Independent, The (London), Oct 3, 2001 by Alice Woolley
Charles Style: When I was little I had this toy set of bricks and mortar that I played with, and I think I pretty much always wanted to be a property developer. My parents made most of their money by buying and selling houses, and I always took an interest. When I was 13 I sold our house to some people who viewed it. I always wanted to study architecture but my parents steered me towards the law.
My father has always been strongly entrepreneurial. When I was a boy he had his own business, photographing the swinging Sixties London scene, and then he moved us all to Brighton and became a bit of a hippy before going into antiques. I went to the City of London Polytechnic to study law but, like my father, I never really fancied having a nine-to-five job. So I dealt in antiques, buying things in Brighton and selling them in London.
I first worked with Spencer in 1982, when we opened the Starlight roller disco with our father in a former Irish dance hall in Hammersmith. We thought this was the start of a national chain but the fad fizzled out. Next we acquired an old cinema in Brixton for pounds 54,000, as everything was so depressed after the Brixton riots, and converted it into a club called The Ace, which later became The Fridge. We also converted an old iron foundry into Hammersmith Studios, a recording and rehearsal studio complex. Then my father took on a partner because he needed more investment, and it all went horribly wrong. He lost the business and went bankrupt. It was a salutary lesson to see how things could go from good to very bad.
Spencer went to America and I decided to train for the Bar. But by the end of the course I knew I would never make a good barrister, and that what I still wanted to do was develop property. First I bought a flat from Wandsworth Council and sold it; then another one, and then a house in Brixton, which I converted into three flats. The money involved was always small enough to scrape together.
In the late Eighties I started developing properties in north Kensington. It was all seat-of-the-pants learning. I had my own building team and we'd buy houses at auction and just go in and convert them. Then, in about 1992, I had a look at Docklands, and I was absolutely amazed at the property you could buy. In Bermondsey I found a 20,000sq ft warehouse on the river for pounds 250,000, the price of a relatively small house in north Kensington. I formed Angel Property to buy and convert it. At the time, I was running my business literally out of the back of my car. I didn't have an office.
Next I bought a listed warehouse in Wapping for about pounds 300,000, and converted it into shell apartments. Then came a piece of land on Butler's Wharf, the Boat House, which is 10 loft apartments, where I did my first new build. The first really substantial project was a school I bought in Stockwell from Lambeth Council. I converted it into 40 flats and built eight houses. It was hard to get bank funding for property and I used a small lender in Hendon, a father and son outfit called BM Samuels Finance Group. They helped me to get the business going.
By this time the business had become more complicated and was difficult for me to run on my own. I'm useless at all that. I ended up going to the Inland Revenue and saying "I've lost the receipts for pounds 1m of building work". I was just not cut out for it. And I was fed up with working on my own. Spencer had been in New York, in the film and music business, but four years ago he came home and was at a loose end, so I said to him: "Have a go with me." I didn't think too hard about bringing him in. It just seemed like a good idea because we've always got on pretty well. We also took on Kurt Little, who I'd known for 12 years. He's the MD and he runs the finances.
Spencer has creative, marketing and design flair which I don't have, and he's great with people. Our current big project, the Hartley Jam Factory in Bermondsey, would never have got off the ground without him. He got the head of Southwark Council, the council's head of regeneration and also the head of planning together. He got a commitment from them, which was quite remarkable.
The only thing is, Spencer tends to think everybody's marvellous. And he likes having meetings, whereas I prefer not to. The Hartley project got delayed by what I felt was verging on incompetence, but it ended up making money because the value of the site went up. I like to have a joke about that: Spencer's incompetence has made us lots of money, which is a bit cruel, but there's some truth in it. When we disagree I get the veto. Angel Property is built mainly with my capital, but Spencer has a profit-share on the jam factory and a salary, and he gets a stake on any project he instigates. When we did the deal, he had no capital to risk, and when he said, "we're going to get very rich", I had to say, "it's me who's going to get very rich, but you'll get quite rich". Spencer will do very well out of it, and he's earned it. But if you're not risking as much, you can't expect as much reward.
We've just finished a new building on the river at Limehouse called Phoenix Wharf, and we've converted the oldest listed warehouse in Butler's Wharf, which is called Wheat Wharf. We're doing well, but I'm not interested in building a huge property corporation and going for a flotation. What we want is to cultivate contacts with financial partners that will enable us to go for exciting new ventures.
I'm a compulsive property buyer. It's like a drug. When I see potential I can't resist it. Maybe I need to go to Property Developers Anonymous.
Spencer Style: When I left school I worked in the Old Masters department at Christie's as a porter. Then I went travelling around America, and spent a year in an art gallery in New York. I was also involved for periods of time with Charles. We used to buy and sell antiques together, and also with my father.
In the early 1980s we opened the Starlight roller disco, which we wanted to be a London equivalent of a place I knew in New York called The Roxy. That project got me involved in promotion and programming and I did tour management and promotions for classic reggae artists: Aswad, Black Uhuru, Jimmy Cliff, Dennis Brown. For three or four years I was on the road, promoting concerts. Then with a partner I opened a London venue called the Astoria, a redundant dinner/dance theatre, which is now a music venue and club.
After that, I spent five years producing and directing documentaries in New York, but when my partner and I had our second child, we wanted to come home. When Charles suggested I work with him, I liked the idea because most of my projects until then had been ephemeral. This would be creating things that would last.
When I first saw the jam factory, I phoned Charles, who was in Spain, and said: "It's fantastic! ... I want to get a contract straight away." And we had a huge row because he said: "Based on what?" We had a battle over the next two weeks. I had to show him the numbers stacked up. It's a very exciting project of about 250,000sq ft, 85 per cent of which was just used for storage. It was completely under-used.
Charles and I get on well, though I think he sometimes finds me infuriating. I feel I have an instinct for some things and he'll say: "How do you know that?" And I say I just know it. What makes Charles tick is always the next project. He's fearless and is always looking at where he wants to go. He has a low attention threshold, and that usually makes things fun.
We're both quite fiery. Both the infuriating and the attractive thing of working with family is that you can have huge rows and then just hang out together afterwards. People around the office can find that extraordinary. We have massive rows and then it's like: "What are you doing later then?" The most important thing has always been not to carry animosity into the next day. And we don't leave things unsaid, which is also liberating.