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: miles ahead

At Ciprim, I enjoyed many other formative moments, such as when Robert Lipscomb, then of Healey and Baker, came with a colleague to measure up our 90 rue de Courcelles project for a tenant. After an excruciating two hours watching them measure every nook and cranny, and take copious notes, I spotted something shining on the measuring tape. It was a staple. Something had ripped apart the tape and somebody in the H&B office had intelligently thought to staple the two ends back together without thinking that the missing 43 centimetres might give the instrument an inherent inaccuracy. Robert turned a dark shade of purple and left muttering his apologies, promising to return to remeasure the whole building once he’d found and sacked the culprit. 

On another occasion we bid together with Rodamco for a beautiful Haussmanian building to renovate on the Boulevard Malesherbes. Having come in the top three bids, we were given a further few days to submit a final offer. Rodamco got board approval for this increased offer and we were preparing to submit it when we were tipped off by our advisor that our increased bid was going to be a few thousand short of what would win it. Given that the pricing was in the region of 300m Francs (€50m) a few extra thousand didn’t seem a big step to take. Miles urgently contacted Rodamco and told them we needed a final effort of 10 thousand francs. With a prize-winning display of downright stubbornness, they replied one hour later saying that they would not budge even one centime out of principle. Their final bid was a final bid. We were horrified. Miles insisted we all jump on a plane to Rotterdam, rush to their offices and plead. This we did. We begged. We argued the case. We urged them to go the extra wedge. We even offered to pay the extra money and revise our partnership terms. There was nothing doing. We flew home deflated and a few days later we heard we had lost the tender for the sake of a few thousand miserable Franch francs. It was gutting. However, although I didn’t express it at the time for fear of being lynched, I had a quiet respect for the principled obstinacy of our partners.

Behind all these stories stands the tall, imposing shadow of one man. Miles d’Arcy Irvine. He was, after George Kendall, the best mentor I ever had the luck to be able to learn from. He was striking physically. Not particularly tall, he had a mop of blond hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was invariably to be seen wearing a navy blue Ralph Lauren blazer, grey flannels and a red tie. He always wore lashings of Ralph Lauren after shave. Quick of mind and wit, an authoritative leader, charming when required, ruthless and outspoken on other occasions, always available to work collaboratively on a project or problem, full of good advice for young me, it didn’t take long to realise how fortunate I was to be carving myself a niche as his right-hand man. He had a spacious office in a private corner of the Ciprim floor and was loyally assisted by Johanna Rietveld, who policed all the intimate, discrete parts of his carefully structured, growing business empire with a firm hand and uncompromising loyalty. Once John had returned to Madrid, I was effectively working alone with Miles on all our office projects and we sat together discretely in his office whenever there was a burning issue or something where I needed advice or where he had to make a decision. He also had the sense to see on several occasions that Marc’s experience and street wisdom would be more useful than his own input.

Miles was a brilliant teacher without ever actually teaching. He taught me how to write letters and faxes, with phrases like, “I would be most grateful if you would kindly”, and “with kindest regards”, which I still use automatically today. He taught me how to dictate fast memos and faxes into a dictaphone using his own shorthand language for punctuation (“Dot dot, list, dash”). He taught me that you could bollock somebody for an error, but that then you had to put your arm round their shoulder and explain and even apologise for the outburst shortly afterwards. He believed in elegance and manners, admonishing me once for writing a mildly abrasive letter to our lawyer, Christian Wilde, who was a friend of his, suggesting I should always reread a letter and imagine I was the one receiving it. (That was the only time I ever recall a dressing-down by him.) He always insisted on producing faultless presentations to business partners and banks, explaining that the recipient was thereby unlikely to read past the first couple of pages or ask questions, and would assume that the project was as perfect as the presentation and therefore should be agreed to immediately, in case anybody else got in there first. In the mad world of the late 1980s property boom, this was not as unlikely as it may sound. Speed was of the essence. Banks would agree to fund 100% of an acquisition and refurbishment project within 24 hours by fax. In retrospect this was utterly insane, but it happened.

Miles had an extraordinarily quick mind. He could take a plan of an old Haussmanian office building and draw the perfect, future office layout within minutes. He could dictate a joint-venture contract without pausing, in his sleep, or at least at a time when most people would be sleeping. This I experienced to an extreme in 1992 when I spent six months sharing a flat with him in Frankfurt, obsessively working on one single project, West End Carré, the results of which would determine whether he made a fortune or lost everything. I would regularly be woken up at 4am by Miles pounding the corridor in front of my room, barking furiously into his dictaphone. 

Miles coined the phrase “other people’s money”, to explain how the Ciprim business model worked. We would put together the investment proposal and offer it to our partners, a small number of companies and individuals who knew Miles, appreciated his exceptional skillset and wanted to work with him. If they liked the project then we would try and negotiate an acquisition. The partner would agree to fund the purchase and refurbishment costs. Our partnership agreement was in reality a service agreement whereby we did all the work from A to Z, received a project management fee in exchange and, crucially, a share of the profits. This was usually a whopping 35%. Furthermore, given that our investors were invariably long-term purchasers and wanted to keep the assets, the profit share would be calculated not on actual sales receipts minus costs, but on a valuation upon completion of works. The detailed basis for calculating the profit share was where Miles was far ahead of the game, thinking several years ahead while the investors thought in mere months. Miles designed his contracts more skillfully than a top QC, foreseeing every sort of problem, issue and dispute, and laying out the solutions to them in perfectly sequential, logical legal-speak, creating clever clauses and articles, which the opposing party would gloss over but which would prove to be crucial (and favourable to Miles) in the event of disputes and ‘force majeure’ (such as market collapse) in the years ahead. Seeing that those very years ahead were to include the property crash of 1991, which was to make valuations at certain dates almost impossible to carry out, this was brilliant planning. Ultimately such contractual intelligence, determination and foresight, together with his ability to work 18 hours a day and be totally focused on the essential, was to save Miles from possible ruin in the crash of 1992/3. However, that was elsewhere and will have to wait for a future chapter.