Patrice Gouty: King of clubs

It was the height of the George Bush era and, being French (and therefore a cheese-eating surrender monkey), Gouty was being called a 'traitor' at his local newsagent. 'In London, God forbid, if you lose your money, you still have friends who talk to you... and hopefully support you. In Miami it was very different. It's all based on how much you have in your bank account and not who you are.' He and his wife decided, however, that they couldn't face going back to Europe: 'Not yet - we can't go back having failed, we have to give Miami another chance,' he remembers saying.

(Left) Gouty at the Delano in Miami

He ended up managing the celebrity and VIP clientele policy at Ian Schrager's Delano hotel. He organised the opening party for Art Basel Miami at the Delano which became a huge success, as well as parties for Madonna, Queen Latifah and Chris Rock. 'Miami is crazy. It's a beautiful, hot place but has that mix of money, high-profile clientele, a lot of wannabes and a dangerous underbelly. It was really important at the Delano to make sure we got the right mix of people and that everyone felt safe enough to let go and really have fun and that their privacy was maintained,' he says.

In 2005 he was hired to launch the Sanctuary, another boutique hotel in Miami. But by 2007, Gouty was missing London badly and was ready for a new challenge - preferably one in which he was a partner. He first heard about Raffles when he got a call out of the blue from a wealthy businessman (who wishes to remain anonymous) looking to back the opening of a new nightclub in London. 'And I thought immediately if it was in the West End I would say no, but the guy said, "I've found a space on the King's Road." I jumped on a plane two days later and when I saw the place, I immediately said, "OK, let's do it."'

Tara Bernerd was already on board. 'I loved what Tara wanted to do with it straight away. She was bringing it back to what the old nightclubs used to be in the Eighties, but with a contemporary feel.' With a 225-person capacity, it was the perfect size. It had two bars, a kitchen, a private room, a back door for celebrities and - most importantly - a licence to party until 5.30am. He took over the building in early 2007 and in the next few months completely renovated it and implemented a staff discretion policy - even with regards to the spec for the sound system - that has never been broken. 'My clients need to know that they are going to be looked after. They only want to work with people they trust and it takes a long time to build trust with anyone, but once you have that trust it's there for life.'

Founded in 1967 by Norman Lonsdale, an Old Etonian publisher, film-maker and flame of Princess Margaret, four years after Mark Birley opened Annabel's and two years before Johnny Gold opened Tramp, there is something of a genealogical mystery about whom Raffles was named after. According to Gouty, the Chelsea club was originally named not after the fictional Victorian gentleman cricketer, jewel thief and all-round louche bounder AJ Raffles, from the novels of EW Hornung (Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law), who lived in The Albany, off Piccadilly, but rather after the much more respectable colonial statesman and administrator Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), who founded Singapore.

To this day, Singapore Airlines' Business Class is called 'Raffles Class'. Gouty decided to keep the aristocratic Raffl es name for the club because 'Lord' Raffles, as he calls him (although Raffles was never enobled), represented everything that Gouty likes about a true blue Englishman. 'Raffles dressed well, he drank a lot, he was an explorer, he discovered new species of plants, he liked to gamble. To me he was the ultimate Englishman. Like a lot of foreigners, I look up to the British - I love brands like Aston Martin, Jaguar and Dunhill - and I got a kick out of making the club the epitome of the very best of British.'

The club had been successful when it opened in the late Sixties and was again fashionable with the Hooray Henry red-braces crowd in the Eighties but in recent years Raffles had quietly become an aspic-wrapped relic, exiling itself into London club oblivion after going through a variety of owners. The first thing Gouty did was to dump the entire old Raffles membership list. 'We just threw it in the bin and started from scratch,' admits Dudley Spencer, owner of luxury PR and events company the London League, who helped Gouty with the relaunch.

The only drawback to Gouty's latest success is that he has not been able to see as much as he would like of his wife and children. He effectively now commutes between London and Miami, where Sabah runs her own successful restaurant, Le Brasserie. When in London, Gouty stays at the flat of Raffles' 'ambassador of fun' Jade Calliva, son of the party and events promoter Jeanette Calliva. Gouty first met Sabah when she came to London to make a new life for herself in the Nineties. Introduced by a mutual friend, Patrice was so taken with her that, despite her total lack of English, he gave her a job working as a receptionist at Trader Vic's. They moved in together within two months and were married in the Maldives in 2002.

Staying up until 5am on a regular basis would put a strain on any marriage. Not least while he is thousands of miles away. 'We have been in Miami for six years now,' says Gouty. 'I would not sell my house as I love Miami, but we are thinking now of coming back to Europe because I cannot keep on doing London and Miami all the time. It takes a toll on my wife and kids, and she is running a business on her own and it is not fair on her. When I go, she is left on her own and suffers a lot. She gets lonely.'

Gouty was brought up in Paris, where his father was in the restaurant business and his mother worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Education. He has a sister and two brothers, all of whom live in the South of France; one brother works for ELF, the other owns a firm that repairs high-speed motorboat engines.

(Right) The bar at Raffles

After school, he enrolled in catering college in Paris and got his first taste of VIP nightlife, aged 15, when he started setting up small bar areas at fashion shows in Paris. 'It was a way of earning some extra cash,' he says. The experience gave him a love of partying that ended up drawing him first to Germany, then to London in 1983, as an impecunious but passionate kid who wanted to make a career out of the nightlife.

His first job in London was as a waiter at Windows on the World and he moved to be a barman at the old Xenon nightclub off Piccadilly in 1985. At the time, he says, London's nightlife didn't add up to much: 'There was only Annabel's and Tramp. There were no cool or hip clubs yet. If you wanted good food, you had to go to some place like Le Gavroche and take out a mortgage. The nightclub revolution had not started yet. There had been no Studio 54 in London and there was no Nobu scene on a Saturday night.'

Studio 54 was a notable influence on Gouty. After Xenon, he became manager (and barman) of a small, cult club in a grubby part of Earls Court called Double Bass, where regulars included George Michael, Naomi Campbell and Kylie Minogue. 'There were prostitutes on the street outside the door but there were also queues around the block. That was where I started to build up my celebrity contact book. If you treat them like people, not like stars, they respect you and they become friends.'

By the Nineties, a new wave of London club promoters began to realise that if you created the right environment you could get people out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, not just at the weekend. Chinawhite opened its doors in December 1998, a venture between Gouty and his friends Rory Keegan and John Stephen, both of whom were already club promoters.

Gouty was credited with revolutionising the members' club business, most notably by using his strong relationships with US celebrities and bringing them along to party with London high society and royalty. 'We changed the VIP room culture and took clubs in London to a different level,' Gouty explains. 'Now if you walk into a club and are on the guest list, you are walked to your own table. It wasn't like that before Chinawhite, except at Annabel's.' For Gouty knows there is no such thing as egalitarianism in the nightclub world: 'There is a class system whether you like it or not. It's who you know and how you look. But you have to be smart and sensible about it. You don't want to upset people. I always say to my staff, "It's not a democracy at the door."'