The Club(2)
It was now almost twenty-five years since Ned and his right-hand man, his brother Adam Groom, had crossed the Atlantic to launch their second club, the now-iconic Manhattan Home.
In the years and decades since, the Home Group had become a genuine global brand, a collection of eleven members’ clubs with attached hotel suites, all offering – for a hefty annual fee – the same comforting combination of down-to-earth luxury, effortfully understated cool and absolute privacy to the chosen few. There was Santa Monica Home. Highland Home. Country Home. Cannes Home. Hamptons Home. Venice Home. Shanghai Home. There were Homes in Malibu, in Paris, in Upstate New York. Each one in a jaw-dropping setting: a former embassy (Shanghai), a grand palazzo (Venice), a deconsecrated cathedral (Cannes), a restored country pile (Country Home, in Northamptonshire; Highland Home, in Perthshire).
Even so, nothing that Ned Groom had ever attempted was on anything like the scale of Island Home. A whole island, two miles across, two and a half miles long, ninety minutes’ drive from London, complete with neo-Palladian manor, acres of woodland and miles of beaches, ninety-seven individual guest cabins, five restaurants, three bars, several gyms, tennis courts, spin studio, spa, sauna, helipad, screening rooms, stables and heated natural outdoor swimming pool. All of it private property, accessible by land only at low tide along a twisting mile-and-a-half-long causeway. Despite the ￡5,000-plus-per-night price tag, before a single member had ever set foot on the sand, Island Home was booked solid for an entire year.
It was perhaps only to be expected, given the size of the place, given the ambition of what Ned Groom and his team were attempting, not to mention Ned’s legendary perfectionism, that not everything had gone quite according to schedule. First it had been due to open in the early spring, then the late spring, then the summer, then autumn.
For months, Home had been hiring staff – kitchen staff, front-desk staff, maintenance staff, waiters, housekeepers, a thirty-person events team, an eighty-person security team – and training them all in the particularities and peculiarities of working for one of the world’s most exclusive and discreet cliques, dealing with some of the world’s most particular and precious people.
For weeks, all hands had been on deck, inspecting and snagging and double-checking. To make certain that the cabins scattered around the island – each one composed of vintage timber reclaimed from hundreds of historical wooden barns, huts and sheds the design team had spent years sourcing and acquiring from as far afield as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia – were ready to receive their first overnight guests. To certify that the log-burners were correctly ventilated and weren’t going to suffocate anyone in their sleep. To ensure that all the lights switched on, all the toilets flushed, all the baths ran at the correct, thunderous water pressure, filling each cast-iron, claw-foot tub in under three minutes. To confirm that the winding gravel paths were clear and navigable, whether on foot or by bicycle, electric scooter or chauffeur-driven golf buggy. That sudden sharp drops and deep water and other natural hazards were clearly signposted. That, by the time the first members arrived, all the paint was dry, patches of splintered wood sanded, exposed wires tucked away, and that no one was going to get electrocuted or accidentally impaled.
In retrospect, perhaps any tragedy seems to acquire a sense of inevitability.
‘The final event of the launch, Sunday morning’s brunch, was meant to be the surprise highlight of the entire weekend,’ reports Josh Macdonald, one of six successive head architects to have worked on the Island Home project over the course of its eight-year gestation. ‘Ned was in an expensive arms race with himself – each new Home club had to outdo the last, with at least one extraordinary feature that made it unique: the Perspex-bottomed rooftop pool in Shanghai, the glass cube bar inside the ruined chapel at Highland Home. This time it was the underwater restaurant, Poseidon.’
The idea, says Macdonald, was inspired by a place where Ned had dined in the Maldives: ‘There’s a bar and an entrance at beach level with a view out across the water, over towards the mainland. When it’s time to eat, you cross a polished concrete bridge and then walk through a tunnel and down some steps and find yourself emerging into this vast room, like a giant fish bowl. In the middle of the room is the kitchen and bar, surrounded by tables and chairs, and out through the windows all you can see is the sea,’ Macdonald explains. ‘Shoals of mackerel. Clouds of blue jellyfish. The undersides of boats. The sunlight playing on the waves overhead. Ned wanted all that to be the last thing that guests saw before leaving the party, to ensure a truly lasting impression of Island Home, which everyone would be talking about for weeks to come.’
He certainly achieved that.
According to those who were there, the question most members were asking as they filed into breakfast on that final morning of the three-day party, nursing their hangovers, was: where was Ned? Usually at a launch like this he was omnipresent, telling jokes, making sure everybody was having a good time. Six foot four and solidly built, a former rugby player, a qualified barrister, he had a booming voice and a raucous laugh you could hear wherever you were standing in the room. Now, remarking on his absence, guests found themselves wondering aloud about the last time they had spoken to him. Speculating where Ned might be, gossiping about the events of the night before and the night before that, tucking into their egg-white omelettes, green juices and turmeric lattes, on the lookout for familiar faces, it was some time before anyone noticed anything peculiar out there in the water, beyond the curved plate-glass windows.