old Compton Street, became Café Bohème. 'I just reversed everything I'd tried to do before. I'd learned about Soho and there tended to be an arrogance whereby people who set up there felt they were on to a winner merely by being there, but it's not like that. Soho hates brands and chains so you have to be quite individual. The other thing you learn is that the customer is incredibly educated.'

Early on, he went for late-night licensing. Café Bohème, a noisy brasserie serving simple food, was open from eight in the morning until three in the morning and I assume that Jones lounged around schmoozing until the wee hours. 'Although I can't say I never did that, it wasn't a regular part of my life. I've always tried to build businesses without me as the front man.'

When the office space above Café Bohème became available, Jones felt he had to get his hands on it despite some of his shareholders begging him not to after just having come through five years of financial nightmare. 'I wasn't a private-club person nor was I a media person, apart from the customers I'd got to know [his friends now include luminaries such as Steve Coogan and Eric Fellner], but the entrance was just a tiny door so a club seemed the only option. And there had been a preview cinema upstairs so why not make it a film club?' And the name, which is at least a part of the genius: 'It was a house and it was in Soho.' Why complicate matters?

He cobbled together a committee from people he knew who worked in television, agents, actors and writers, and then threw a 'Hard Hats at the House Party'. All the committee members asked 20 people, the inside was gutted, the cocktails were brewed in cement mixers and 'somehow the vibe was right. People signed up for founder membership and we opened six months later.'

The converted house, all poky, cosy rooms piled on top of one another hanging off confusing staircases, was packed with the bold and the beautiful until May 1996, barely six months after the club opened, when it suddenly emptied out completely. 'I just thought, "F***ing hell, it can't be over already," and then someone told me about the Cannes Film Festival so the next year I followed my members out there, rented a boat and ran the club from it.' This year he plans to do the same in LA for the Oscars.

Jones's talent lies in moving forward and meeting ever-changing needs. He has that Branson talent of being able to think like a customer. In 1998, with the definite sense that 'no one had got this country-hotel thing right', he opened Babington House.

'I knew there was a demand for something with a London ethos. We took the rule book, tore it up and started letting people do what they wanted --if they felt like breakfast at five in the afternoon, we'd cook it for 'em.' And with that, he chucked out the chintzy, dripping tap, psychotic-staff image of the British rural hotel.

On Babington's opening day, Kirsty Young pitched up fresh from her break-up with rugby star Kenny Logan. Jones, in his accustomed capacity of man-of-all-work, carried her bags to her room. 'I thought she was beautiful and lovely. We sat down to lunch and it happened very quickly. We were married at Babington just over a year later.' Jones was already separated from his first wife but she made some comments to the press branding his behaviour 'disgusting and unforgivable'.

He admits that 'sometimes it's complicated. It's never ideal having your children living in two different places [his two elder children live in Cambridge with Tania while he, Kirsty and Freya live in Chelsea] but we get by and actually we are all very close so it works.'

Babington has been full from the day it opened. Even the Cowshed products used in its spa (Why the Cowshed? 'Well, it used to be a cowshed.' Of course it did) are now sold in Barneys in New York where the Park Avenue Princesses can get a thrill from products called things such as Horny Cow.

On the back of Babington came the Electric Cinema project in Notting Hill. 'Everyone knew Portobello was great in the daytime but no one went near it at night,' he says. 'Cinema-going had become so machine-like - it was almost like going on the Tube - so we put some personality back into the experience.' The Electric is now one of the highest-grossing cinemas in London, while the club and brasserie above have a spacious feel brought in from Babington with none of the Dickensian gloom of the Soho premises.

As Jones and his team scampered towards their biggest project to date, Soho House New York (which would struggle with the fussiest, most fickle customers in the world), Jude Law and Sadie Frost's two-year-old daughter Iris swallowed an ecstasy tablet she found on the floor in Soho House London.

'I'd be lying if I said that we really enjoyed that period of our lives,' he admits, 'but there was only one important thing and that was that the child was fine. Everything else we could deal with. We just had to retreat into a box and take a battering for a while.'

It provided a trigger for some censorious publicity. 'Some people just detest media holes,' says Jones incisively. 'But I've never seen Soho House as any sort of den of iniquity - it's as full for breakfast and lunch as it is at night.'

Measures have been taken, however, and the loos furnished with an attendant, while any flat cocaine-snorting surfaces have been removed.

The New York club opened in April 2003, complete with a rooftop pool, Cowshed spa, cinema, late licence and hysterical media hype. It seems to be the sum total of the best parts of all his other establishments and picky, cliquey New York has passionately embraced his formula.

At the same time, back in London, another Jones venture, a low-key restaurant called the Balham Kitchen & Bar, was opening its doors on Bedford Hill. It's where we are sitting now on a huge leather sofa in front of the fire. This already-packed restaurant, what with its proximity to Nappy Valley, has a crèche and Jones is going for his first 'tablecloth' restaurant this month when he takes over Cecconi's in Mayfair. 'We're going to tweak it, lower the prices a bit and make it more foxy.'

And then there is talk of a sunshine destination. 'Maybe the South of France, maybe Spain,' Jones concedes, 'maybe the Hamptons. There are all sorts of possibilities. I'm not after global domination, I just don't want myself or my customers to get bored.'