From magician’s assistant to tech mogul — and creator of Soho’s most flamboyant hotel

Martin Brudnizki says he wasn’t aware of his client’s personal history when he got the brief for a new hotel in London. All the Swedish-born interior designer knew was that Noel Hayden, a serial web entrepreneur, had made the kind of cash that allows you to build a 57-room luxury hotel smack in the middle of Soho. 

Though Brudnizki is fêted for work ranging from Annabel’s on Berkeley Square to the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, the Broadwick Soho would be his first top-to-bottom London hotel project. It replaces a drab ’90s office building on the corner of Broadwick and Berwick streets and opened last week.

Hayden was clear that the new property should channel all of Soho’s sense of show and gritty glamour, but told Brudnizki less about himself. “We’re talking about this historic part of London that was all about loucheness, frivolity and fun,” Brudnizki tells me from his design studio in Chelsea. “I really wanted to be transported into that.” 

Two days after launch, it’s clear that the designer has nailed the show-stopper brief. When I arrive at dusk on a grey Friday afternoon, passing shoppers gawp at the shiny new brick facade. The hotel’s name has been put up in lights under two towering pink circus elephants.

I step through the oversized Georgian-style front door, which is also pink and has a brass elephant knocker, to discover eight floors of glorious, ’70s-inspired, high-end kitsch. Barely a square centimetre has escaped Brudnizki’s magpie eye for pattern-clashing, colour-popping detail. He describes the maximalist scheme as “Studio 54 meets your godmother’s Soho townhouse”.

It all rises to a crescendo at Flute, the seventh-floor bar and terrace. There are leopard-print cocktail chairs, a mirror-tiled ceiling, theatrical Austrian blinds and cork panelling framed by olive-green lacquered architraves. And in one corner — at the client’s request — scallop-shell footlights illuminate a tiny stage with velvet curtains. 

Near the bar, I spot a remarkable photo. The date is about 1980, and a magician in a blazer with silver braid is preparing to saw his wife in half. She sits on a train-shaped box built for the trick, as foil curtains shimmer behind her.

Standing slightly more awkwardly to one side is a boy — the couple’s son — aged about 10. He wears a black bow tie and a ruffled dress shirt. “That was my life, two nights a week, from the age of six,” says Hayden, who is now 52, when he joins me in the bar for a Moscow mule. 

Hayden, who has long hair and wears a patterned cashmere cardigan over a gold shirt, made his millions in the decidedly unglamorous world of online gaming and gambling. Most recently, in 2021, Gamesys, which he co-founded in 2001, was the subject of a £2bn buyout by a Nevada casino giant. But he is no stranger to the hospitality industry.

In 1973, when Hayden was two, his father — also Noel Hayden — sweet-talked a bank into loaning him the cash to buy a 100-room seaside hotel in Bournemouth, on England’s south coast. The family had been living in London, where Noel Snr moved after growing up with a travelling circus in his native Ireland.

After working in pubs in west London in the 1960s, Noel Snr and his wife Jackie had bought a few modest buy-to-let properties. The Bournemouth hotel, which Jackie, who was also a circus performer, named the Mon Ami, would mark their return to the stage. They did magic shows twice a week and employed a house comedian and band. After the shows, Noel Snr, an unstoppable showman, would hypnotise his guests at the bar.

“My bedroom opened out on the reception,” says Hayden. “I used to do my homework in the office and in the morning I was the head of toast. We had this amazing machine that could do toast for 250 people.”

Brudnizki smiled when he saw the photo and learnt that his client had smuggled a slice of 1970s Bournemouth into the middle of Soho. “We’d put the silver curtain behind the little stage in the corner, and here was the same curtain in the picture,” the designer says. “It all made sense.”

The Mon Ami became a hit, an all-singing-and-dancing entertainment resort in the pre-easyJet age. Hayden remembers being driven to school in a Rolls-Royce and travelling to Fleet Street with his mother — who had the business brain — to swap bags of cash for full-page ads in the Daily Mirror. The family moved into a big house and went on fancy holidays.

But when their guests began to travel abroad too, swapping Dorset for the Costa del Sol and beyond, the Mon Ami began to struggle. By the mid-1980s, after a ruinous decline, the family had lost everything and returned to London to live in a series of one-bedroom flats. Hayden was 15 and never went back to school, lying about his age to get a job in an electronics store.

It was a dramatic fall from grace, but Hayden saw opportunity in his inherited entrepreneurial spirit and the dawn of the digital age. He had tinkered with his first computer aged only nine — it was a birthday present from his mother when times were still good. Later, in the early 1990s, he started designing websites, trawling the Yellow Pages to identify businesses in need of one.

Hayden was soon providing web services for London councils. He went on to start a domain registration business, in 1998, and then his gaming company, which included a successful online bingo platform. He ended up employing 1,000 people in offices on Piccadilly and now chairs several web businesses based in Soho and the City.

Hayden admits to having mixed feelings about getting back into the hotel game. He was a sometimes reluctant magician’s assistant and remembers the huge toll that operating the Mon Ami took on his parents. “They worked until three in the morning and got up at six to get breakfast ready,” he says. “And then it was a very painful process to lose it all.”

Yet Hayden had always harboured a vague ambition to revive the family’s stalled dream. It became more real over a glass of wine with Jo Ringestad, a hotelier friend of his who had grown up in his own parents’ hotel on the French Riviera. Hayden and Ringestad (who would later become the Broadwick’s managing director) dispatched an agent to find a site, insisting that Soho was the only suitable setting for Hayden’s retro-glam vision.

Hayden bought 20 Broadwick Street in 2016 for £33.5mn, according to the land registry, and has invested an undisclosed amount since. He also recruited Jamie Poulton, owner of the Randall & Aubin restaurant on nearby Brewer Street, to help create the restaurants and bars. The hotel’s creative director is Andrea Gelardin, whose other clients have included Lady Gaga.

As well as Flute, which has a fine south-facing terrace, there’s a private dining room on the top floor and, tucked at the back of the hotel at ground level, the Nook, a boudoir-ish sitting room for hotel guests, with a fabric coffered ceiling and an open fire. Spilling out on to the street is Bar Jackie, an all-day café and bar.

The rooms themselves are relatively pared back, at least by Brudnizki’s standards, though my fifth-floor suite is still replete with embroidered botanical wallpaper, a marble bathroom and a custom elephant-shaped brass bar cart crafted in Jaipur. Big Crittall windows open out on to Soho’s hodgepodge of rooftops.

After drinks with Hayden at Flute, I head down to Dear Jackie, a softly lit Italian restaurant with red silk walls, also named in Hayden’s mother’s honour. I enjoy sea bass crudo with fennel and a rack of lamb with puntarelle chicory and anchovy. Two nights earlier, Hayden was down here with Jackie herself for a launch party. 

Business success as a young man allowed Hayden to support his parents, who struggled to find their feet after returning to London with nothing. They are now well into their eighties and live near Hayden in Wimbledon, though he says Noel Snr has dementia and has not been able to see the Broadwick. With a wry smile, he wonders if that’s a blessing: “He’d want to take over the stage, and get pissed off if he didn’t get top billing.”

Hayden, who has already employed a magician to perform in Flute, says Jackie shed a tear when he gave a speech during the dinner — the first time he’d seen her cry despite the family’s turbulent past. “She’s incredibly strong and I attribute a lot to her resilience,” Hayden says. “So I said in my speech that I was grateful. I said: ‘It’s taken me 40 years, Mum, but we’re back in business.’”

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