In the last week of January 2024, administrators from Interpath Advisory were appointed over one of Mayfair’s largest residential schemes. The developer behind 60 Curzon Street had defaulted on £315 million of debt.
Brockton Capital, the development manager, was out. Apollo Global Management, holding the paper, needed someone to take a half-built building off its hands and turn it into something saleable.
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Alex Michelin’s telephone rang. “‘Alex, we’ve just taken this thing over’,” he recalls. “‘I need the best developer in London’.”
He had worked with the lender before, years earlier, on a different scheme; this was the whole of the qualification Michelin needed to take the mandate.
It’s a project he puts at roughly £600 million gross development value (GDV), and an acquisition for Valouran, a business he and co-founder CFO Matthew Robertson and had launched in June 2023.
It’s a pattern Valouran has repeated since, and one that looks decidedly less like luck and more like a blueprint that’s up-ending the super-prime model.
Unpacking a figure that defines institutional trust
Valouran Partners LLP was incorporated in March 2022 and began trading publicly in June 2023. Michelin remained a partner at Finchatton, the firm he co-founded 26 years ago with school friend, Andrew Dunn, until February 2024.
Little over three years from launch, Valouran has around £4 billion of property assets under management – a figure described as unprecedented, and which is worth parsing carefully, because assets under management is not the same as assets delivered.
The intent was institutional from the outset. Finchatton had been built on private-client work – “brilliant little private client jobs,” as he puts it – interior design for high-net-worth owners, a business he is careful to say is still doing very well.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve built with Finchatton,” Michelin has been quoted previously in 2024. “But I felt it was the first part of the book. For the past three years previous, I’ve had the feeling that I wanted to do more. It was time to move on to the next chapter.”
And Valouran was born. The Marylebone-HQ’d firm has been positioned deliberately elsewhere, as in Michelin’s words, towards “the institutional-grade real estate developer for residential in London”, the counterparty of choice for funds, banks and private equity houses.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve built with Finchatton, but I felt it was the first part of the book. For the past three years, I’ve had the feeling that I wanted to do more – it was time to move on to the next chapter”
Alex Michelin, Co-Founder & CEO, Valouran
His own background in investment banking has served as foundations for a business philosophy he describes as somewhat spreadsheet-driven. It’s not quite as binary in reality but linguistic; it gave him the vocabulary to talk to capital in its own language and a deep understanding of the behaviours that motivate it. What he did not plan for was the form this institutional business would take.
“What I hadn’t expected was obviously we were in this sort of downturn in the market,” he says. “And I wasn’t expecting to have people actually just call me and say, I’ve got something and I need your help.”
The distinction matters. Valouran aimed at institutional capital and was met by institutional distress. Its two largest mandates – 60 Curzon Street for Apollo, and The Broadway, a scheme in St James’s he puts at around £1 billion, for First Abu Dhabi Bank – are both assets that arrived broken. Neither was originated by Valouran but came from lenders who already knew him.
Michelin has formed a reputation among his ultra-prime peers for being one of the most formidable business minds in the sector; singularly bloody-minded in his approach to negotiaon but also sensitive to navigating the nuances of taste-making. It’s this kind of reputation that affords a playmaker immense institutional trust when it comes to sharp end of dealmaking.
Michelin has a phrase for the mechanism: “relationship equity”. Deals done cleanly a decade or 15 years ago, he argues, compound into mandates now – and he is disarming about how much of Valouran’s growth he attributes to it rather than strategy. The First Abu Dhabi Bank relationship makes the point precisely.
FAB was the lender on Twenty Grosvenor Square, which Michelin converted into the world’s first standalone Four Seasons private residences, and completed years before Valouran existed.
He is also clear-eyed about the second reason the phone rings, which is that fewer people are answering it. London has taken sustained damage to its standing since Brexit, he says, and a number of developers have simply left the market. Those remaining are, by his account, both fewer and better.
“We’re one of the last men standing,” he says, “and we’re very good at what we do.”
Where the convictions were formed
Two beliefs run underneath everything Michelin says, and they’re the touchstone that centres Valouran’s mission.
The first is you cannot outperform by buying what the market has already agreed is good.
“It’s difficult to make a lot of money just by going to the places that everyone knows are prime already,” he says, “and buying something that everyone knows is available in the marketplace and doing the obvious.”
Quoted as being a fan of Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial spirit (but not necessarily the strata of wealth he represents – “no one in the world deserves to have a trillion dollars”), he makes the analogy of Tesla stock – obvious now, lucrative only to those who took the risk a decade ago.
“The first belief Michelin says Valouran was founded on is that you cannot outperform by buying what the market has already agreed is good”
His worked example is Twenty Grosvenor Square. A consortium including Finchatton acquired the former US Naval Headquarters in May 2013 for a reported £250 million, out of the long tail of the financial crisis, on a judgement that the market was about to turn.
Six months later, Lodha exchanged contracts on No.1 Grosvenor Square, across the square, at £306 million.
“Exactly the same building,” Michelin begins. “Same basic four floor plate.” Lodha’s, he points out, carried commercial space and a more complicated development process. The scheme Finchatton went on to deliver became the world’s first standalone Four Seasons private residences.
The second belief is that the building is not the product. The street is. “We didn’t want to be known as a developer,” he says. “I think that has connotations. We prefer to call ourselves ‘placemakers’, as we are trying to make new places for the community.”
The proof of it is Queensway, and it’s the most concrete thing in his career. At The Whiteley – the Foster + Partners reimagining of London’s first department store, delivered as a joint venture between MARK and C C Land with Valouran now as development manager – Michelin brought in Six Senses as the hotel brand on a deliberate read of where demand was heading. Then he went considerably further than his own site boundary.
He convened the street’s landowners into the Queensway Steering Group. The road was taken from two lanes to one, with council approval. Pavements were widened. Fifty-six trees were planted, benches installed, street-cleaning doubled.
Planning was secured for new gates into Hyde Park at the top of the street – which Michelin describes as restoring a flow of energy from the park back down through Bayswater. Retail was curated rather than let: a deli, a supermarket, hairdressers, dog grooming, with chain operators refused outright in favour of independents.
Agencies and advisory networks have universally approved, citing the re-energising effect the influx of luxury retail and institutional investment has had on Bayswater. Some market agents, as they’re want to do, have even tried offering up a new sobriquet for the area, “The Bay”.
More importantly, there has been an overwhelmingly positive reaction to retrofit-first methodology Valouran champions, noting that preserving historical structural elements while inserting high-spec contemporary design helps future-proof central London’s aging architectural stock.
“Michelin believes the reasoning is unsentimental, describing the resident's journey from the taxi door rather than the front door – what they see, smell, whether there is birdsong, all before the interior registers at all”
Michelin believes the reasoning is unsentimental, however, describes designing the resident’s journey from the taxi door rather than the front door – what they see, what they smell, whether there is birdsong, what colour the light is, what is visible through the window before the interior registers at all. He calls the result a subconscious emotional reaction, and he has a number for it.
Residences at The Whiteley have traded at an average of around £3,600 per square foot. A hundred metres away, across a square he concedes is “perfectly nice”, apartments go for closer to £2,000.
“It’s still a very nice apartment,” he says. “But it’s just not the same. And people are willing to pay for that placemaking.”
Luxury has long been associated with exclusivity, while mainstream design has often been shaped around the idea of the ‘average’ user. Yet the assumption that one design can meet the needs of most people has always been flawed, because there is no such thing as an ‘average’ person.
The truth is that no two people experience the world in exactly the same way, and the environments we create should reflect that reality. As our understanding of people’s diverse needs and expectations evolves, the future of luxury design lies not only in designing for the few or the many, but in creating personalised and inclusive experiences that recognise individual needs.
This shift also challenges our traditional understanding of luxury. Increasingly, luxury is not defined purely by having the most exclusive materials, or the grandest experiences, but by having choice.
What the buyer wants, and who he builds for
Ask Michelin what has changed most in what ultra-high-net-worth buyers want, and the answer is not space, security nor address.
“Today it’s really about wellness,” he says. “People are obsessed about living longer, being healthier, looking younger.”
He tracks the shift through his own order of enquiry. A decade ago the questions were about technology and the master suite. Now, he says, the gym is roughly question number two – followed by the spa, the treatment rooms, the ease of getting blood work done.
He is candid that his market functions as a leading indicator rather than an outlier; Crestron home automation, for example, was a super-prime specification long before it reached the mainstream, and wellness is following the same path down the demographic. He points to his own circle, all of them wearing Whoops and Oura rings.
Michelin is equally willing to say where the sector overshot, too. Home automation went too far, he believes, saying buyers ended up demanding systems so complex and tedious to use they asked for them to be ripped out again.
But the more interesting change is that homes are getting smaller, and Michelin gives two reasons for it.
The first is most certainly cost. Buyers who once wanted 5,000 square feet now take 3,000; those who wanted 2,000 take 1,000. “I think that’s a lot driven by tax, to be fair,” he says. “Wealth taxes and the sort of perceived risk of tax increases in the UK.”
“He is equally willing to say where the sector overshot, too. Home automation went too far, he says, as buyers ended up demanding systems so complex and tedious to use they asked for them to be ripped out again”
The second is – and perhaps more speculatively – conscience. Describing the same contraction later in the conversation, he casts it as the successor to stealth wealth – a post-financial-crisis retreat from overt display that has hardened into something closer to ethics.
A client who could comfortably buy 10,000 square feet in Mayfair takes 5,000 instead: “As much as I can afford it – I could have it if I wanted to – it’s just sort of not the socially responsible thing to do.” He cites a buyer currently asking him for an off-grid London house with no carbon impact, a brief he concedes is close to impossible.
This is the core contradiction at the heart of a deeper discourse about UHNW behaviours and belief systems – how do you spend it ethically?
The same buyer is described as fleeing UK tax exposure, possibly by private jet, but when buying a home is willing to spend big on premiums that allow them to minimise their carbon footprint.
Better yet, the desire to cut the amount square footage in a primary residence in one of the world’s most concentrated cities, resembles something close to embracing restraint.
What is not in dispute is the operational consequence, and Michelin has watched it happen unit by unit. At The Whiteley, buyers arriving for five-bedroom apartments repeatedly bought three.
“There’s a hotel here,” Michelin says. “So when the in-laws come to stay, we’re just going to put them in the hotel. It’s down the corridor.” Why hold two bedrooms used four days a year at Christmas? That is also the logic behind his rule on brand partners, which is narrower than the market’s.
Michelin will work with hospitality operators and not with anyone else. Four Seasons, his partner at Twenty Grosvenor Square, understood residential service in a way he says he has not found elsewhere – decades of institutional knowledge about how to greet people, embedded rather than hired.
“People are just sticking any brand on any building and thinking it’s going to add a premium,” he says.
He is scathing about the alternative. Certain football- or automotive-themed residences in the Middle East both are drawn into the firing line, as does the penthouse of a new-build development with haute-couture-branded interiors.
It’s this, he states, is the thing likely to have a negative impact on stakeholder reputations, as there is little to no cross0ver in operational benchmarks between brand and developer – “You cannot hire a stranger and expect them to run a building to that standard,” he says.
His prediction is a shakeout, and buyers who paid for a badge may well discover that expectation does not actually meet with reality in the end.
Whether the Valouran model travels
The Queensway thesis was proved on a scheme Michelin helped shape from the beginning, but The Broadway, in St James’s, shows another path of travel.
Valouran did not design it and did not originate it; it inherited a building where the offices were half let, the ground floor had no retail at all, and the whole thing lacked, in his phrase, any sense of place.
The intervention was the Queensway method applied retrospectively. Again, trees were planted and art installations dot the street. Retail curated for footfall and texture rather than covenant strength – Farmer J, Atis, a barber, the American chain Coyu Taco, which he notes with some amusement is the exception to his own rule about chains.
“At 60 Curzon Street the bones were sound… what was missing was the cultural soft touches that make a building feel like it was intended rather than assembled”
He describes the result as busy and vibey, with the offices now let bar a single floor and the retail fully taken.
At 60 Curzon Street the problem was different. The bones were sound – the architecture, the room sizes, nothing was intrinsically wrong. What was missing was the finish and the culture: interior design, taste, the soft touches that make a building feel like it was intended rather than assembled. Valouran reworked the interiors, made structural alterations and brought in a restaurant operator.
He puts the sales that followed at around £270 million. Michelin is clear that this is a filter, not an appetite. “We won’t take on any project,” he says. “That’s not how we work. We have also turned down a lot.”
The £4 billion bet that isn't settled
Among others, this leaves Bishops Avenue Gardens, a marquee scheme in the Valouran portfolio that is entirely of Michelin’s own conviction.
He says he has watched the street across his whole career. He describes its peak – Billionaires’ Row, vast plots, vast gardens, and a global buyer class that wanted exactly that. Then the trend inverted.
Wealth moved inward, to Mayfair and Belgravia, to being close to the action; living at the edge of the city stopped signalling status and started signalling distance from it. The mansions emptied and, mostly, came down.
His case for going back is positional rather than unromantic: Kenwood, the Heath, five minutes into Hampstead; golf clubs, schools on the doorstep; Heathrow on the doorstep for a quick escape.
“Michelin has watched Bishops Avenue his whole career. He describes its peak – Billionaires' Row, vast plots, vast gardens, and a global buyer class that wanted exactly that. Then that trend inverted”
Land along the road has been bought up by apartment developers, but he believes the street’s misfortunes turned for no obvious reason and will soon recover.
“It’s one of those roads that kind of fell down a little bit,” he says. “There’s no real reason for it – there’s no intrinsic reason.”
It is, on his own framework, the Tesla trade – the uncomfortable purchase made before the market agrees. Bishops Avenue Gardens launched its first show apartment weeks before this conversation.
Interest, he says, has been very strong. Buyers are lined up and two units have already sold. “Touch wood,” he says. “You have to take these bets. That’s how you outperform.”
