Now and again, in the evenings, you could make out through the trees the flicker of huge flaming torches, the front of The Manor illuminated in yellow or green or blue. There were even times, if the wind was in the right direction, when it was possible to imagine you could hear the crowd: their cheers, their whoops, their laughter. Their screams.
As well as celebrating Island Home’s grand opening, the lavish event also marked thirty years since the company’s CEO Ned Groom – one of hospitality’s great visionaries – had inherited The Home Club in Covent Garden from his grandfather and boldly set to work transforming it from a dusty and undersubscribed private drinking den for ‘actors, performers and other stage professionals’ into the modishly renamed Home, the most exclusive and talked-about London nightspot of the decade （that decade being the 1990s）， whose famous front-door superstars stumbled out of and straight onto the pages of the next day’s tabloids. Kate Moss had her birthday party there several years in a row. Kiefer Sutherland and his entourage were famously turned away one night. The entire cast of Friends took over the roof terrace for their final London press junket.
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.