Martin Miller

Meeting the maverick Westbourne Grove hotelier

iT’S NOT EASY TO identify what Martin Miller does. There are too many options. He is best known for his series of antiques prices guides, but he sold those 12 years ago. “I still have ‘publisher’ on my passport,” he says. “And I still think of myself like that but I suppose I’m falling out of it. I’m a hotelier, really, and there’s the gin.” Martin Miller runs two hotels and an Academy and he has his own label gin, plus a finger in various unlikely pies including a Chiswick pizza outfit and an enduring habit of acquiring antiques.
Miller’s Residence in Hereford Road started 12 years ago, and it’s not really a hotel. “It’s a strange operation, beyond bed and breakfast but not quite a hotel,” says Martin. There’s no restaurant, and guests are welcome to eat whatever’s around, drink all they like and use the phones freely, part of the ‘at home’ concept. Mostly known for the lavish, theatrical interior that’s full of antiques, ornaments and candles and reminiscent of a Gothic horror film set, or the slightly surreal home of an ancient aunt, the Residence is a favourite of the fashion world, highly sought after as a location for shoots, shows and events. It has a loyal international following of people who stay regularly. Until a few years ago, Martin lived there, but his wife insisted they move to Chepstow Villas (“she didn’t like living above the shop – most of the activity there tends to be people coming back in the evening and staying up drinking”). Though Martin himself, surprisingly for someone who runs a salon, is an obsessively early riser who likes nothing more than the 5.30am start that takes him from W2 to his other hotel in Somerset in time for breakfast. “I don’t go to bed much after midnight. I’ve always thought that you’ll never have a conversation worth having after 1am.”
When another building on Hereford Road became available last year, an old language school on the opposite corner of Westbourne Grove,  Martin took that on too. “So I thought of the Academy as a place to host old-fashioned salon nights with a lecture followed by people whiling the night away with supper and drink afterwards.” Also, it provided a good excuse to go to more auctions and buy more stuff. It’s a members’ club and more than half of its regulars live locally. Recent lectures have been given by Simon Callow and Andrew Motion as well as Octavius Black of the Mind Gym and fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky (tickets for the Russian dissident sold out in less than 12 hours). Salon  sessions are fun and sociable; the Academy’s interior is opulent and houses a piano as well as an enormous amount of furniture.
The only gin to be served at all of Martin’s venues is of course his own, the award-winning Miller’s Gin. How did he get into that? “Over lunch. I tend to have ideas over lunch and gin was one of them. I was a gin drinker and everyone was doing premium vodkas at the time. We spent two years getting the taste right with distillation after distillation and working on the bottle, but that’s the easy part. Distribution is the hard part. It’s a pension fund really because we will make money out of it one day but at the moment we have to keep putting the money back in.” Another thing that arose over lunch one day is a pizza business in Chiswick, Clever Wally’s, that runs on the unusual principle of allowing customers to bake their own pizzas. “Though I’m really trying to cut down on things to do. My problem is that I get sidetracked all the time. I do have some projects in early stages of development and a whole filing cabinet full of ideas. But after a while you realise that the thinking of ideas is more fun than the actually doing them.”
Martin’s first idea was the antiques price guide, the first of its kind when he published it in 1969. A love of auction houses and antiques led him to research sales prices and a dislike of haggling with dealers made him think that people would like to have a rough guide to what things were really worth, whether they were going to cost hundreds or thousands. And they did. The guides are still going, though Martin had had enough 12 years ago and switched his focus to the hotels.
And why Hereford Road, anyway? “This place just came up and suited what I wanted to do. I was never looking to live in Notting Hill and I wasn’t really a London person at all. I had a house in Kensington and then I got divorced and needed somewhere else to live.” A lucky choice. And how does he like the neighbours? He had lunch at Tom Pemberton’s Hereford Road the other day, though he wasn’t too keen. “I’m of the school of thought that if it’s not really for me it’ll be a success. And this wasn’t really for me, though I think it’s very good. I’m so traditional, what I like it roast and three veg. I had potted crab but would have preferred a prawn cocktail.”
Martin’s an eccentric, very English sort of maverick with a highly developed sense of fun and a laid back air. Who knows what his next project will be, his next idea over lunch? l