Bikinis to Bellinis: Nick House and Kelly Brook on love and getting schlossed together

What happened when the king of Bodo’s met the queen of bras? As Nick House and Kelly Brook open a bar in the City they talk to Charlotte Edwardes about love and getting schlossed together
20 November 2013

Just call me Ginger,” Kelly Brook giggles in a Jacques Azagury dress that is a waterfall of gold sequins. She makes a burlesque of Hollywood glamour, shoulder forward, hand on hip and a finger propping her chin. “Well, whaddya think?” She bats her false eyelashes.

Well, what does anyone think? That Kelly Brook is a doll. She has that sort of cosy appeal that promises to mop up under beer glasses, or wink coquettishly from an autographed calendar, or send men marching to war with big smiles and morale high.

She’s a bikini model, actress, presenter and dancer, but today we are in Steam & Rye in the City, a fantastical restaurant-bar-cabaret joint she is opening with Nick House, the man behind Prince Harry favourites Mahiki, Whisky Mist and Bodo Schloss.

Why is Kelly Brook opening a restaurant? “Why not?” she squeaks with a shrug. “I’m a brand. I’m a performer and an entertainer. This place is show-business,” she sweeps her red nails round the scene.

It’s done up like Grand Central Station with train carriages, Ionic pillars and ornate cornicing. It’s like a film set, Martin Scorsese directing Bugsy Malone (this is what House does, a themed venue to the ultimate degree, and then some).

“In LA it’s normal,” Brook says. “Robert De Niro has Ago, an Italian with a gangland feel, where you’d imagine the mob going for pasta and red wine. Puff Daddy has a drinks company. This place is performance, Hollywood style, great music, sexy dancers, everything I do anyway. Just add burgers and cocktails.”

In many ways 33-year-old Brook has challenged the accepted view of her for some 15 years. She’s the former Page Three girl from Rochester made good. Like Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole before her, she’s shed the skin of a working-class past moving — as one friend put it — gracefully from brassy to classy.

Yesterday she flew in from Los Angeles, where she has a “gorgeous Marilyn Monroe-esque apartment,” and where she lived for many years with actor Jason Statham. Later she was engaged to the actor Billy Zane. Then she dated the rugby player Thom Evans (with whom she suffered a late miscarriage). More recently she broke up with Danny Cipriani, eight years her junior.

A rumour of a budding relationship with Jeremy Piven, star of Mr Selfridge, trails her but she’s quick to stamp on it. “I’m single,” she says with a bright smile. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m not unlucky in love — I’m very lucky in love! When I’m ready to settle down I will, don’t worry.

“And when I eventually have a family, I want everything to be great. I’ve had relationships along the way where they’ve had different upbringings and not the vision I’ve had, so I’ve left those relationships. I’m not ready to meet my husband. When I’m ready I will.

“Right now I’m playing around. I’m having fun. And I’m going to be here hosting nights, drinking cocktails!”

When in London, Brook lives in Marylebone (she also has a cottage in the country). She met House through his business partner Piers Adam, whom she’d known since she was 17.

Together Brook and House fall into a double-act — Kelly all coquettish charm and double entendre, Nick cautious in a dapper suit and Mac.

“He’s a very mischievous, naughty boy,” she says, enjoying his discomfort. “I always enjoyed our debauched wild nights.”

“I’m not debauched!” House yelps. He tells me about an endurance marathon he recently ran in the desert, and how he doesn’t drink so that he can work late, “and still get up early in the morning”.

But Brook has turned to the menu. “The Monica Lewinsky,” she says of a cocktail, “will be a big seller. It’s an oral delight!”

“Stop!” House says.

“What?” she replies, Bambi-eyed. To me she says, “It’s a milky cocktail with a fab ice lolly in it and lots of other naughty things.”

“Stop!”

Brook shrieks with laughter. Later she describes the restaurant as “The Box meets TGI Fridays”, and House looks as if his heart has stopped. “I’m JOKING,” she shouts in his face.

When House first brought Brook to show her this Grade II-listed building — site of the old Bank of New York — it was still a barely used Harvey Nichols restaurant, “with a man on the piano playing Greensleeves and a table of old dears having tea,” he says. “I think Kelly’s laugh was the loudest thing in here.”

Brook continues: “I’d never done anything like this, but it’s an extension of my aesthetic — movies, cabaret and so on — and Nick’s a genius at what he does.”

“I’m blushing.”

“He’s also completely bonkers and out there.”

“Oh.”

“But I like that.”

House’s venues have mythical status, perhaps because of drawing the Princes William and Harry crowd. A brilliant alliance with Guy Pelly, one of the princes’ childhood friends, meant Sloanes and commoners alike would queue round the block just to breathe the same stale air as their royal heroes. His stated “camp, democratic, alternative door policy” pulled stars too — Scarlett Johansson was a regular, Katy Perry, Kate Moss, Madonna.

Both House and Brook credit their backgrounds for their tearing drive. Nick, 39, comes from a place “smaller than a hamlet” near Tunbridge Wells. His parents were “middle class with a dip in fortunes”, and when he went to Leeds University, he had only £400 from his grandmother in his pocket. “I knew it would run out very quickly. I had about three weeks to start earning money.” And he did. The first party he threw — In Your Dreams — had a £3 entry charge. “I was begging and borrowing to get the flyers, the DJ, the sound system.”

But he didn’t look back — branching out to Manchester and Sheffield too. “University wasn’t about my degree course, it was about survival,” he laughs. After a brief spell in the City, he teamed up with Piers Adam and Ben Elliot (who now owns Quintessentially), as their Friday promoter for clubs in Chelsea/Fulham. The kids with big trust funds did “grate” a bit but he quickly realised “they’re the ones spending the money”.

Similarly Brook says her drive “for a gorgeous glamorous life, with beautiful clothes and shoes” was born from the crashing reality of growing up in a two-bedroom terraced on a council estate in Kent. “It was very hard, very hand to mouth. There wasn’t any extra anything. We had nothing.”

Except her imagination: “I used to draw my dream house — a cottage with flowers, pond and swimming pools. I’ve never lost my spirit and my drive to do better. I aspire to beauty, and perfection. Everyday I wake up and I want my life to be very glamorous.”

She’s certainly braved out any ups and downs. Aged 18 she presented The Big Breakfast with Johnny Vaughan. Her brain-befuddling 32E size 8 figure was immediately cited as evidence of her stupidity. “All I said was, ‘keep the scripts to a minimum, give me bullet points so I can elaborate myself’,” she says now. “Some horrible person in the production meeting told a newspaper I couldn’t read complicated words. It was my first week! After that they picked up on any stumble or mistake. The knives were out.”

She resigned after six months, something Vaughan still laments when they meet over lunch. “He says, ‘we had the best ratings ever on that show’.”

She did her own show on MTV for a while, before going to Los Angeles for six years “where people were kinder about ambition. Kinder generally”.

Brook sends herself up. Her comedy is Carry On-style camp. She plays nurses and roles that require her to wear “silly outfits with my boobs out”, like a porn actress in the spoof horror Piranha 3D. On Celebrity Juice she is a foil for the comedian Leigh Francis’s alter ego Keith Lemon — “his jokes are always about me being fired and not being any good” — and it’s funny.

She moves her great mass of tumbling hair from one shoulder to the other. “But I’ve worked hard.” She has three houses to show for it, as well as a successful fashion line with New Look, selling bikinis, underwear, shoes, clothes and make up, and now Steam & Rye, which Nick is thinking of duplicating “in venues dotted over London”.

And then House and Brook are off, Brook switching her hips as they return to the “bonkers” theatre of their new venue. And I’m back blinking in the hard grey of Leadenhall Street where it’s starting to drizzle.

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