If ever there was someone who doesn’t seem like a hotelier, it’s David Richards. For starters, the 61 year-old is a career businessman who made his name in the motorsport and automotive industries rather than hospitality.
Although a trained accountant, Richards’ personal passion lies in motorsports. In the 1970s, he became a rally co-driver and won the World Rally Championship in 1981. He then moved into management by setting up a company called Prodrive, which ran Subaru’s rally team that went on to win three consecutive titles.
Prodrive diversified into providing specialist engineering services and is now one of Britain’s leading automotive high-tech firms. In addition to running Prodrive, Richards has been the boss of two Formula One teams and is now chairman of luxury motor marque Aston Martin. So, with a career forged in the fast-paced world of the motor industry, how did he become a hotel owner?
Ironically, one of the biggest selling points of Richards’ hotel is its sleepy, laid-back style. The Idle Rocks is a 20-room hotel in a tiny fishing village in England that few people in the country, let alone outside it, have ever heard of. The village is St. Mawes and it is in the south-west region of England known as Cornwall, famous for its comparatively warm climate and rolling hills. Prince Charles owns a great deal of land there through his vast estate, the Duchy of Cornwall, but St. Mawes itself doesn’t take up much space. It has a population of just 1,000 and Richards admits that being tucked away is what attracted him to it.
“It is one of those rare, unspoilt villages,” he says. “So many others in the area are limited in their scale, because they are in a narrow little valley, or they are overbuilt so don’t look out on to open space. St. Mawes is not, as it is nicely spread out in an estuary and on the other side you look out on to land owned by Prince Charles’ Duchy of Cornwall.”
Richards was well-acquainted with the area as he has owned a house in St. Mawes for nearly a decade. The Idle Rocks straddles the seafront, making it hard to miss, and Richards says he noticed that over the years it had been neglected. “It enjoys one of the best and most prominent locations in the village and it was so sad to see it quietly fall into disrepair. It was a hotel that enjoyed such an incredible reputation not so many years ago. It therefore seemed like an obvious project to undertake and a new challenge.”
The hotel first opened in 1913 and its popularity peaked after the Second World War when St. Mawes became known as England’s answer to St. Tropez. Richards bought the hotel in 2010 for GBP 2.5 million (US $4 million) using loans from Swedish bank Svenska Handelsbanken, but he didn’t get involved straightaway. It was initially leased back to the previous owner until a break clause in his contract allowed Richards to step in at the end of last year, which gave him time to create a blueprint for his ideal hotel.
“I wanted a bit of thinking time. I needed to recruit the right people and I needed to understand what we were going to do with the place,” he says. One of the most important team members was on board right from the very beginning.
Richards’ wife Karen designed the interior of the hotel from scratch and says that, although she had previously worked on residential houses and some office projects, she had never done anything on this scale before. It certainly doesn’t show.
The hotel is crammed with nautical-themed objets d’art and paintings. Colourful oars are displayed in the corner of corridors, sea urchin shells are placed on top of uplighters in the rooms and instead of light shades, giant fishing cages hang from the ceiling in the lobby, making it seem as though the hotel is actually under the sea.
Just off the reception area is a cosy lounge connected to a long bar and dining room, which give on to a wraparound terrace. The hotel actually appears to be at sea as guests get a close-up view of the ocean through huge windows lining the bar, lounge and dining room. Completing the picture, the ground-floor corridors have slate floors and clapboard walls, giving them the air of a luxury beach chalet.
Friendliness is the order of the day when it comes to the service and the homely style is reflected in the activities on offer. It is a pleasure to sit on the terrace reading a book, watching the world go by and listening to the sound of the waves lapping against the rocks below. Locals often fish in rock pools and catch crabs in the harbour, which makes St. Mawes seem even more like it has come straight from the pages of a turn-of-the-century novel. Adding to this atmosphere from a bygone era, it is tough to get a mobile phone signal anywhere in the village, despite the hotel being equipped with a booster.
The food served in the restaurant at The Idle Rocks is local, with daily deliveries from Cornish fishermen. Seafood is, of course, the speciality with the signature dishes including moules (mussels) and poached lobster tail with leeks. Portions can be a little small, but the crunchy freshness of the ingredients more than makes up for that.
Richards himself can be regularly found entertaining friends in the restaurant, which reminds you that this is more than just a business to him. Well-established boutique properties succeed in giving guests the impression that they are staying in a luxury home rather than a hotel and The Idle Rocks manages to pull this off
in earnest.
Despite being a tiny village, St. Mawes has four hotels including Hotel Tresanton, which is owned by legendary hotelier Sir Rocco Forte’s sister, Olga Polizzi. Cut into the hillside, Hotel Tresanton has larger rooms than The Idle Rocks and a more formal atmosphere, but the two are clearly pitched against each other.
“We needed to have a differentiator,” explains Richards. “We looked at all the other places around us and we looked at the lifestyle of the people we were trying to attract. We didn’t want it to be positioned as a conventional hotel where people check in and are a guest; we wanted them to make it their own home.” Richards has taken this approach to a minute level of detail.
“There are certain things I have got phobias about. When I go into a hotel room and see little notices on tables I put them all in a drawer. My wife has got a phobia about TVs in rooms. She says they look ugly, so most of the TVs in our rooms are hidden behind a mirror. You don’t even know they are there unless they are turned on. It goes down to the detail of the telephones. I didn’t want conventional telephones because I just hate the things. But Bang & Olufsen do a very neat little stack telephone and they supply Aston Martin, so it was the natural choice.”
The renovation took nine months and cost around GBP 3 million ($4.8 million), with the hotel finally reopening its doors in June. The Idle Rocks previously had 10 more rooms, but they were removed to increase the average size. Walls were knocked through so plumbing and electricals could be installed from scratch before the walls were rebuilt. But it was not plain sailing as halfway through the process the lead contractor went bust due to the economic downturn, leaving Richards himself to co-ordinate the work.
The rooms are indeed free from clutter and have a phone that looks more like a space-age antenna than a device for making calls. They also have frills, the stuff of dreams for most travellers, including an abundance of plug sockets and one wireless router per room to ensure that the internet connection is never slowed down by traffic. The only niggles are that room doors don’t lock automatically when closed and, in Richards’ clutter-free world, you won’t find items such as room service menus and ‘Do not disturb’ signs. It also doesn’t come cheap, with doubles starting at GBP 180 ($288) per night.
Richards admits that his inspiration for the luxurious in-room touches has come from his travels all over the world. “I wouldn’t say that I have got one favourite hotel, I would say that I have got lots of favourite things about hotels around the world. We haven’t taken our lead from the grand hotels of the world like the George V in Paris. We have taken it from places that we feel comfortable and relaxed in, and I believe that is a style that people are moving towards.”
The light blue-and-white colour scheme of the bed covers matches the lampshades, the patterned curtains and even the complimentary stick of rock which is left on the bed by the turn-down service. Colour co-ordination isn’t the only recurring theme. The Idle Rocks logo is a reef knot that appears on everything from the letter-headed paper to the string tied around napkins to stop them from unfurling.
Drawing on his experiences in the motor industry, Richards created a brand guide for The Idle Rocks, which includes key images and colour schemes used in the hotel, as well as the themes for which it stands for.
“I spent a lot of time on the brand positioning and marketing of the hotel and how we wanted to present it, because I felt that was critical. That to me was key to the consistency of the way we decorated the place, the way we marketed ourselves, the way we recruited our staff, the food offering, everything we did. I’ve done it in other environments before, but never anything like this.”
Richards didn’t spend so much time on the brand positioning just for the sake of the hotel. He stresses that he isn’t planning to create a chain, but is considering applying The Idle Rocks brand to other products. “We are starting to look now at how extensions of this could be rolled out into other environments. It’s early days yet and that’s not something I’m going to rush into.”
Although the brand positioning may be the most visible evidence here of Richards’ experience in the motor industry, it isn’t the most important.
“One thing I am modestly competent at in life is building teams that are very effective, loyal and professional, with enormous attention to detail. I hope to create an environment where people will want to stay and become part of something special.
“We have got a young general manager, Josie Simcox, who is only 29 years old, but is particularly bright, and has won lots of trade awards and accolades in previous roles. She is going to build the team around her and I’m going to support her. You have to be as pedantic and as demanding as the customers, and you have to make sure that the staff realise that. It is all down to attention to detail and everything I have ever done is about that.” The Idle Rocks is certainly no exception.