Give them time...
James Forsyth
CONCIERGE SERVICES
In November — a time when I normally refuse to think about the coming holidays — The Spectator’s Style and Travel editor offered me a wife for Christmas. Sarah Standing quickly assured me that there would be no mail order bride arriving at Old Queen Street. Rather, she was going to send me along to Quintessentially, a private concierge service, and have them explain how they could organise my Christmas. ‘It’ll be better than having a wife,’ she said.
So on the last Friday in November I headed off to the Quintessentially office in Soho. As I arrive, a gaggle of staff are outside having a smoke and discussing where they are sending their charges that night. There is a gentle game of oneupmanship going on, with one staffer being ragged for having booked people into somewhere that closes at midnight. He hits back by saying that he’s just starting them there. If he wasn’t, he was now: bragging rights and customer service working in union.
On arrival, I’m kindly offered a cup of tea or coffee and ask for tea with milk. As the personalised nature of the service they offer is being explained to me I’m handed a beverage that tastes oddly like coffee with sugar. But as the scope of the operation is shown to me, I start contemplating how much they could do for me. Or to be more accurate, what they could do for me once I’m into my mid-thirties — the average Quintessentially client is between 35 and 40. My feeling that I might not quite be ready to join this club is reinforced when I ask one of the gifts people how many members phone in a panic on 24 December. She calmly informs me that most members have made their purchases by then. I feel like protesting that this is my quintessential Christmas dilemma but think better of it.
What Quintessentially is really selling is time. This isn’t a bad product when you consider how much more useful more hours in the day would be than most Christmas gifts. Time is the one thing we all lack. But it is also the hardest thing to give someone.
Until the time-turner that Hermione Granger used to attend multiple lessons at Hogwarts comes on the open market, a membership to Quintessentially is probably the closest thing that there is to a time voucher. Quintessentially calls itself a ‘global concierge service’. Strip away the corporate jargon and it is essentially a club for those who don’t have time to organise everything that they need or want to organise.
The festive season is when more time would come in most handy. Even those of us whose sole Christmas duties are to buy a number of presents that could be counted on the fingers of two hands and turn up at our family’s house before six on Christmas Eve can begin to feel seasonal stress. The toll on those who have to send out umpteen Christmas cards, buy 60-odd presents and are in charge of the cooking can be seen in the ferocity with which they attack the champagne and mince pies at every reception. Admittedly much of this stress is our own fault; we all put off doing our Christmas chores until the last minute so we can squeeze in another party.
But Quintessentially isn’t just for Christmas. Their estates service can buy you a property, their wine people can stock the cellar, their art folk can hang pictures on the wall and place sculptures in the grounds and while all this is being prepared the holiday arm can book you a few weeks away. When the house is ready, the flower service can arrange fresh flowers every day, the events planners can organise your house-warming and their fashion advisers can ensure that no one is wearing the same clothes as you that evening by securing you one of their specially commissioned designs.
To be sure, most members don’t use the service like this — even if some have trusted it to buy property for them sight unseen. There are three levels of membership. The first one, which costs £750 a year, gives you access to the concierge service. With 40-odd offices worldwide, this is a fairly global service. The next one entitles you to a dedicated ‘Lifestyle Manager’ for a £2,500 annual fee. Rather than you calling them, they call you. Your Lifestyle Manager makes sure you’re reminded in plenty of time of birthdays, anniversaries and the like as well as being alerted to things that you really should be at. The final level will set you back between £10,000 and £24,000. But it seems that once you’ve paid you get pretty much anything you want organised for you. Listening to the description, I pondered that if you signed up for it, they probably could arrange a wife for you for Christmas.
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