‘We want the standard of a hotel, but for it to feel like home.” Penny Hughes is giving a tour of an upmarket apartment complex just opened by Riverstone Living, the property developer she chairs, beside the Thames in south-west London.
This high-end development, with its heritage-style reception doors, and the sort of plush furnishings and tasteful lighting normally associated with luxury hotels and private members’ clubs, is actually a “retirement community”.
Riverstone, founded in 2019 with backing from US investment bank Goldman Sachs, believes it has spotted a gap in the “later living” market – offering new-builds to well-heeled over-65s looking to downsize but stay in the capital.
Hughes, who is 63, joined Riverstone after several decades in the boardrooms of some of the UK’s largest consumer companies, including Coca-Cola, Vodafone and Morrisons. She says little is being done to adapt the UK’s housing stock to meet the needs of the 11 million over-65s in Britain, who account for nearly 19% of the population of England and Wales, according to the latest census.
“You allow people to retain their community and their love for London, and access to all the facilities, but add a more comfortable apartment,” she says, enthusiastically demonstrating features including wide doorways for wheelchair users.
When the Observer visits the Fulham development, one couple are doing a virtual tai chi class in the state-of-the-art gym, a prospective purchaser is getting a tour, and a 90-year-old is expected to move in later that day. Other amenities include a swimming pool, a cinema, and an Italian restaurant.
All of which comes at a price: the average two-bedroom flat in the complex costs £1.5m. Larger ones and those overlooking the river cost considerably more.
In addition, there are monthly “membership fees” of about £20,000 a year to cover maintenance, running costs and staffing (but not medical or nursing care. Riverstone also receives a “deferred management fee” when the property is sold: this rises for each year of ownership to a maximum of 28% of the price after seven years. (This is common practice among retirement home developers.)
The Fulham complex is Riverstone’s second site – its first opened in Kensington last year – and the company believes there will be sufficient demand among wealthier members of Britain’s ageing population to add a further eight developments in affluent London neighbourhoods over the next five years.
Hughes believes this focus on the capital sets Riverstone apart from rival retirement village developers – such as Audley, McCarthy Stone and Inspired – which tend to operate outside London.
Hughes’s “plural career” as a non-executive director of a host of companies wasn’t necessarily what she expected when she left her childhood home in the Wirral to study chemistry at Sheffield.
The turning point came in her early 30s: she had joined Procter & Gamble straight from university, working in product development, then done a stint at the Milk Marketing Board before moving to Coca-Cola and quickly rising through the management ranks. At the age of 32, she was appointed head the company’s British and Irish operations.
But just at the moment when further promotions and an international business career looked likely, she decided to step out of her executive career trajectory. Hughes and her husband had already had the first of their two sons, and she came to realise that an itinerant corporate lifestyle wasn’t for her.
“I don’t have that sort of adventurous spirit, in terms of travel. Some people just pick up their family and go,” she recalls. She particularly didn’t want to move to Coca-Cola’s head office in Atlanta.
“Once you start on an expat package, the company sort of decides what your next role is and where you’re going to live next,” she laughs. “I was too young to accept that and I fought it.”
Hughes had her first taste of a non-executive director role while still at Coca-Cola, when she joined the board of beauty retailer The Body Shop under its inspirational founder Anita Roddick. That was enough, it seems, to convince her to swap executive for non-executive roles.
Since then, she has held directorships at companies including the Gym Group and Argos as well as Vodafone and Morrisons. She gained experience in the property business as non-executive chair of student accommodation company iQ, which is part-owned by Goldman Sachs.
However, boardroom life had its ups and downs. Hughes came in for criticism in 2012 when she was chair of the remuneration committee of Royal Bank of Scotland, as NatWest was known at the time. The committee had granted a controversial near-£1m bonus to chief executive Stephen Hester after the government bailed the bank out at the height of the 2008 financial crisis.
Yet her “most challenging” role came when she was made chair of luxury carmaker Aston Martin as it was preparing to float on the stock market. Less than 18 months later, amid weak sales and with mounting debts, the carmaker was saved from collapse in a £500m rescue deal led by Canadian billionaire Laurence Stroll.
Hughes says she “should have understood the business better” before the company committed to an IPO. She believes Aston Martin’s management, its banks and advisers, all had “too rosy a view of the world”, while the executive team did not have any experience of public companies.
She says she is also proud of having brought in Stroll as executive chairman: “I think the company’s in the right hands.”
Looking back on a career in various boardrooms, Hughes says she’s been “extremely lucky” but is also adamant that non-executive directorships are “real work”. “I don’t have to run a business to have a real influence.”
Hughes believes the role of a director, and the way candidates are chosen for those jobs, has fundamentally changed in recent decades.
“In those early days it was people you knew who got you some of those roles,” she says. “It’s not like that now.”
She welcomes the changes to the composition of corporate boards over recent decades, particularly in terms of gender and diversity, but disagrees with the suggestion that some directors view the job as an easy way to make money.
“I think all the focus on corporate governance means that if you accept a role as a director, you have to know what is going on.”
CV
Age 63
Family Married with two sons.
Education Birkenhead high school, BSc in chemistry at Sheffield University.
Pay Undisclosed but performance-linked.
Last holiday Skiing in Morzine, France.
Best advice she’s been given A former boss at Coca-Cola, a fellow football fan, told her to learn how to become a centre-back rather than a centre-forward. “When you become a leader, you’ve got to be balanced and able to play all positions in the team.”
Phrase she overuses “Hey ho, onwards. I often finish emails like that.”
Biggest career mistake Her “odd move” from Procter & Gamble to the Milk Marketing Board: “I was just lucky I got rescued by Coke.”
How she relaxes Holidays, walking the dog, watching football.
