One night in early 2018 Paddy Renouf was having dinner at the Academy Club with his life-long friend Dr Mark Sopher, a cardiologist who practises on the English south coast. The following morning Sopher was flying to Kenya with friends for a kite-surfing trip.
Sopher wondered aloud why on earth Renouf wasn’t coming too. The doctor whipped out his phone and quickly established a seat was still available on his flight, and it was promptly booked. Thus it came about that Renouf, who never leaves home without his passport, joined the party to Heathrow a few hours later. On another occasion Renouf was having an early breakfast with a client and ended up with him on that day’s 11.00am flight to Acapulco.
Renouf is an instantly familiar figure processing through London’s more fashionable galleries, drawing rooms, bars and restaurants. With his distinguished grey hair, cut on the long side more in the style of Mayfair or Hoxton than Lombard Street, his impenetrable brown eyes, and roué’s scarf, he has been described as a flâneur. The description half works in the sense that he is a strolling observer around London and far beyond, but flâneur also suggests an idleness a detachment which does not fit Renouf.
He is too curious to be satisfied by pressing his nose up against the window; he needs to be a participant, and nor is he an idler. Ensconced in his later-life career as a procurer of fun and unique experiences for the global rich, he will put down his cocktail glass and snap into action on behalf of his demanding client list, which range from Gulf princes to bankers to arms dealers to multimillionaire funeral home tycoons to Hollywood stars.
And then many of them become his friend because that is the Renouf way. “He has the raconteur’s skills to rival Peter Ustinov,” says Mary Killen, the Spectator contributor who has more recently found television fame on Gogglebox.
Patrick Hugh Aloysius Renouf was born on 3rd September 1959 in Sussex, one of 10 children in a noisy, slightly Bohemian Catholic family. Right at the end of the swinging sixties, he was sent to Worth Abbey, then a stringent Benedictine foundation, now a softer coeducational establishment renamed Worth School. The family were comfortable though not rich, and the numerous sets of school fees could only be afforded because Paddy’s father Anthony was the much-loved art master at the school and got a hefty discount.
Friends say Renouf has frequently tried to lead a conventional life, but that the feeling passes. After Worth he went to Catterick for basic military training and then on to Sandhurst for his officer’s polish, but he quit after a term. He disliked what he was becoming -- a pipe-smoking tweed-jacketed stiff, and it particularly rankled that his school contemporaries were travelling the world and getting laid.
He went hitch-hiking across America, then crewed a super-yacht, before going up three years late to the University of East Anglia to read History of Art, excellent preparation for his middle age when he began to paint, and became a gallery guide to the global super-rich.
The urge to be conventional again resurfaced and drew him into a job in the mid-eighties in the nascent mobile phone industry, rising to become MD of one of the first cellular companies. But he threw that in to hit the hippy trail in the early 1990s, some would say a little a bit after the main event.
With the hippy stuff out of his system, he went back to industry, selling medical thermometers. Slightly to his surprise he was good at it, and ended up managing director of Zeal Medical, but restlessness again overwhelmed him in the new millennium.
During his time on the road as a business executive, he came to understand something important about human nature: the luxury of an itinerant existence compounds the dreariness of being far from home and friendless in a foreign capital. Renouf sensed an opening.
He experimented by driving visiting acquaintances around the UK in his green 1978 Bentley, and ultimately established his business, Serendipity. The full corporate offerings can be found on the website, but essentially the business harnesses Renouf’s innate knack for making friends, establishing contacts, and knowing how to make people happy when out of their comfort zone. He first realised he had to take his new career seriously and take full responsibility when a client decided to send his son to Worth after deciding he’d like him to become a bit like Renouf.
If you’re foreign and rich and planning to come to London and want a private party at a leading gallery with a talk from one of Britain’s greatest painters, then fancy leaving the next morning for deer-stalking in Scotland, Renouf will arrange it, and come along for the fun. Complete strangers are drawn to him, which explains why clients such as Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and David Soul have become firm friends and regular lunching partners.
Renouf is not so much a networker as a connector. He has a genius for introducing new people into his circle of friends and associates. Barbara Broccoli, the formidable producer and co-owner of the James Bond movie franchise, was so taken by Renouf on their first meeting that she promptly nominated a Bond girl to work as his personal assistant.
He then introduced Broccoli to another pal, the head barman at the Savoy, who she asked to create the signature Skyfall cocktail and serve it at the premiere. He is such a familiar figure at the Savoy that the management presented him with a solid silver credit card to use while hosting events for clients and other luncheon parties that culminated in his founding the Curious Arts Literary Festival. A cocktail named after him can be shaken or stirred at the American Bar.
Tom Maryniak, a close friend acquired relatively recently, recalls sipping cocktails at the bar at Brown’s Hotel when three Chinese women were sitting at a nearby table. One of them came to the bar and asked if Renouf would mind terribly if she hugged him; he did not. A moment of exuberant public intimacy, and then she calmly disappeared into the Mayfair night, entranced by her encounter with her new, fleeting English friend. Those who know him talk of an innate empathy and a desire not only to do well, but to do good. This impulse led him once to lead a party of blind people on an extensive tour of Paris.
Renouf is genuinely interested in the rich, but really in the talents and qualities that underpin their success. He has built a business to marry that talent to his creative flair. Another friend says curiosity is the driving force of his personality. Serendipity has always been much more than just a business.
But he has known great personal sadness that tends to remain concealed behind his jaunty optimism. Though he has never ‘settled down’, there was a love of his life, Sally Prideaux, whom he met at university but who first married another man. That marriage failed, and she and Renouf reunited when he was 40.
Preternaturally bright, this yoga practising blonde with perfect hair, body and smile complained of headaches in 2013. Within five months she was dead from a brain tumour. Renouf could not believe one so vibrant could fall ill. He kept himself together until the day she died, but then he was flattened. “Grief hits you in many ways, and it has a long tail,” he says.
Into his fifties, Renouf got more and more pleasure from painting, which began with landscapes but developed into portraiture. But his greatest source of pride arose from the pure serendipity – to coin a phrase -- of his having been seated next to Nicky Philipps at a dinner party. It was the same week that her famous portrait of Princes William and Harry had been unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery.
By the end of the evening, she had asked Renouf to sit for her. Of course he agreed, and the resulting portrait – Renouf posing at his most raffish – was hung at the National Portrait Gallery, perhaps his greatest single source of pride.
Renouf is a friend to all the best barmen and concierges in London. This is partly because he needs them onside for his day job, but also because he likes them as much as some of his clients, who include two former US presidents (he won’t say which).
He retains a loose affection for the faith of his childhood, and he abides by the spirit of his alma mater with its motto which is supremely appropriate for an old Worthian of Renouf’s tastes and distinctions: Gloria Dei est homo bene vivit; the glory of God is a man fully alive.
“Life is about taking decisions,” he likes to say, “and if you don’t take them, then life takes them for you.”
Portrait written by Stephen Robinson