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, Miles d’Arcy Irvine, helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To catch up with the first four chapters, please follow the link at the bottom of this piece.

Miles above all: the Haussmann Tronchet project

In my time at Ciprim we worked on some fascinating projects. One was a collection of buildings on the Boulevard Haussmann, which we refurbished in partnership with Rodamco, including a ‘hôtel particulier’, Le Beauharnais, where Napoleon’s Josephine used to live. We commissioned L from my Hampton days to arrange the eviction of a dozen tenants, mostly ground-floor shops, a plan which he contrived to nearly ruin by being too nice.

One devious occupier of a small top floor flat sold him a tragic sob story, got L to pay him an eviction indemnity from L’s own money up front and then refused to move out. L was a more convincing actor in other cases though. He had to pretend to be a hairdresser when attempting to buy an option to acquire the hairdresser’s business, then a restaurateur when negotiating the purchase of an option to buy the café-bar lease round the corner. This went on for eight different shops. L became a master of disguises. In the end we succeeded in buying out all but two of the shops without being blackmailed by those who might otherwise have seen a massive and lucrative real estate deal behind all this.

On this project I got to work with Rodamco’s mercurial Joost Bomhoff, who was always excellent company on his many visits to Paris. He savoured being involved peripherally, with no direct responsibility, in some of the darker arts all property developers need to be able to deploy. He also enjoyed a good dinner at one of Paris’s finest, like Lloyds near our office, or the Grand Vefour. I have to admit, to my mild shame, that in one of the buildings we were trying to vacate, we did plan to adopt some underhand tactics. It was an office tenant who occupied 250m², the whole of one floor. We never saw more than three people in the premises whenever we went up to negotiate their departure and we surmised that the business was on its last legs. However this was far from being good news. The tenant had realised early on that our project depended on vacating the building entirely – and quickly – and deduced that if they played for time and hung around ending up as the last tenants in the whole complex, they might benefit from being paid off with far more money than they were earning through their regular business. When we twigged this was indeed their plan we tried to be all Stan Flashman about it but – perhaps thankfully – ruthless behaviour just wasn’t in our DNA. The worst we did to them was to cut off the lift for a few days and Joost reluctantly refused my suggestion to introduce rats into the building. Every time we went to see the tenants they just smiled knowingly and told us they didn’t need a lift anyway and, just in case, they were actually quite fond of rats. Then they kindly repeated their demands for an obscene amount of cash in order to vacate the premises. In the end we bowed to their determination and elegance and paid up. It hardly affected the overall profitability of the scheme. 

One of my early tasks on this project was to communicate in a friendly and professional way with the remaining two ground-floor retail tenants, who had resisted L’s charms and decided to stay on during the works. They needed constant reassurance. This was a major challenge, because the refurbishment was going to consist in digging out underground car parking below them and all around them. It was going to be noisy, dirty and customer-unfriendly. Moreover, one of the tenants was a luxury dry cleaner, Parfait (élève de Pouyane), and the other a specialist retailer of ivory products, Aux Tortues, whose shop on the corner of Blvd Haussmann and Rue Tronchet was a Paris landmark.

The Aux Tortues man was a delicate soul, whose default mental states seemed to oscillate between extreme anxiety and mild terror. He was all but petrified as to what might happen to his beautiful shop. I must have gone there about a hundred times to reassure him that all would be fine, that he could trust us completely. Then, on the day the building site opened, he phoned me, so hysterical he could hardly speak, to say that water was pouring in through the ceiling onto his shop floor and ruining his antlers. I didn’t dare go back in person to see the damage in case he impaled me on a damp tusk. In the end, calm returned and we made peace. The shop was sold a few years later and a comparatively banal Paul bakery now occupies the memorable old corner site. At least the listed buildings people insisted the shop frontage had to remain so you can still see the beautiful old Aux Tortues signage if you go past the corner of Haussmann and Tronchet. 

Compared to this drama, at least my relationship with the luxury dry cleaner was an unequivocal success. They agreed to let us move them twice around the ground floor and basement areas so we could refurbish around them. They gritted their teeth and coped with the disturbance, the pneumatic drilling and the dust, and never complained. In return we compensated them generously. This arrangement, which made life easy and agreeable, was another good lesson for younger me in how best to live life and do business. Mme Attal, the manager, was simply delightful to work with, friendly, constructive and helpful. They are still in situ today at 55 Blvd Haussmann.

A few years ago, 25 years after all this happened, I was walking past and decided on a whim to pop in and see if by chance Mme Attal was still there. The ladies in the shop said she had retired to the countryside five years earlier. They promised to pass on my good wishes. A few weeks later I got a card from Mme Attal, fondly reminiscing about what were, despite everything, good times. She thanked me again for having looked after them so well. I replied in kind and thanked her for making my job at the time both enjoyable and easy, and providing me with the valuable lesson that a happy life is made up of episodes like this. Sadly, I never enjoyed the same reminiscences with the man from Aux Tortues, probably still having nightmares about his flooded ivory collection 25 years later.