New opening


Geller Capital Partners and Loveday & Co, as well as being chancellor of University of West London, chairman of the Geller Commission on dementia care, and a noted philanthropist. After filling me in on some of the history


of the building that was transformed into Loveday Esher, Laurence explained how the house had come to Loveday’s attention. “It had number of owners,” he says. “It


was used for hosting weddings and grand events and parties. When a friend of mine bought it, she wasn’t quite sure what to do it. She came to meet me at lunch and decided [to work with us]. “It was a small house with wonderful


land, but it didn’t look like it did now. The garden at the back was similar, but the front was just a wasteland. We added a wing, and somewhere between 25 and 30 bedrooms. Then, as we were doing it, we were seeing the success of our post-surgery rehab at our other properties, so we decided ‘this is a business we want to be in’ and that’s when we decided to build the 20-unit rehab unit. “We saw the potential. We liked the


market. It fit with what we wanted, which is the affluent area, the house pricing … not particularly an older population, but a fairly mixed demographic. Somebody told me the term the ‘gin and jag’ set. I like that. “We’ve got a map in our offices of the


locations around London where we want to be, and this one fit the bill almost to a tee. It wasn’t just because it was the right location – we could make a statement. “We saw this initially as our country club


for our homes in London,” he continues. “We thought this would be a remarkable place for day out, and we wanted to make it a community hub. We wanted the community to use us for daycare, to come and see us, because the more activity the better. So Esher is an experiment, but it’s an experiment with others to follow as soon as we hit a certain level of profitability.” Laurence explains Loveday’s approach to


using a Grade II listed building: “The main house had been empty for a while. It had deteriorated. That didn’t worry us. What we asked ourselves was: ‘how do we live within the grade two listing and make it a functional care home?’.” He tells me that that differing flooring


levels were a particular issue, given the potential risk they could pose to elderly residents prone to falling or tripping, but it was a challenge Loveday was able to overcome as they rebuilt and refitted the property in order to bring it up to – and


Relaxed personalisation Membership sits at the core of the Loveday offering, and I wondered if Laurence might be concerned that other providers could ‘borrow’ the idea. In fact, as he explains the importance of Membership to Loveday, he seems intensely relaxed about this possibility. After all, with his long and extremely successful career in hospitality, Laurence is justifiably confident that while emulating the Membership concept would be, on the face of it, fairly straightforward, backing it up with the depth of experience and understanding that he and his team bring to the Loveday offering would be anything but. “First of all,” he says, “Membership is


exceed – the standards expected of a luxury Loveday residence. While Loveday was able to incorporate


some of the original features of the property into the end result, the core design ethos was to create a modern, cutting-edge facility, and not to ‘restore’ the building to its previous state by recreating design elements of a bygone era. As Laurence puts it: “The whole thing


has to feel new and modern. I don’t believe in faking things … that’s why the 1150 Club building is so modern – because we didn’t want to pretend that it fit in. It’s a lovely building, but it stands on its own. It’s not fake Tudor; it’s not fake Edwardian – it’s ‘real 2025’. “So we preserved the house beautifully. We


had to do certain things with staircases, which [the planning authorities] were fine with. But where we did the façade of the extension and the roof line – to be sympathetic and to fit in so it wouldn’t diminish from the main building – we didn’t pretend that it’s part of the original building. It feels like a continuum, but there’s no pretence.” In terms of modern innovation, Loveday


sank 39 bore holes under Loveday Esher, meaning that the home boasts ground source heating. “We have reduced our energy bill dramatically, and we’ve done something good for the environment,” says Laurence. I wonder if Loveday would consider using


another existing building in the future, given the challenges involved, but Laurence tells me that they would certainly do so, on the proviso that any such property would have to be a good candidate for the installation of the lifts, staircases, and level flooring required of a modern home.


16 www.thecarehomeenvironment.com October 2025


essential, because we want people to feel that they’re in a club. They can come and go; they can interchange between all our properties. They can come for the day, the week, the month, an hour. Come and just have lunch, you know? So that’s how I want it to be. And people can emulate it, but you’ve got to have that culture of service. “I have a would-be competitor in London


that thinks it’s all about the building,” he continues. “It’s not. It’s about the attitude, the style, the people – what you believe in. It’s a culture of relaxed personalisation. You can’t copy our culture – you’d have to develop your own culture.”


A deliberate pause With Loveday & Co surpassing themselves with every new residence, my final question for Laurence is simply: ‘what next?’ He tells me that while there are four or five deals in the pipeline, it was decided a couple of years ago – when it became clear that Loveday Belgravia and Loveday Esher would open very close to one another – that following those openings there would be a “deliberately planned” pause on subsequent openings “for at least a year”. “I have no doubt about Esher’s success,”


he tells me. “I have no doubt about Belgravia’s. We have a couple [of potential locations] in central London, and a couple outside of London in similar locations to Esher. But at the moment, my priority is to not only get Belgravia and Esher right, but bring up Loveday Kensington and Loveday Abbey Road to the same standards.” Loveday & Co have surpassed


themselves with Loveday Esher and it was an absolute pleasure to both visit the new residence and to chat with Laurence afterwards. As ever, I cannot wait to see what Loveday does next. n


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