ARCADIA


panoramic windows that provide views of rowers sculling along the Thames below. In fact, he’s more of a frontman. ‘Clubs al- ways have to have “A Person”,’ he says, in measured tones. ‘It’s not a role I usually in- habit. Actually, I’m not entirely comfortable being in the media. My friends are like: “You must be loving this – not.”’ Caring, who has worked on the project


through his hospitality consultancy Seven- gage, says he stepped up to the plate because there wasn’t a clear alternative. Fulham FC is owned by Shahid Khan, the extravagantly moustachioed Pakistani-American auto parts magnate who also owns the Jackson- ville Jaguars NFL team. Khan is reckoned to have a net worth of $13.3 billion. ‘As incredible as Mr Khan is,’ Caring says,


‘if [the private members’ club] was associat- ed directly with him as a person, people would think it’s for incredibly wealthy busi- nesspeople.’ Another option might have been Alistair Mackintosh, the CEO of the football club. But despite being contained within the structure of Craven Cottage, Light- house Social was never intended to have any explicit connection with the beautiful game. There are no special perks for Fulham sea-


son ticket holders and, with a large crèche and childcare on offer, there is a clear inten- tion to attract families. ‘It’s a neighbourhood club – a lot of people walk from their homes,’ Caring explains. ‘It needed to be proudly “Fulham” and representative of the fact that Fulham is a real mixed bag of people – differ- ent ethnicities, backgrounds.’ Though he won’t reveal what the targets


for membership numbers were, Caring says they have been exceeded since the club first opened in June and that there are on average 50 applications per week. The professional backgrounds of members are ‘incredibly di- verse’, although ‘We have had quite a lot of finance people apply. So some of them are on the waiting list because we don’t want it to be too “finance”.’ Membership fees are £1,200 per year; there’s a joining fee of £200. The interiors, which are the work of Paris- ian design studio Dion & Arles, might be de- scribed as members’ club maximalism with a modern edge. The setting helps to further distinguish it from other establishments, but some people assume that Caring’s father, Richard, the billionaire owner of a hospitality empire that includes Annabel’s and Mark’s Club, is involved. In fact, Caring says, Rich- ard ‘has never been here’.


‘He’s sort of vaguely aware of it, because


he saw the press. But if I said to him, “What am I working on at the moment?”, he would have forgotten. Because he’s got a huge com- pany that he runs, and this isn’t his focus.’ Father and son do sometimes team up, how- ever. ‘He’s an on-off client, so occasionally he’ll give me some feasibility work, because he’ll say that no one in his company can do it.’ Aſter graduating from the University of


Exeter in 1993, Caring did a brief stint at Vir- gin before joining MTV in 1994. It was the ‘dream job’ for someone who had loved mu- sic since he was a child. ‘When I was very young, my dad was


working all the time and travelling a lot, so it was me and my mum [his father’s first wife, Jacqueline]. My mum was a model, and so all her friends were other models and gay guys who would come around to the house. I learned how to put records on.’ One forma- tive experience was when a friend of his mother’s brought a record to the house that he said was the latest and greatest thing. ‘So we put it on. It was Lipps, Inc. Funkytown, okay? And so I remember, as a five- or six- year-old, people dancing around to this music.’ While his father was in Hong Kong build-


ing up his business in the rag trade, Caring became a boarder at Highgate School and remembers charging fellow students 20p a time to borrow cassettes from the vast hoard he kept in a locker. (Today he has 20,000 vi- nyl records and a similar number of CDs.) By incorporating a natural passion for mu- sic into his work, he progressed through the ranks at MTV and, by the time he leſt in 2008, had risen to head of talent and music for the business’s operations outside of the US. It was around this time that he got to know


Soho House founder Nick Jones. At that point, the business (in which Richard Caring held a significant share, and for which his brother Ben has also worked) had five clubs in London, one in Somerset (Babington House) and just one international outpost in New York. Over lunch, the pair agreed that Caring would use his background in ‘talent’ to come on board as commercial director. So he set about developing the club’s events programme, with pop-up parties around the Oscars, Baſtas, Toronto International Film Festival, Coachella and Frieze. Famous ac- tors, musicians and other celebrities would turn up and pose for pictures, which oſten showed off a brand that had paid to partner with Soho House. ‘That would be worth mil-


lions to [the brands], because they could syn- dicate that globally and be like: “Here’s George Clooney at the Toronto Film Festival serving drinks from behind the [branded] bar.” Those are money-can’t-buy pictures. And that drove huge public awareness of Soho House really for the first time.’ By 2015, things had moved on and, at an-


other of their ‘famous lunches’, Caring told Jones that, amid some structural reorganisa- tion at the company, he was considering leav- ing to start his own consultancy. Jones agreed to become its first client and the relationship continues to this day, with Caring consulting on the annual Soho House Festival. How would Caring describe Jones? ‘Fan-


tastically mercurial,’ he says. ‘He’s a perfec- tionist. And I think that’s meant that he’s cre- ated some unbelievable spaces, but also that, financially, things got kind of challenging.’ Aſter a tricky few years on the New York Stock Exchange, it was announced in August that the business, which listed in 2021, would go back into private hands via a $2.7 billion deal. Since starting his consultancy just over a decade ago, Caring has worked on around 70 projects – ‘women’s clubs, social clubs, co-work- ing spaces, kids’ clubs, family clubs, arts clubs, retirement living concepts’ – and is well placed to understand what works, and what doesn’t. ‘Clubs have to evolve,’ he says. ‘There’s a


reason why South Kensington club and Mor- ton’s [which closed in 2023 and 2020, respec- tively] and other places don’t exist anymore; they were stale and they’d lost their mojo.’ The hot new trend today is clear: ‘There’s


been a tsunami of wellness clubs,’ Caring says, also noting an appetite for ‘fractional ownership clubs’, which allow their mem- bers to buy a share in a collection of luxury items, such as supercars, watches or whisky. For his own part, he’s working on projects


everywhere from Texas to Malta and Korea, and with an Irishman who wants his help to revolutionise the concept of the golf club. But he has some stern advice for anyone


weighing up an entry into this competitive market: ‘A lot of people want to be the owner of a club. They want to host, you know? It’s an ego thing, there’s prestige and status. And, [people want to be able to say:] “I’ve got my own members’ club.” ‘Obviously you want to make a return,’ but


investors who want to make ‘20X or whatever’ should think twice. ‘If you want to get them right, clubs need to be about more than that,’ he says. ‘I think you’ve got to really want it.’


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116