Peter de Savary, who has died aged 78, liked to describe himself as a swashbuckling entrepreneur, adventurer and sportsman. He came to fame in the 1980s and 90s for his patriotic but unsuccessful attempts to win the America’s Cup yacht race, with a series of expensive craft. A restless speculator, who would buy a derelict castle on a whim, he once owned both Land’s End and John o’Groats but his serendipitous business ventures could often be short-lived. He was an early Brexiter, and stood unsuccessfully for James Goldsmith’s Referendum party in the 1997 general election.
De Savary, a colourful and noisy figure who loved cigars and vintage cars, came close to a British triumph in the America’s Cup in 1983 with his boat Victory 83, losing in the final heat to Alan Bond’s Australia II. But his attempt to mount further challenges were unsuccessful and ended in 1994 when Placeton, the holding company for much of his interests, went into receivership with £200m debts and De Savary had to sell his homes.
He bounced back, however, and rebuilt a rather smaller fortune, once estimated at £34m, by concentrating on satisfying the tastes of the rich and famous for privacy in exclusive hotels. He transformed more than 60 hotels, seven championship golf courses, most attached to hotels, and three marinas. Most recently he had been living on a luxury houseboat on the Thames in London.
De Savary was born in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. His father, John, who had been born in France, ran a pig farm. But when Peter was two, his parents separated and his mother, Vera, took him to live with her second husband, a Shell executive, in a Venezuelan oilfield.
Despatched aged nine to Britain to board at prep school and then Charterhouse in Surrey, he never tired of saying how much he hated school. With a single O-level in scripture to his name, at 16 he was expelled after being found in bed with the headmaster’s au pair. Rejecting the offer of an apprenticeship in the joinery business his father had established, he went to live with his mother in Canada and took a series of casual jobs before returning at 20 with his first wife, Marcia, and their child.
Four years later, after quarrelling with his father and leaving the business, he was in so much debt that he had to sell his house and car. But his fortunes changed when in 1969 he met a widowed friend of his mother who was attempting to sell her husband’s Dutch import and export business. De Savary borrowed the money to buy it from a friend and moved to The Hague where he developed the business, Afrex, much of it in Nigeria, which was in the process of rebuilding after the civil war; one of his partners was the president’s brother.
Other ventures followed. His share in a Kuwaiti oil company led to a lifelong connection with the industry and he was involved with founding an ultimately unsuccessful bank in the Bahamas.
Back in London, the now wealthy De Savary turned to providing hospitality for his counterparts; something that would help to define his life. Declaring that even expensive hotels were too often filled with people he did not like, in 1979 he founded the St James’s Club, a boutique membership hotel for the rich, and rolled out the formula internationally (in New York, Antigua, Paris and Los Angeles), later selling out for many millions. At one point he tried to acquire the Mar-a-Lago complex in Florida, only to be outbid by Donald Trump.
He bought into gaming, buying the Aspinalls casinos for £90m in 1987 but selling them two years later because he said his mother did not approve of gambling.
The impulsive De Savary bought and sold a long trail of country homes. In the mid-80s he bought on the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall. Though he claimed it was only intended as a private retreat, in less than two years, in a splurge, he had bought Falmouth docks, drawing up plans for a marina and residential complex there, started an oil bunkering service for passing ships, founded Pendennis Shipyard to build and service yachts, and acquired Land’s End, which he turned into a theme park (it seemed inevitable that he should follow it with the purchase of land at John o’Groats). It was seen as the largest investment in Cornwall for years but by 1992 he had relinquished nearly all his interests in the county, as once again he moved on.
By 1985, De Savary was divorced from Marcia and had become engaged to Lana Paton, a former beauty queen whom he had met in South Carolina. But then he suddenly married his personal assistant Alice Simms in a ceremony in Gibraltar. Six weeks later, it was over and De Savary married Lana the following year.
In 1987, the aircraft carrying them and his children crashed on a Caribbean reef, killing the pilot. The party were trapped in the upside-down aircraft before being rescued by a surfer. Later De Savary said, in an interview with the magazine Cigar Aficionado: “At that point my philosophy on life changed. When you genuinely look death in the eye, you know it’s a pretty tenuous thing you are hanging on to.”
Property, with its lure of profitable development, was always a key part of De Savary’s portfolio. As well as his Cornish interests, at various times he owned more than 200 acres on Canvey Island, Essex; planned a container port in Kent; invested in Southampton airport in 1988, in the then-unrealised hope of turning it into an international airport (he sold it to BAA in 1990); and acquired numerous hotel sites with surrounding land for development.
The most dramatic was Skibo Castle – acquired in 1990 – a Victorian pile in Sutherland once belonging to the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Up for auction when De Savary visited it in search of pictures connected to his wife’s family, he found it so irresistible that he bought in within the week. After his financial meltdown in the early 90s, he turned Skibo into the first of a series of high-end international Carnegie Clubs, good enough to host the wedding of Madonna and Guy Ritchie in 2000, before once more selling on.
In recent years, he had sold his latest country house on the basis that it should not be a burden to his wife after his death, while he also announced an apparent intention not to leave his fortune to his children: “Carnegie’s view was ‘to die rich is to die disgraced’; I wanted them to make their own way without that burden of my legacy.”
He is survived by Lana and their three daughters, and the two daughters from his first marriage.
• Peter de Savary, entrepreneur, born 11 July 1944; died 30 October 2022
