HOWZAT

The glossy brochure accompanying Quintain’s planning application describes the scheme as “a once in a lifetime opportunity to change perceptions of the area”.

Lucky Wembley, lucky Quintain. Property experts say the deals are smart as Wyatt is risking little capital in return for enormous potential profit. Quintain could make £500m from the two schemes in the next decade, and its raised profile in urban regeneration is already bringing more proposals its way.

After a sticky patch when profits were on the slide and Wyatt stepped aside for a new chief executive in 2002, then stepped back in when the appointee left after four months, Quintain’s prospects look rosy.

But who is going to run it? Some in the property world thought that Wyatt, who has built Quintain with a tight team of very able executives, was giving others more room when the new boss, Mike Riley, came in. Apparently not.

Now many feel Wyatt is too autocratic to let go. “They are wrong,” he says. “Mike wanted to be a policeman and I wanted to be an actor. We just had different styles.”

Wyatt has always been a hard man to second-guess. He made his name as a partner at the property consultancy Jones Lang Wootton running investments for the Mars pension fund and takes a cerebral approach to his business — mathematical formulas, a focus on opportunities others have brushed off — which he wears on his sleeve.

Before Quintain, he was “king of the short-term lease”, squeezing value from parts of property others avoided. Then he was building his plc, with a string of little acquisitions, usually companies others had avoided. Now he is pushing through special projects. That unorthodox, flexible approach either appeals or repels.

“His whole business is very clever and not widely understood,” says Michael Prew, property analyst at Citigroup Smith Barney. “He exploits value where there is a folklore that value doesn’t exist.”

William Rucker, chief executive of Lazards in London, Quintain’s banker, says simply that “for all the fun and good humour, Adrian is a first-class financier”.

Nobody is sure where Wyatt draws his inspiration from or what drives him on. Behind the vaudeville, say friends, he is very clever, and likes people to know it. His company’s name, Quintain Estates Development, is a typical Wyatt conceit. Quintain is a medieval word for jousting target, the rest an in-joke. “I just wanted initials that stood for quod erat demonstrandum,” he giggles. QED.

That quality, part inspirational, part exhibitionist — he was nude Mr July in a recent charity calendar — is allied with an occasionally fragile temperament. Wyatt left Jones Lang, for instance, because he was furious the partnership would not invest in a complicated but lucrative scheme for buying its offices in Mayfair.

“They said ‘partnerships shouldn’t own assets’. I said, ‘so set up a f***ing trust fund’.” They wouldn’t. So he left and, with backing from Standard Life and Scottish Equitable, set up Quintain.

“The thing about Adrian,” says property consultant Peter Fineman, an old friend, “is that he is financially very cute and exceptionally bright mathematically, but a lot of people don’t realise it, because of all the jokes.”

Wyatt’s combustible character was thrown together during an emotionally tough childhood as an only child who frequently fell out with his father, an English teacher who set up adult education institutes. Other influences were varied. His dad’s dad had been a founder member of the British Communist party, his mother’s dad — who he adored — had fought in every major battle in the first world war and survived.

Wyatt says he is the opposite of his own father, haphazard where his dad was methodical, messy instead of scrupulously tidy. He got little financial backing from his parents to continue education after school, and failed to complete a degree at Portsmouth Polytechnic. Despite his own yearning to be an actor, he bundled his way into the property business because others told him he should knuckle down. He learnt the ropes working for Docker and Norman Bowie, a former surveyor for the Prudential, before joining Jones Lang.

Wyatt’s private life has been more erratic. He married his first girlfriend, got divorced, married again for eight years, got divorced, married again. He has four children. Wife No 3 Zoe, works two days a week with him at the firm.

“Shall I tell you how we met?” he says. I can see his finance director getting agitated. “If you tell him, he’ll print it,” she sighs. So what? he says. He proceeds to tell a long tale of how the future Mrs Wyatt turned up in his office as a surveyor and refused his offer of a drink. “Then I said ‘do you know the difference between a penis and a chicken drumstick?’ She said, no, and I said, ‘well how about a picnic on Saturday?’”

Boom boom. Wyatt grins. Worthington looks stoical. He is clearly irrepressible. “And, you know, if you had done that at Merrill Lynch you would have been out and sued,” he says, with innocent surprise, “but that was it.” Love at first bite.

And he is such a force of energy that it is hard to take offence. When I ask what he gets from the business, a torrent of thoughts pour out. “It’s about building something, putting something back, making money, seeing ideas come to fruition, putting communities together...”

Others will now be putting considerable pressure on him to make sure Quintain’s highly visible projects pay off to everyone’s benefit. But he seems to relish the challenge.

“It’s a fantastic set of toys to be playing with,” he shrugs, “and I am just very, very lucky.” He refills his wine glass, before turning to Worthington. “Now you talk Becky, while I have something to eat.”