Elite Traveler November-December 2015

elite traveler NOV/DEC 2015 ISSUE 6 127

businesscard (which wouldn’t be accurate anyway – he is only 18th in line to the throne). Should Linley’s business ever fail – and to outsiders it certainly looked a little wobbly in 2012 when he parted company with Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev who had extended him a $600,000 loan – he could easily make a living consulting in networking, which is how he spends much of his days. Yesterday, for example, he woke at 5:30am as usual, listened to Farming Today on the radio, went for a run with his “very nice trainer fromWales” while simultaneously keeping an eye out for properties for sale. (He has a sideline in buying “doer-upper” houses.) Then it was off for lunch with an art collector and dealer at "Robin Burley’s place, you know,” (private member’s club 5 Hertford Street), before heading off to view a private art collection. Which all begins to explain why he has little time or inclination to get involved heavily in hands-on furniture design. “I don’t do the craft anymore – I delegate. I’m a very good delegator,” he says. “You can only grow to a certain size if you’re making the furniture yourself because you’re spending all day in the workshop and delivering it.” Certainly his roles at Christie’s and Linley are more than enough to occupy him, though he says that he has never found it a challenge to hold down both. “They complement each other,” he explains. “Your relationship with somebody doesn’t depend on whether you work here or there. It’s the friendship and confidence you build up that gives you the rapport.” On the subject of the future, Linley would like to grow the business but has no concrete plans other than a vague notion to move into east London, having been based solely in the south west of the capital until now. But he adds: “The hardest work of all is going from your twenties when your main concerns are ‘what am I and who am I?’ to your forties when, having found out your abilities, you try to concentrate on them. Then in your fifties, you try to take your business to the next stage. So that’s where I am.” And, has he finally proved himself to those, he mentioned earlier, who doubted him? For once, his answer is absolutely firm. “Oh no,” he says. “Certainly not. I mean, we’re only just starting.”

predominantly as a service. So if you said ‘where should I get my children educated?’ I would have a view and would help you find something. I just try to be helpful. It’s also the sort of a place you can come and meet interesting people. That’s what this business is.” Linley’s first lesson in the business, however you deign to title it, came when he was a schoolboy of seven observing his father Lord Snowdon at work. “There were often people passing in and out; to me there was always an excitement to being there and listening to the conversations,” he says. A s a schoolboy at Bedales, the smart, private school in Hampshire, Linley spent his free hours building desks, dining tables and chairs. He thought he had mastered cabinetmaking by the time he left, but was quickly humbled when he enrolled on a two-year course at the School for Craftsmanship in Wood headed by the pioneering British furniture designer John Makepeace. “The first day there we were given a piece of plate glass and told to put sandpaper on it and to make the plate glass flat. I thought it must be perfect, right? But after two or three days of sanding, you could see that it was out by a thou [a thousandth of an inch]. A thou! I thought I’d made furniture well, but suddenly I realized I knew almost nothing. That’s how I learned what was acceptable in terms of quality, right down to perfectionism.” After graduating he set up workshop above a fish and chip shop in Dorking and had a list of orders as long as his arm. He is adamant that his popularity is nothing to do with his royal connections which were always, he claims, a hindrance. "Actually they made it harder. There was an attitude 'it's all right for him'. I had to prove myself doubly hard, but luckily I was brought up in robust company by both parents. They didn't suffer any kind of nonsense. I didn't stand on ceremony and neither did they." Certainly, he is a proficient networker and well able to make his own contacts without the need to namedrop his aunt, Queen Elizabeth, in his business dealings, nor add HRH to his