From growing up in war-torn Andersonstown during the seventies to the £750m purchases of London's swankiest hotels is quite the journey but the story of how Paddy McKillen held on those establishments is an even greater adventure.
FROM LITTLE ACORNS: DC Exhausts advertising in Andersonstown News in January 1980
And now, as the Belfast-reared entrepreneur takes the wraps off a multi-million pound renewal of Claridges — which features a mining miracle inspired by the tunnels of the Viet Cong — he has been speaking out about his battle to retain three of the grandest hotels in the world.
Paddy McKillen's father, also Paddy, was well-known in West Belfast through his ownership of DC Exhausts on Kennedy Way. Indeed, his ad was a weekly feature in the Andersonstown News during the paper's early years. Paddy McKillen left Belfast in 1972 at the age of 16 to work in the family firm which became the first garage chain in Ireland and sold in the nineties for €25m.
Paddy McKillen's property portfolio spans four continents - from Argentina to Vietnam – while his Chateau La Coste (below) in France is both vineyard, hotel and art oasis.
After the 2004 acquisition of London's finest hotels, he grouped three of them together into the Maybourne company - The Connaught, the Berkeley and the grande dame, Claridges. A marathon battle with NAMA ensued when they tried to wrench control of the hotels in part=payment of €2.1bn in loans owned by McKillen. In 2011, the Supreme Court in Dublin ruled against NAMA which in turn set up a battle with two of Britain's richest men, the Barclay twins.
MINING MIRACLE: Paddy McKillen underground at Claridge's during renovations
During the Great Recession, the brothers had bought the loans with which the hotel had been acquired. "I left my iife and concentrated for five years on that," McKillen told the FT. "We lost everything. We never won a case in the courts, not one. They just got tired. They'd admit that now, 'How'd you stick it out? How did you keep going?' That's what their words were to me." Ultimately, the Emir of Qatar to underwrite the loan and partner McKillen in the development of the hotels. "They agreed to buy my shares at a premium to a certain level so I could clear all my debt, and I was still able to hold 36 per cent on the upside," says McKillen. " I got a different type of deal with the Qataris, and now I am the sole manager and boss."
Efforts to double the size of Claridges by going underground confounded the five largest engineering companies in the world until McKillen experienced a Eureka moment when visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels of Vietnam, built by the Viet Cong during their war with the US. "Vietnamese farmers dug those tunnels buy hand with spoons," McKillen told the FT. "They build hospitals and schools down there. And that's how they defeated the Americans, with this network of tunnels. I can back and said, 'are you saying we don't have the technology to do the same under Claridges's?"
Shortly thereafter, in 2015, 75 miners arrived from Donegal to begin work on the most ambitious hotel extension in London in over a century. Five years later and the results of the endeavours of the famed Arranmore tunnel tigers are a sight to behold. Says the FT: "There are dizzying views from the tops of stairwells that corkscrew down 33m (deeper than the building was tall) beneath the London streets; cavernous concrete halls destined to become swimming pools and treatment rooms...Take a right turn and you might end up in a brick-clad, loft-like space with windows cunningly illuminated to mimic daylight boasting a gnarled, centuries-old olive tree and seating for 100; the staff restaurant. Take a left and you find yourself in an oenophile's Elysium, with bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti stacked floor to ceiling."
HOSPITALITY AT HEART OF HOTEL: The main reception room at Claridge's
Amazingly, the hotel, dubbed "the best in the world" by Harper's Bazaar, didn't close for even one day during the renovations.
His drive to provide the final word in hospitality to guests from around the world remains undiminished by Covid-19. And his advice to staff harks back to his upbringing in Andersonstown and his belief that a sense of family is at the heart of what he does.
He tells his staff, says the FT, that if in doubt, they should think back to what their mother would have them do.
