At the art of it: Brian Clivaz

By Amanda Constance on January 30th 2010

Brian Clivaz is telling us about a documentary he made with the BBC about the Atkins diet. “It was terrible,” he recalls, “and incredibly tough, but I lost about 3.5 stone.” Was it enough to persuade the legendary bon viveur to become an ambassador for the dietary regime many swear by? “God no,” chortles Clivaz with a sizeable, fruity laugh. “The worst thing is that it all came back on incredibly quickly.”

Food and drink are what Clivaz does - and does well. As chief executive of the Arts Club in Dover Street, it is Clivaz’s job to make sure members enjoy the good life. As we talk in a corner of the bar, the larger-than-life Clivaz is restless. With preparations underway for a big lunch event, his eyes flick about the room. He downs one espresso and calls for another. He shifts his weight, leaning forwards into the conversation then falling back into the sofa, all the while picking frenetically at the cuticles on his thumb.

Founded in 1863 by Lord Frederick Leighton and Charles Darwin, Dover Street is the oldest arts club in the world, a point Clivaz is keen to press home. Chelsea Arts Club is, by comparison, a mere whippersnapper, founded in 1891 in the then suburbs of Chelsea by Dover Street defector James Whistler. In the 19th-century, the Arts Club on Dover Street was the creative hub for Victorian London and frequented by the major artists of the day. By the time Clivaz got involved, in 2004, however, it was a shadow of its former self, its membership dwindling at just 700 and threatened with closure.

“The Arts Club had failed to reinvent itself,” says Clivaz. “If organisations don’t evolve they collapse.” Clivaz was brought on board to bring back some of the razzle dazzle he has become famous for in the hospitality business. He enjoyed unprecedented success in the early Noughties as one of the co-founders of Home House; the Portman Square club fast became a byword for happening London as dotcom millionaires jostled to sign up and rub shoulders with A-list members such as Brad Pitt.

Clivaz denies he joined Dover Street as some sort of saviour. “I forced myself upon them,” he says. “I said this is a full-time job and someone’s got to do it.” When we meet, days before the start of a new decade, he seems very certain of where he wants the club to go and how he wants to achieve it. “This club will again be one of the premier clubs in London,” he asserts, attributing its recent troubles to an identity crisis. “We weren’t quite sure of ourselves, in the sense that we hadn’t the confidence to say we should rank with the likes of Brook’s, Boodle’s and The Travellers Club. We thought we were slightly in the second rank and therefore we had to be less expensive.”

Clivaz is only too aware that there is currently plenty of money swilling about, not just in the arts world but in Mayfair generally. He’s a great admirer of Richard Caring, the perma-tanned owner of Scott’s, J Sheekey and The Ivy who “does everything with panache”. Clivaz enjoyed a stint in charge of Scott’s himself; back then he was keen to spend half a million quid updating the restaurant but the purse strings weren’t his to control. Caring, on the other hand, was very much the money man when he bought the restaurant, spending £3million on refurbishing the interior and turning Scott's into the sexiest - and most successful - eaterie du jour. “He proved that if you spend the money, people will come,” Clivaz says.

Clivaz is confident the Arts Club can up its game. “The arts world is incredibly vibrant with lots of very exciting people. We need to have a vibrant and exciting atmosphere here in order to attract them”. To that end, the club has refinanced and is spending £3 million on updating the décor, furniture and the lighting.

It’s a facelift that’s long overdue. Some areas, such as the double-height, 18th-century library and drawing room, complete with a circular marble staircase, are stunning as they are. The Seventies mish-mash of a bar, in contrast, is an eyesore, as are the bowels of the building which house the cloakrooms and which wouldn’t be out of place in a neglected municipal building. Clivaz insists that the changes won’t be too dramatic: “We want to make it feel as if the club is an undiscovered treasure,” he says.

The five years it has taken Clivaz to reach this point have not been without controversy. The club is wholly owned by its members (each member owns one share) and many were not for turning when it came to modernisation. Clivaz is diplomatic about what he calls “an interesting challenge” but insists he has never gone for all-out change, rather a “quiet revolution”. “We’ve tried to keep everybody on board… what we wanted to do was to take the best of the past and build on it.” Nevertheless, one senses labour-intensive consensus building is not Clivaz's modus operandi.

Some changes have been more controversial than others. If last year’s sale

of the club’s freehold, for £17m, raised eyebrows, October’s sale at Bonham’s of a sizeable portion of the club’s back catalogue led to 15 members writing to Clivaz in protest. One, a Royal Academician, compared it to “selling the family silver”. In fact, the freehold was bought by a kindly member in order to finance the recent refurbishment, and the Bonham’s sale was roundly supported, not least by the Evening Standard art critic and club member Brian Sewell.

Clivaz won’t be drawn on disagreements, merely commenting that the world is full

of “lemons – sour and slightly bitter people who don’t like change and don’t like people enjoying themselves.” But, he says, there are also many “happy smiley people” and “we have more of them than lemons here”. One of Clivaz’s great pleasures has been witnessing some of the more sceptical membership slowly accepting the changes. “I love to see an older member, who at one stage would have complained bitterly about somebody using their phone, sitting in the corner chatting quietly on their mobile to their granddaughter or whatever.”

And it’s not as if Clivaz can’t handle himself when the going gets tough. At 51, he’s been around the block a few times since he started at the Dorchester in 1975. Since then he has worked in the grandest of grand hotels, in Paris, Dubai and Bermuda, plus

a stint as managing director of Simpson’s- in-the-Strand. He believes the best managers run both front and back of house. “It’s all about having a presence,” he says. “That’s what Chris Corbin and Jeremy King do so well, and Mark Birley was always a presence in his places.” Nick Jones of Soho House is another who comes in for praise; Clivaz once had plans to take Home House global, as Jones has done with Soho House. It was not to be and, forced out in a boardroom coup in 2004, today Clivaz seems caught between the idea that Jones cleaned up with “his” concept and a certain pleasure that his instincts were bang- on-the-money.

There is little time for self pity, however. If Clivaz is a glass half-full person generally, on the challenge of attracting contemporary young artists to Dover Street he is positively overflowing with enthusiastic plans. The club has recently rekindled relationships with a number of prominent art schools, including St Martins, Chelsea, Camberwell, Slade, and the Royal College of Art. The club offers a student membership of £100 a year (the normal annual fee is £1,000) and there are plans afoot for exhibitions of emerging artists. In 2013, the club will celebrate its 150th anniversary with, Clivaz says airily, “probably the biggest banquet in London”.

Thanks to Clivaz’s efforts, membership at Dover Street has already risen to 1,100, including such stellar names as Roger Daltrey, Ronnie Wood, Kim Cattrall and Antony Gormley. It isn’t these celeb members who rock Clivaz’s boat though; he is more interested in art and history and knows his stuff. Reeling off the names of the various artists whose works line the club bar, he takes pleasure from the sense of historical continuity. Simon Russell Flint is a member, as his grandfather William Russell Flint was before him. Leila Pissarro is another, following in the footsteps of her great grandfather, Camille Pissarro, as is Henry John, grandson of Augustus.

Mayfair is hotter than hot right now and Clivaz knows he’s on to a good thing. Despite living in Brixton, he seems very at home in W1. He says Mayfair is like a village, cheekily comparing Mount Street to the local high street, Scott’s to the local chippy and the Connaught to his own B&B. But will all the exciting new shops and restaurants be enough to lure the jeunesse away from edgy Shoreditch? “Wherever you’ve been successful in this business,” he says, rolling his eyes, “you always end up in the West End. It’s where all the money is.”

The Arts Club, 40 Dover Street, W1S 4NP, 020 7290 3550

www.theartsclub.co.uk

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