Party People: London's favourite party starters

A honey-voiced, doe-eyed Old Etonian, he is certainly a compelling presence. His sole purpose with magic is to induce in others the feelings that it has always elicited in him. ‘I think that magic, at its root, is a very abstract notion. There’s no real, approved definition. And, in that sense, it’s like love; you can only see magic by the effect it has on people.’

Drummond, the son of Crispin Money-Coutts, 9th Baron Latymer, was brought up in Sussex, obsessing about UFOs, ghosts and Ancient Egypt. He discovered Davenports, London’s oldest magic shop, aged six — ‘It’s rather like Ollivanders, the wand shop from Harry Potter’ — and memorised the catalogue. He learned the scales and arpeggios of magic, the classic routines and the traditional tricks before spinning it his way. A fan of David Blaine and Derren Brown, he does not claim that his magic is supernatural. It is theatre.

He started getting paid for his magic while at Leeds University studying languages, and his first gig, at the Royal Horticultural Society in Vincent Square, earned him £20. Nowadays it’s more like £2,000.

Early on he did a six-month stint at Annabel’s nightclub — ‘and I learned fast. The psychology of the approach is huge. If you approach a man and a woman, you have to work on the man. If you win the man, you win the woman. If they are on a date, and you win the woman, you lose the man. I totally understand it when people say, “God, I hate magic,” because most magicians do my head in. Naff. Over the top. Bad gags. Brash. Aggressive. Smelly. There are a lot of smelly magicians. And all that just incites people to want to unravel them.’

Drummond has his heart set on the telly. He has made a series of short films looking at witchcraft in Tanzania, card sharks in Bangkok, belief systems and sacrifice in India. He seems to represent a new mood for magic. And a commercial one. He is anything but street — he will one day be Lord Latymer. If you can’t afford to book him, rest assured that he will soon be on your television screen making you wonder. (dmcmagic.com)

Temple of Fun

Tarja Visan’s Buddha-Bar empire has finally found its way back to London

There was a time — years, actually — when you couldn’t go to a party in London without the Eastern-Western ambient tunes of Buddha-Bar compilations pulsing out from a speaker in the vicinity. It was music for style-conscious minglers, too sensible to be ravers. But few of the Londoners who drank, smoked and schmoozed realised that the music had a home, a mothership. That the DJ legend Claude Challe had a Paris HQ, and one that birthed an empire.

It was recession time and the idea was to create a den where Parisian professionals could have a proper night out — a dinner interesting enough to be a talking point, cocktails powerful enough to incite flirting, DJs skilful enough to brew atmosphere — and still be tucked up by 11pm. Festivities kicked off at 6.30pm but the feel was late-night, the colours were Chinese — red and gold and black — and the whole thing was put together by an enterprising couple, one Scandinavian, the other Romanian. Not a drop of Buddha-ish background between them, but they shared a sense of the future.

Tarja Visan is a kind of master-race Finnish Amazonian, a proper pillar of Scandi-statuesque womanhood with the comedy hurdy-gurdy accent to match. She seems unfeasibly good-natured, unutterably healthful. And so it’s odd to meet this creature, who looks built to lope through the pine forests of her homeland, in the swarthily exotic surroundings of Knightsbridge’s brand-new Buddha-Bar.

An ex-model, hovering around the 50 mark, she is rather magnificent. Her husband and business partner Raymond died of cancer two years ago and this is the first Buddha-Bar (one of 14 worldwide, plus a couple of spas and an exploding Buddha-Bar hotel business, Karma Kafés, Cuban restaurants and many more) that she has opened without him. The restaurants are licensed out, but she is bang in there with the decoration, menus, tastings, staffing, artworks and atmosphere. The couple met on the street in Paris when she was 20. He was 14 years older. They had two daughters, Ilona, now 22, and Lenita, 20.

‘My husband was a super-marvellous person,’ she says. ‘The best person in the world and the love of my life. He was my partner, my lover, my husband, my best friend. We really balanced each other.’ She is nervy about this new project, but buoyed by the fact that her girls approve. ‘I was worried but they said, “Daddy would be very proud of you,” and I really appreciate that.’

There was another Buddha-Bar in London, on the Embankment, which closed in 2010 after four years. It was, according to one national paper’s restaurant critic: ‘Where hope, like ingredients, goes to die.’ But Raymond was dying at the time and Varja cannot talk about its demise for legal reasons (she reads a stock, meaningless statement from her notebook). The Knightsbridge Buddha-Bar, she insists, ‘will have the best-quality food and the best service and super ambience’.

It’s a brand that still inspires confidence, and a fair smattering of London’s party types pitched up to the Hallowe’en night opening. Amber Le Bon, Guy Pelly, Otis Ferry and the Candy brothers (it’s bang opposite their One Hyde Park monolith) stuck their heads round the door to be greeted by Swarovski crystal dragons, a vast bronze-mesh Buddha and another piece made up of 207 smaller brass Buddhas. It might just capture the collective.

‘London is such a sophisticated city,’ says Tarja. ‘All the men are chic in three-piece suits [not sure where she’s been hanging out] but then they can go completely crazy [that makes more sense] and we Finns are the same. We are dangerous people, the Finns. Be careful…’ She howls with mirth. ‘The Finns are coming!’ (buddhabarlondon.com)

Monsieur Fete

Raise the guillotine, Arthur de Soultrait, tie-maker to the bourgeouisie, is reviving old-fashioned French decadence

In the flesh, Paris’s ‘King of Decadence’, Arthur de Soultrait, is less Marquis de Sade and more Bertrand Woostér, a buck-toothed and sports-jacketed French Sloane who owns Vicomte A, a preppy clothing label.

Notoriety, and inappropriate soubriquets, came about after he hosted Pippa Middleton at his 30th birthday party in Paris in April. The theme was Versailles and Pippa was photographed dressed as Marie Antoinette alongside Arthur in full Louis XVI, with the addition of a studded dog collar and lead.

The following morning, Arthur was sitting next to his younger brother Marcy in the back of a car driven by a lawyer called Romain Rabillard, with Pippa in the passenger seat, when the driver wittily pulled a real-looking fake gun on the paparazzi in pursuit. Arthur confessed he was ‘still drunk’ at the time and the furore thickened. Would Pippa be questioned or prosecuted? Of course not, but it earned this timid toff his new title.

Arthur met Pippa four years ago at the wedding of a mutual friend, Countess Marie-Sophie von Montgelas, at her family schloss. They remain friends even after the spring’s hysteria.

Born into an old Burgundian family of horse breeders, Arthur is the oldest of four. With no allowance from his parents, he started selling ties while at business school in Paris and took them with him for an internship in North Carolina. The company went bankrupt after two weeks but he made $8,000 selling his ties door-to-door to the desperate housewives of Charlotte (much bowing and Gallic lisping one assumes). Anyway, he used the money to start Vicomte A in 2005. ‘It was my American friends who said I had to call it Vicomte A. I was horrified because in my family, who are very entrepreneurial and modern, we never speak about the title,’ he says. ‘It was also my American friends’ idea to design the logo with that very big crown. But I made it fook-sha [fuchsia] because I thought it was a bit impertinent.’

Own-label ties were followed by polo shirts in acid colours that the BCBG French youth went nuts for. ‘It was a big phenomenon, but that can be dangerous for a brand because you might have one summer of popularity.’ The line has since evolved to become a country-man-about-town sensation, with 20 shops worldwide, including on the King’s Road. It launched clothes for women and children. It makes customised polo shirts for Bentley and Cartier. His yearly parties are now PR exercises as much as personal celebrations. Two years ago the theme was Eyes Wide Shut, with topless waitresses. Casino Royale came next. He has already decided what the theme will be for 2013 — but ‘it is a secret. You are not allowed in if your costume is not perfect.’

He is planning a party in London at the Brompton Club on 13 December. ‘The English are more fun than the French,’ he says. ‘I like a good English pub but I do not drink beer.’ He has spent evenings at Boujis and Annabel’s, but seems conflicted about whether he wants to be seen as a party person or not. But he wants to be seen. To be part of things. To get recognition for hard work. And he can have that. Ralph Lauren started out selling ties and look what happened to him. (vicomte-a.com)

Smart Thinker

Arjun Waney earns a fortune from his glossy West End hangouts, but his soul is rich, too

‘I don’t give interviews. I don’t like my family name in the press. But I asked Gwyneth Paltrow and she said, “Don’t be such a bloody fool. What is the big deal? You have me fly Cameron Diaz over here so she’ll sign up with you in the US and you won’t even give an interview?” ’ And so Arjun Waney and I find ourselves facing each other across a table in the members’ bar of Coya, his beautiful new Peruvian restaurant on Piccadilly.

Arjun, 73, the Indian billionaire venture capitalist and prolific high-end restaurateur, is as chirpy as a cricket. He is at the centre of London’s sceney café society mosh pit. Hedge-funders and bankers and professional heiresses rarely go a week without paying a substantial bill in one of his establishments, whether it’s Dover Street Arts Club, Zuma, Roka or La Petite Maison. But he was a late-blooming restaurateur. By the time he financed his first restaurant in 2002, he was 63.

He was born in Karachi to a middle-class family and left at 18 to study at Berkeley. ‘I had to do menial jobs that would pay me under the table, like washing dishes and cleaning sorority lavatories.’ He met his American wife Judy at Berkeley. ‘She lent me $100 and she said, “You owe me.” So I said, “Well, I’ll marry you one day.” ’ They have been married for 50 years and have one daughter, Devika.

A small loan enabled him to open his first shop, which turned into a chain of stores called Cost Less, that later merged with Pier 1 to became the second largest retailer in America with 800 shops. ‘I sold out and made a large sum of money. In 1968 $100 million was a lot of money.’ At the start of the 1970s, he drifted about just being rich. ‘I spent a lot of time in London with Jimmy Goldsmith, John Aspinall, and couldn’t do what I knew because the buyers of the business had paid me $11 million not to compete. It was a false life, a substitute for living. So I went to India and started a company that sold wholesale clothing and I was a winner, winner, winner all the way through. I took the company public and cashed out in 1992. By then I had huge houses in La Jolla, Cap Ferrat — the best. I bought Helena Rubinstein’s flat on Lowndes Square, 3,400sq ft. But I was

still pissing away money in casinos. I was unhappy and looking for meaning. But I learned my philosophy during an argument with Mother Theresa.’

A Hindu by birth, he was explaining to the nun of all nuns that he didn’t practise any religion and didn’t want to become a Catholic when she said, ‘Serve the poor and you serve God.’ And he was off. His Savitri Waney Charit-able Trust, named after his mother, aims to ‘eliminate curable blindness by 2020’. He plonks his charity brochure down on the table. ‘This is my work. This is all I’m really concerned about in life. I don’t give a shit about anything else. As long as you add to life I think it helps to protect you from cancer. I’m not saying it’s a cure, but it’s an attitude of giving.’

His latest wave of empire building began in March 2001 when he tried to book a table at Nobu for his anniversary. No luck. So he tried again, two months in advance, to book for his birthday. They offered him 6pm. He figured there was room for competition.

His barber introduced him to Rainer Becker, who had run the restaurants at the Park Hyatt’s Tokyo hotel, made famous by the movie Lost in Translation. And together with Divia Lalvani, daughter of the telecoms titan Gulu Lalvani, they started Zuma in Knightsbridge. ‘It was only a £3 million investment but the London restaurant has always made more than $4.5 million net. That’s profit. It’s about £45,000 a day, seven days a week.’

Six years ago he visited a renowned little restaurant (a favourite of the Furnish-Johns), La Petite Maison in Nice, met the owner Nicole Rubi and asked to buy the franchise. ‘She said, “You pay me €25,000 per franchise.” So I said, “Here, sweetheart. Let’s sign a deal.” €25,000 is peanuts! For a restaurant that makes £1.6 million profit?’ Tucked behind Claridge’s, La Petite Maison serves wonderful, expensive French food. You might get a table for 6pm on your birthday, if you call well in advance.

Dover Street Arts Club opened last year with Gwyneth as a shareholder and creative director and Mark Ronson as music director. The opening parties were peppered with London’s top-tier types: Stella McCartney, Mario Testino, and Prince Philip, who Gwyneth serenaded with a live performance of Cee Lo Green’s ‘F**k You’. The Duke later remarked that he had ‘enjoyed the language’. A year on and the Arts Club hosts mainly the hugely rich, plus the occasional visit from Prince Harry and David Beckham. ‘The only art on show is the art of plastic surgery,’ spat one observer. ‘It is a fancy, frilly, rich crowd,’ admits Arjun.

He now has 22 restaurants worldwide, is set to launch a New York Grill on the 32nd floor of the Shard and plans to open a Coya (which is aimed at a slightly younger crowd) in New York — hence the Paltrow-Diaz hook-up. ‘She [Diaz] would own ten per cent. I think Peruvian food is the future.’ Certainly Coya is fizzy with its ceviche bar and Pisco sours and chef’s table. I wonder why there is an upstairs members’ bar when the restaurant is open to all? ‘I almost feel embarrassed to say this but it’s an annuity programme for life. If you pay me £1,500 to be a member and I have 400 members then that’s £6 million profit. And you still pay for your bloody drink!’ (coyarestaurant.com)