JOHN HITCHCOX will see you now in the bedroom. Really? The thing is, adds his woman assistant as we ascend the stairs, there really isn’t anywhere else to talk. His home, as I can tell from the cacophony of drilling all around, is overrun with builders.
The whole place — a four-storey Victorian villa in London’s chichi Notting Hill — is being gutted and rebuilt. “I’m so sorry,” grins Hitchcox, jumping up from a sofa when I walk in, “this is the one room that’s free. It’s not where I normally meet the press.”
If only. There’s been so much going on about Hitchcox’s love life in the tabloids this year — Elle Macpherson, Caprice, Kate Moss — that I thought maybe the paparazzi were just snuggled up under the duvet.
“Come on, let’s keep it to business,” he says sheepishly, hands dug deep in the pockets. But he looks the part: short, snake-hipped, handsome, wearing tight black Levi’s and a charmer’s grin, he could be the spitting image of a youngish Mick Jagger. “Yeah,” he sighs, “if I could have had £1 for everyone who’s told me that …” He’d be even richer than he probably already is. Hitchcox, 45, the son of an architect, has worked in property for a quarter of a century. He bought and sold houses in the 1980s, then co-founded Manhattan Loft Corporation in the 1990s, and now runs the Yoo design and development group, a joint venture with designer Philippe Starck, which sells kitted-out apartments in blocks all over the world.
By Hitchcox’s own estimations, Yoo has $5.5 billion (£2.9 billion) worth of flats under development in places such as New York, Miami, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong, and deals to come in Panama, Puerto Rico — the list goes on. The business is building so fast he may shortly float the company in London.
And that’s why I’m here, taking the armchair opposite the sofa at the end of his busy bed in his all-white bedroom — it had to be here, as he could only squeeze me in between meetings, travelling and checking on his builders. Hitchcox, it is quickly clear, is all go.
He’s easy company, too: informal, chatty, classless, roundly read, not at all the property hound that you might expect. That ease with others — he ascribes it to a liberal education at a Rudolf Steiner school which eschewed boring necessities such as getting A-levels — underpins a business style that relies on partnerships. It also gives him a long list of celebrity friends and a legendary charm, which, for some, makes him quite the ladies man.
But enough of that. At Yoo, where he owns a 69% stake, he works closely with Starck and designer Jade Jagger, adding their flair and his commercial nous to the basic groundwork done by other property developers.
“Yeah, everything I do is in partnerships,” he shrugs. “Partnerships are more time-consuming, but they are more rewarding, too.”
He’s also a travel addict, who clocks up 350,000 air miles a year, and he clearly abhors the simple life. He has been married twice — the second time round to designer Tara Bernerd, daughter of property tycoon Elliott Bernerd — and divorced twice, with three children.
And his restlessness in front of me, pacing up and down, sprawling on the sofa, fiddling with the windows, taking calls on his Blackberry, seems pretty much emblematic of the man.
At Yoo he has channelled that into a formula that is as much about marketing as property development. Working with Starck, Jagger and others, his firm designs and sells apartments in a range of branded styles, chock-full of the latest ideas and gadgetry.
Other developers want the Yoo touch because Hitchcox has got his finger on the pulse, and can call on designers with name recognition.
“We make our money through fees and co-investment in projects,” says Hitchcox, who then laughs and says that, actually, he developed the concept because he wanted something that combined his love of design and travelling.
With the globalisation of taste, Yoo can now sell its vision to developers around the world. Most of the buyers of its apartments are affluent singles, and they tend to want the same things worldwide.
And working on different continents gives the business a stability that should counteract any plunge in local property markets. “We started off that way to spread the risk, but often it’s just a case of people giving us a call,” he adds.
Those who work with Hitchcox say Yoo has developed a lucrative niche: adding pizzazz to residential developments that might otherwise get lost in the mix. “He knows what people want, his team is very good at design, and what he says, he does,” says Kevin Linfoot, whose firm KW Linfoot is developing a 57-storey tower in Leeds with Yoo. “John is also very good at organising things.”
Others are more sceptical about exactly what it is that Yoo offers. “Where’s the substance?” asks another developer. But there seems to be no shortage of takers for Yoo’s services. What Hitchcox wants next is more capital to expand the firm, hence the suggestion of a float, and a value of £80m put on the business.
Yet Hitchcox makes a face when I ask if it’s going to happen. “We are thinking about it. We need new capital. I’m just not sure I want to spend an hour a day with you guys.”
Oh thanks. No offence, he laughs. But he has never run a public company before, and he is worried about the fit between property and the City. “The thing about development, especially urban development, is that it’s very lumpy, and quite difficult to get even profits. And the City loves even profits.”
More to the point, Hitchcox is now ambivalent about being in the public eye. His shift from the property press to the tabloids earlier this year has left him antsy. An attempt to mollify one Sunday paper over his relationship with Macpherson ended up in a story headlined “Two hours after this photo, I bedded Elle for the first time”. His PRs are still fielding calls from red-tops about whom he’s dating next. It all looks a bit out of control.
“What can you do?” he says, head in hands. “The idea of me as an ageing playboy is just so untrue. I was married for 14 years. Look, I went to three charity dos with Elle, that’s all. My concern is with my children reading all this stuff. Who knows what it does to the business.”
But a bit of notoriety never hurt, and those around him say he’s more resilient than his sensitivity suggests.
“John is so business focused,” says Anton Bilton, chairman of the property developer Raven Mount, which wants to partner Yoo in a proposed 600-acre development in the Cotswolds. “You have to remember he made his own money, and he really is on the pulse of what’s going on around the world.”
Hitchcox says he developed a love of property early on, listening to his father’s stories about work. “My father ended up designing hospitals and got an OBE for it. My grandfather was a builder and developer in Surrey. I think I had property in the blood.”
Born the second of five children, he remembers living in homes that were continually being renovated. “The day they were finished we moved out.” He left his Steiner school in Sussex with four O-levels and a yen to travel, and then thought he’d raise money by doing up houses.
“I found a two-up, two-down in Caterham for £19,000. I borrowed the money, bought it, learnt how to plaster, plumb, the whole lot. Then another house came up and another. If you are a nutty doer like me, you just keep on going. In the end I did something like 300 houses in the 1980s.”
He sold out in 1989. “I was lucky, I lost money but not as much as many around me who lost everything.” He was later introduced to fellow developer Harry Handelsman by a lawyer in Malaysia. “I was looking for a boom market. Harry was based in Israel then. He and I were searching for things to do and we started Manhattan Loft Corporation.”
The business went on to become one of the best-branded developers in Britain, providing high-design loft apartments for the affluent trendy, often converting commercial premises for residential use. Hitchcox and Handelsman had a highly productive, but tetchy, relationship.
“We screamed and shouted at each other until we came up with solutions,” says Hitchcox. “My partnerships now are very distinct. With Harry it was more creative tension.”
The creative tension eventually persuaded the pair to follow separate projects. “Each of us is doing his own thing,” says Handelsman, who runs Manhattan Loft Corporation as chief executive. “John follows his path, a path which,” he adds after a pause, “is difficult to assess.”
That path led, via hotelier Ian Schrager, to designer Philippe Starck, whom Hitchcox hauled into Yoo (with a 28% stake) and persuaded to create a series of apartment “styles” that could be imposed on any development.
“We came up with four: classic, culture, minimal and nature. My job is managing the creative, working out what is commercial and what isn’t. But if you improve the design, you improve the quality.”
He has done the same with Jade Jagger, Mick Jagger’s designer daughter. “I’d seen her house which she’d done with the architect Tom Bartlett and I thought that they’d be interesting to have on board. It’s a different style to Philippe, more hippy chic. We’re doing a Jade building in New York with 80 apartments.”
Is it just about famous names? He looks pensive. “Marketing is a positive facet of what we do, but the emperor has to have some clothes. We have sold half the Jade apartments in the last month at higher prices than we expected.”
Next he wants to move into “condo-hotels” — apartments with hotel-type services — and is talking to New York’s hip Mercer hotel about a tie-in. He also wants to sign up Sophie Conran, daughter of Sir Terence, to the Yoo team. “I want to create identities at Yoo that are all different,” he says.
But essentially, isn’t it all the same thing — yuppy flats for those without the initiative to decorate and furnish the interiors themselves? “Oh that’s so not true,” he exclaims, looking appalled. “We have 23,000 apartments that we’re working on, and they stretch in price from A$80,000 (£32,000) in Australia to $7m in New York.”
He launches into a long speech about how Yoo creates real communities of like-minded people who love the communal areas that come with their apartments, where they can meet others, and broaden their own horizons. He makes his business sound almost like social work.
And those are Hitchcox’s strengths: energy, plausibility, resourcefulness, allied to a sharp eye and a useful contacts book. The difficulty, sometimes, is pinning him down — he seems constantly on the move. Even now, he’s glancing at his watch, and bouncing more anxiously on his seat. “Look, I’m in so much trouble,” he says, “I’ve got a bunch of people waiting for me and I’ve got to go. Leave me your numbers.”
Then with another Jagger-esque grin, he’s out the door, off to cut more international deals. I leave my business card on his bed and pad down the staircase.
In the basement, the builders are working on a sunken swimming pool flanked by mirrored walls, with a music room next door. Above the empty pool hangs a huge glitter ball. It looks like something from the set of Austin Powers. No wonder the ladies love him.
Vital statistics
Born: September 14, 1961
Marital status: divorced twice, three children
School: Michael Hall, E Sussex
University: Westminster
First job: cleaner
Salary package: £250,000
Homes: London, Paris and Gloucestershire
Car: grey Range Rover
Favourite book: Blink, by Ted Dekker
Favourite music: Mozart’s Requiem
Favourite film: The Graduate, starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman
Favourite gadget: Blackberry
Last holiday: Ibiza
John Hitchcox's working day
THE Yoo chairman wakes at his home in London’s Notting Hill at 7.30am. John Hitchcox drinks herb tea and then either pops upstairs to an office he keeps there, or cycles into Yoo’s London base off Marylebone High Street. “I’m always looking at a variety of things: new projects, problems with projects, design issues, new sites, new designers, international partners.”
Hitchcox travels long-haul constantly, keeping abreast of Yoo’s projects. “I travel a lot at night so I can have the days free.” He thought up the idea of Yoo after a night flight was cancelled. “I had to take a plane the next day. It was a day of reflection. I’d just separated from my wife and I wanted a business I could take to other parts of the world.” At night he sees friends outside work. “I’m not a big socialiser in the trade.”
Downtime
JOHN HITCHCOX relaxes by practising yoga and playing music. “I play piano, guitar and sing.” He describes his favourite music as “piano to commit suicide to — Elton John, Billy Joel”. He plays tennis with the coach at Notting Hill’s Harbour Club, and sets aside time to study something that isn’t work-orientated. “Like philosophy or classical guitar. People say learning is something you do at school or university, but I’ve never stopped learning, life is about learning all the way through.”
He is also trying to raise money to build a vocational school in Uganda. “I spent a bit of time in east Africa when I was younger, they’ve got an economy that’s shot to pieces and they need some long-term solutions. We want to take the drop-out kids and give them a basic education. That’s how I’m spending my money at the moment.”
