Wed 4 Jul 2007
... with Romy Summerskill
This month, Michael Dineen went to meet with the extremely talented Romy Summerskill, managing director of The Acorn Property Group.
The abiding impression of Acorn is that it truly enjoys improving run-down areas.'Revitalise' was the message that came over to me when I interviewed the boss, Romy Summerskill, at her office in Bermondsey Street, south London.
The office block, plain and functional, is newly built by Acorn in a street that was typically scruffy until Romy's critical eye fell on it and she set about smartening the place up. The whole street, that is. One by one the dog-eared buildings were refurbished by Acorn and made ready for a new breed of inhabitants: professional people needing a city address - but without the high cost of City offices.
There's a calm atmosphere in her office. The people she works with seem unaggressive and intent upon doing a socially conscientious job of providing decent housing and workplaces, pleasant live/work environments.
If this seems a little on the gentle side, let me reassure the hard-headed among our readership that Acorn's first major undertaking ten years ago was Bermondsey Exchange which Romy bought for £1 million. Within a year she had turned a forlorn haven for dust and spiders into a smart refurbished block including 12 apartments, a commercial section and even some ateliers. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that the top-floor apartment alone was sold recently for £1 million.
Romy has a calm demeanour and it is only reluctantly that she admits to the title, chairman and managing director. She much prefers to be part of a team. Everyone on the payroll has a contribution to make, she insists, and her own flair is for architectural design.
However, one of her colleagues, admittedly in an affectionate way, gives the lie to the notion that Romy's a softie: "When I saw her asking a banker for support I was astonished; she was terrifying. But she has a good track record and is thoroughly justified in demanding cooperation from financiers."
All of which explains the current acceleration of Acorn's activities, away from her native London, with important developments afoot in Yorkshire, the Midlands and Cornwall.
The track began less than 20 years ago when Romy, daughter of an estate agent, embraced her father's profession in north London. But estate agency did not hold enough interest for her and it was not long before she was employing her creative energies adding value to a small one-bedroom flat in Crouch End by refurbishing it - assisted of course by a helpful bank manager.
Her entrepreneurial zeal was ignited by the success of this little venture, and soon word-of-mouth recommendations were leading to larger jobs, including housing refurbs and well as grotty flat rescues.
Her move south of the river to the Bermondsey Exchange job was a bold one, involving some firm talk with the bank manager, leading to a £1 million advance to buy the neglected building.
She was only 29, but it is fair to point out that her family background was in estate agency so she had sound advice when she needed her judgement to be backed. It was also an asset that she could bring an architectural and design passion to bear on a building before any financial commitment.
All that was ten years ago when, faced with the £1 million challenge, she set about creating a team capable of carrying out the major refurbishment. The result was The Acorn Property Group.
Bow in its tenth year of trading, Acorn is seeking to beef up its dwindling London land bank by seeking business elsewhere.
With typical modesty, Romy admits she has no experience of big company working when she explains the recruitment of former Barratt and Fairview executive Stephen Parkinson, a Yorkshireman and an experienced operator to oversee the company's major redevelopment of a university campus in Wakefield.
Here, typically, Acorn has been at pains to keep valuable old buildings and some comparatively new ones rather than clearing the site for new-build. In fact, the university, which had only recently completed a student accommodation programme, was relieved when Acorn said that it would create 187 residential units - without recourse to the bulldozer and polluting clouds of mortar dust.
Perhaps more interestingly Acorn has become involved with the Cornish boom. An Acorn surveyor who had been asked to look out for more redevelopment opportunities outside London is also a surfing buff; he reported the general run-down state of some Newquay hotels and houses and asked Romy to take a closer look.
"I really believe that many people are fed up with foreign travel, hanging about airports with children and are taking more holidays in England, particularly if they can rent good quality self-catering, as the British climate gets warmer," says Romy who refurbished a run-down bungalow on the south coast to provide her and her family with a permanent and oft-needed holiday resort.
The family includes her husband, also in the property development industry, and three children.
Acorn's Newquay enterprises, a mixture of refurbishment and new-build, will provide a total of 300 units for easy year-round renting, and notwithstanding Romy's understandable horror of airports, it has to be noted that Newquay's improved landing facilities bring a trip from London down to a mere fifty minutes.
I tried to pin her down to forecasting Acorn's future. A five-year plan, perhaps?
Her reply was typical, "As long as we enjoy it we carry on."
"We" is a company of faithfuls - architects, quantity surveyors, surveyors-cum-land buyers, sales personnel, accountants, project managers and so on - who genuinely enjoy the working atmosphere enough to stick around year after year.
It is the enjoyment that makes a heavy schedule seem easy. For Romy manages, with the help of her husband and mother, to run a household, take the children to school, work a full day in her offices, get home in time to help with homework and still stay awake long enough to deal with emails before bed.
"It doesn't seem like work when you enjoy it so much," she says.
First published in Homes Overseas Magazine July 2007.
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