"ANNABEL'S HAS £1.2m HANGOVER FROM 50th BIRTHDAY BASHES
ANNABEL’S, the Mayfair members club and celebrity haunt, spent £1.2m on a week of glamorous celebrations to mark it’s 50th anniversary, recent accounts have revealed.
In September 2013, the club held a series of parties, with each night focused on one of the decades since it opened. Shout singer Lulu led sixties nostalgia, and Bryan Ferry followed the next night with a Seventies-themes gig.
The club’s accounts, which have been filed with the Companies House, reveal that the cost of ‘investing heavily in a series of events to celebrate this milestone’ came in at £1.2m.
As a result, Annabel’s pre-tax profits fell by almost 30pc, to £2.2m for the year ending 29 December 2013.
The business reported sales of £8.4m, while adjusted earnings were marginally higher, at £3.3m.
The club, which was opened in 1963 by Mark Birley, was named after his wife Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, who would later marry Sir James Goldsmith.
Over the years members have include Frank Sinatra, Diana Ross and Mick Jagger, who was given special dispensation not to wear a tie, while Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson attended in 1986 dressed as police women.
The club attracted its most exclusive guest in 2003 – the Queen – who dropped in for a gin martini. Annabel’s remains the only nightclub her Majesty has, to public knowledge, ever visited.
The club was bought in 2007 by restaurant mogul Richard Caring, who also owns some The Ivy and Le Caprice. In a £95m deal.
London’s blue-blooded revelers were up in arms earlier this year after it emerged that it would move from its Berkeley Square home to a larger property. Mr Caring has promised that the original fixtures and fittings will be transported to its new home, including its array for famous nude artworks." - Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 5 July 2015
