In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To read or re-read the first four chapters of French Reconnection, please follow the link at the bottom of this piece.
Miles above all: Copeland and the Beaujolais party
Although Miles was omnipresent by fax and telephone, he only came to the office irregularly. As John Sanders was going to be in Spain from now onwards, this only left one other senior person to colleague with. But this was no ordinary human being. This was Marc Copeland, a larger than life, confident South Londoner, the Harry Redknapp of Paris property, who loved the feel of the deal and had become an industry expert in retail warehouse and light industrial developments.
Marc took me under his wing to some extent and cleverly tried to get me onside in the office politics dividing his department and ours. In order to do this he had to juggle the numerous chips on his shoulders. He was all too conscious that John and I had somewhat posh accents, at least compared to his. Furthermore, we dealt in snobby Haussmanian offices while he trawled around in the suburban mud of the industrial property world. We had our well-heeled investor partners to finance our schemes, while he had to negotiate with the grubby little banks. So as attack is the best form of defence, he was always taking the piss out of us.
He taunted us for being speculators in high-value square metres, not real property developers
He taunted us for being speculators in high-value square metres, not real property developers. He informed us that we managed the construction side of refurbishment projects like amateurs and only made the huge profits we made due to massive yield compression. He was always good humoured in his banter and he wasn’t wrong. During the period of 1987-1990, prime Paris office yields went from 6.5% down to 4%. This meant our results were consistently fabulous while his were merely impressive, as he slaved away with ruthless efficiency and great project-management skills in a market segment where yields stayed stubbornly at 10%. He also took the piss out of John being officious and ponderous. Marc would proclaim loudly, to anybody who was prepared to listen, that if John noticed fire had broken out in our offices he would react by sending a memo to his secretary asking her to deal with it while everything burnt to a cinder around him.
This was funny but very unfair on John who, while he didn’t like to rush things, was very strong technically. He was one of life’s gentlemen in every sense. He was kind, generous, efficient, organised and, above all, elegant. After leaving Ciprim’s Paris office, he would make a new life for himself in Spain and help Miles complete some highly successful office renovation deals in Madrid CBD. John, who became a dear friend, will reappear with me in the late 90s at Hammerson, in a future chapter.
Meanwhile, Marc also never missed a trick to offer us his help on projects, delighting in bringing us down to his level of dodgy but highly creative bending of rules and regulations. In one magnificent but rundown building we acquired in the rue Ballu, in the old insurance district of Paris 9ème, we wanted to find a way to add additional space to a 200m² showroom with a 4.50m floor-to-ceiling height. The easy construction solution would have been to build a mezzanine floor, but planning regs meant we couldn’t add space within the building if we didn’t remove it elsewhere in the same building. Well, apart from a few square metres here and there we simply couldn’t do that. Two days before the Ville de Paris listed buildings department were due to inspect the building, Marc had a brainwave. “Some of my lads will go in and build a simple, metal-framed mezzanine right now so the planners think it’s always been there and then we get to keep the new floor area and rebuild it later. QE fucking D,” he declared, in the sort of tone of voice that doesn’t invite any disagreement.
“Er… Won’t that look rather suspiciously new?” Miles queried.
“Nah,” said Marc. “We’ll send Oliver down there with a couple of bottles of red and some cigarette ends and he’ll make it look old.”
We all looked at each other non-plussed, but a couple of shrugs of shoulders later and it was a done deal and I had been given a new job, sub-contracted to Marc’s devious planning team. The next day Marc sent in a team of builders and they threw up a flimsy-looking mezzanine in no time. It did, however, look dazzlingly new and I knew I was going to have my work cut out. Arriving early, armed with some cheap wine, sand paper, cigarette ends collected from the the office ashtrays, a hammer and a screwdriver, I set to work pouring, crushing, kicking and scraping till there was enough damage done to suggest that at the very least the thing had not been put up the day before, even though it had been. When the Ville de Paris planning inspector arrived I was dreading turning the corner into the room with the mezzanine. When we finally did so, the inspector stopped in his tracks and lowered his reading glasses.
“Putain, qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” which can best be translated as “What the **** is that?”
I had learned another trick I wouldn’t have found in the Chartered Surveyor’s handbook
I gulped and garbled some sort of ridiculous reply about the old occupiers occasionally using the space for audits. The inspector looked at the low-beamed roof and said something about dwarves. I laughed nervously. He moved on. Marc’s mad plan had worked and I had learned another trick I wouldn’t have found in the Chartered Surveyor’s handbook.
Marc also enjoyed life to the full, particularly where eating and drinking were concerned. He had started by leaving his Sarf London origins behind and marrying into a family of gourmet chefs. He developed a tremendous knowledge of good food and wine, would always hold court over lunch at fine restaurants in the Paris West End and was marvellous company. He knew all the best places to eat in some of the most unlikely corners of that city and also in the provinces, where it seemed he had a member of his in-laws’ family running a restaurant in every village. He generously invited me out to lunch on numerous occasions. In 1988 he also created one of the best-known institutions in the Paris real estate world, the Beaujolais Party.
Marc had the idea of using a company building site, in the first instance an office building we were in the middle of refurbishing on the Place d’Iena, to hold an informal knees-up to discover the new Beaujolais on its arrival on the third Thursday in November. We invited just about everybody we knew in the real estate market. To the conservative Parisian real estate community, this was unconventional but a lot of fun. Ciprim’s (and Marc’s) reputation as serious, successful and fun-loving in the relaxed British way was set in stone or, rather, it had its feet stuck to a Beaujolais-covered concrete floor. By the late 1990s the Ciprim Beaujolais party had grown from these small beginnings to massive gatherings of thousands of enthusiastic property people. The morning before the Beaujolais party was one where you cleared your diary, put a tube of paracetamol in your pocket and headed off to do at most two hours work.
At Ciprim we joked that the main company strategy, no, the only company strategy, was to make sure we had a new building in its ‘brut de béton’ state and suitable for a Beaujolais party in our portfolio every November. There were some fantastic venues in the early days. In 1989 we held the party in the old Dolfus Mieg HQ in Rue de Rivoli. We had just acquired this building in partnership with Norwich Union and after renovation it was to host a wonderful Marks and Spencer store, conveniently close to where I subsequently lived for a few years. The floor plates were quite small and the crowds arriving at lunchtime were huge. The usual grim Beaujolais Nouveau was doing the rounds and giving everybody a brief euphoric high before homing in to destroy any brain cells it could find.
By 2.30pm the place was packed. I found myself chatting to Marc, congratulating him on another rip-roaring Beaujolais party, when we both heard a groaning noise. Looking across the main room, it felt like the earth was moving. This wasn’t another side effect of the wine, but rather the floorboards beginning to bounce like a trampoline, the first signs of structural failure. In a cold sweat, Marc whispered that we had better start to get people out of the building or we were going to have a disaster on our hands. It was already well after 4pm. We shared our concerns with colleagues and then all started to usher away inebriated estate agents and bankers from the crowded floor. We kept as calm as we could. The guests left, the floor remained intact and, as a result, so did we. That last glass of Beaujolais we drank after all the guests had dispersed was the best one I’ve ever tasted.
