INTERVIEW
After losing both his parents to dementia, hotelier and financier Laurence Geller began a one-man mission to fight back, opening a host of high-end boutique care homes and ploughing millions of pounds into research
It’s 7pm in the sumptuous lounge and a waiter is taking an order for gin and tonics from two smartly dressed women. On the menu is confit of duck or baked salmon with saffron potatoes, and there’s the tinkle of music from a baby grand piano across the room. Coffee can be taken on the rooftop terrace.
This feels exactly like a five-star hotel – but is in fact a care home. And not just any care home. Loveday Kensington is the crème de la crème of senior living, specialising in those with dementia. It’s no wonder: the man behind it used to run the Four Seasons luxury hotel chain.
His name is Laurence Geller, and right now he’s sitting opposite me, explaining how and why the battle against dementia became a personal one for him. Both his parents died with it – his mother Ruth a decade ago, his father Harold, a former conductor with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, seven years earlier. That was the catalyst that sparked his unwavering commitment to changing the way people with dementia are treated. He has since poured millions into research, set up a university institute, advised the government on dementia and is an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society.
What he realised was the tragedy at the heart of dementia care: no one knew enough about the condition, and the presumption was that if you were unlucky enough to have it, your life was pretty much over. ‘I was based in the US at that time, one of the most intensely funded medical landscapes anywhere in the world, and the experts were even more confused than I was,’ he says. ‘People with dementia were being almost locked away, shunned by society – they were condemned to death, essentially.’
With little focus on research, and no qualifications for those caring for the residents, it felt to Geller like the equivalent of the hotel industry in the early 1960s. ‘It was that primitive,’ he says. He didn’t buy the line that there was nothing that could be done. Why not? ‘Because I’m a stubborn contrarian. If you tell me that something can’t be done, that’s a flashpoint for me to try to do it.’
Geller had already donated huge sums to children’s health in the US, where he’d gone to live after being raised in north London, and where he’d carved out a stellar career running and financing some of the world’s top hotel chains. ‘I saw the difference my money had made to children’s health and I thought, if I can do it for that, I can also do
