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Cocktail chat: Giuseppe Dewilde, Home House

As general manager of London private members’ club Home House, Giuseppe Dewilde makes sure his guests are well catered for, and that includes creating the venue’s own gin.

Home HOUSE LOUNGE (1)
Home House opened in 1998

*This feature was originally published in the October 2024 issue of The Spirits Business magazine. 

When boredom set in while he was studying law, Giuseppe Dewilde knew he was a destined for a different career. His mother was a restaurateur, his father a diplomat. Dewilde decided a career in the restaurant business sounded far more appealing – but, as they say, mothers know best, and he was encouraged to move into hotels instead. From Italy, Dewilde ended up in London working for Firmdale Hotels, and “that set the scene for many things I did in my career”, he says.

The restaurant world continued to call Dewilde’s name, and he spent a decade at Conran Restaurants, combining his passion for fashion, food and drinks. “I grew up in this world of fashion and fun, then restaurants and also diplomacy,” he recalls. “Once I got into hospitality, I knew I wanted to work in a members’ club.” Having honed his craft at myriad hospitality companies – including D&D Restaurant, Corinthia Hotels International, Café Royal, and Bleeding Heart Restaurants & Private Dining Rooms, to name a few – Dewilde’s members’ club dreams became a reality.

Giuseppe Dewilde joined Home House in 2019
Giuseppe Dewilde joined Home House in 2019

Royalty welcomed

In 2019, Dewilde joined London’s luxury private members’ club Home House as general manager and operations director. Spread across three Georgian townhouses in London’s Marylebone, Home House’s reputation precedes itself, having welcomed royalty – and pop royalty, too. Madonna once enjoyed an extended residency in the Lady Islington Suite. Additional famous ties included Pamela Anderson’s birthday party. There’s a reason why Home House is so trusted with A-list names, Dewilde says: “What happens at Home House stays at Home House.”

The house boasts different sections for different occasions. The Garden is popular all year long with members, Dewilde says. It’s an additional attraction, alongside multiple bars – including House Bar, and House 21 – a restaurant, drawing rooms, 23 bedrooms and suites, private dining spaces, a gym, and more. “What I like about Home House is the fact that it’s a perfect combination of everything I’ve experienced in my life; it’s got a restaurant, bars, a garden, bedrooms, a gym – it is a bit of a maze,” enthuses Dewilde. “But it’s not too big. It’s not facetious. It’s got true social DNA, which is what this industry is all about, essentially – by the people, for the people, with the people.”

But just as Dewilde’s private members’ club ambitions came to fruition, the global hospitality industry was hit with its biggest challenge since World War II: the Covid-19 pandemic. “Obviously nobody knew that Covid was going to hit any of us,” he recalls. “When I joined in 2019, I was tasked, first of all, to refurbish House 21, which we did. We opened House 21 10 days before Covid hit. Then we had to shut it.”

Down but not out, Dewilde took the time gifted by pandemic lockdowns to revisit and revamp various aspects of Home House, from the food menus to the drinks offerings. “That’s where the idea to create our own Home House Gin came from,” he explains.

The club partnered with award-winning gin distillery Oro in Lockerbie, Scotland, to create a spirit that would encapsulate the opulent and eccentric nature of Home House. Botanicals used in the gin include Spanish saffron, Macedonian juniper, English rose, and orris. Dewilde worked closely with Ray Clynick, managing director and head distiller at Oro, to create the gin.

“I was very clear when I met Ray that I wasn’t interested in doing a ‘white label’ gin,” Dewilde says. “To me, what was most important was having something bespoke that could link to the house, the historical facts of the house, and Lady Home,” who was the inspiration for the house, which was built in 1773 by King George III’s architect, James Wyatt. “The parties in those days,” Dewilde says, explaining the somewhat salacious history of the house during its 18th-century years, “consisted of three things: playing cards, drinking gin or cocktails – because it was safer than drinking water – and gossiping about the royal court.” For him, Home House Gin had to be “an elegant London Dry gin”.

He and Clynick spent about nine months perfecting the Home House Gin recipe. For Clynick, Dewilde’s clear vision for the flavour profile was a refreshing approach to developing a product with a third party.

Home House London THE GARDEN (1)
The Garden

“We had a very clear goal,” Clynick explains. “I spent a lot of time in Home House. Quickly, I realised it needed to be a London Dry gin at its core. Then it was about building nuance into the spirit, so that led down the road of balancing saffron and rose. The final product makes a really fantastic gin and tonic, but it also stands up in a Negroni – and Giuseppe and I, as we will happily admit, do enjoy spending an afternoon with Negronis in the Home House garden.”

The bottle includes carefully chosen design accents to incorporate parts of Home House. Then came the task of creating a cocktail menu for House 21 ahead of its reopening.

“I dedicated time with my bar team to create a story for our cocktails, all about Lady Home going out with her girlfriends, and entertaining,” Dewilde explains. “We created a journey whereby the key component of the drink became the hero. So, obviously gin was the first hero, then we had a vodka hero, a whisky hero, and a rum hero.”

The drinks offerings differ from one Home House bar to another, and the bar teams are empowered to be creative in each. “We work very closely with our bar team, and they always come up with new ideas that are really outstanding,” praises Dewilde. “They get the DNA of Home House. We don’t want to be pretentious, even though we are exclusive; we want Home House to be somewhere social, special, but with a relaxed atmosphere at the same time.”

New and old

To keep things interesting for the venue’s 5,000-plus members, Home House frequently revisits its cocktail menus. “We normally change our menus every quarter,” Dewilde explains. “We bring in some new drinks and keep some of the old favourites. Some members will ask, ‘Oh, where is that? Can I have that cocktail back, or that particular dish back?’ So we have to be mindful of that as well. At the end of the day, everything we do, from cocktails to food, is for our members to enjoy with their friends, and at the same time to be part of the house.”

More is to come, too. Dewilde and Clynick are busy finalising a second spirit to join the Home House portfolio – Home House Rum. Details are not quite yet ready to be shared – but Dewilde does confirm this is not the end of the club’s own-label bottlings.

“I can tell you it was important that it wasn’t a white rum; it had to be an aged rum because we wanted a spirit you could drink neat, over ice, or mixed,” Dewilde says. “In everything we do, we want to create a moment of memories. It could be a moment of celebration, a moment of reflection, a moment of success, perhaps we are there in a moment of sadness, as well. Home House has 300 years of memories. It’s important that DNA is constantly being reflected in all the things we do.”

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