“That could have gone either way,” he says, matter-of-factly, about the week he spent waiting for his PET scan results back in 2022. His doctor had been careful not to show alarm during the discovery phase – “he said, ‘I didn’t want to appear to be worried’” – which Jones had taken as reassurance. When the call finally came, when his doctor was “happy it hadn’t spread,” something shifted.

“At that point, I decided I wanted a different life,” Jones says. “More balance. I didn’t want to be knackered and napping each weekend.”

He had run Soho House for three decades, lived endlessly on airplanes, had built an organisation with 250,000 members across more than 50 clubs worldwide – and he had done it, he now concedes, with a fervour that had less to do with ambition than compulsion.

“I was a workaholic,” he says. “I’m still a workaholic. I’m a recovering workaholic, I suppose. And it’s really important to recover from it, because everyone looks at people like that and thinks, ‘brilliant’. But it’s not brilliant. It takes over your life.”

He stepped down from his chief executive role at Soho House in 2022 and relinquished his seat on the board earlier this year. He still holds his founder title and still has dinner with the Soho House team. The current CEO, Andrew Carnie, came to St Clement recently, Jones notes with pleasure. “I’m super proud of Soho House and I wish them all the luck in the world.”

For six months after stepping back, Jones did something he had not done since his twenties: nothing. He ran up and down a hill near his home in Oxfordshire – “I get to the top and I’m a panting like an old dog, but I recover” – went to the gym twice a week when in London and discovered, to his surprise, that he rather liked being bored. “It’s quite good to be bored occasionally,” he says. “I’d sort of missed it.”

And he spent precious time with his family. He has four grown children, a three-year-old grandson, and lives between Oxfordshire and Marylebone with his wife Kirsty Young, the former Desert Island Discs presenter and podcaster, who knows a thing or two about public life being upended by illness, having stepped back from the BBC when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia some years ago. Young, not unreasonably, enjoyed the less-manic version of her husband, but has always supported his ambitions. She didn’t want him “madly working”, as he puts it, but she also understood, when six months had passed and Jones had started talking to Mark Wadhwa about a new project, that retirement was not on the cards for someone built the way he is.

“Kirsty knew I needed to do something,” he says. But the agreement was that they needed to do less, both professionally and personally. It’s why Jones has recently put an island in Scotland – which they’d bought and spent considerable time getting planning permission for – back on the market. The project was ambitious and beautiful and, post-diagnosis, entirely the wrong scale for the life they now wanted. “I just wanted a smaller life,” he says simply. “Do I want a big project that’s going to be big to run? Or do I want something smaller? Someone should go and buy it,” he adds. “It’s stunning.”

The St Clement – one hotel, one city, four days a week, Monday to Thursday – is the right size for him. It is ambitious enough to engage him but contained enough not to swallow his life. “With one property, you can keep it in a box,” he says, though it sounds slightly unconvincing coming from a man who famously cannot walk past a breadbasket without mentally repositioning it.

The cancer conversation is one Jones actively seeks out now since he went public with his diagnosis. He has become an effective campaigner. He is a trustee of Prostate Cancer Research, an advocate of national screening programmes and a firm believer in men openly discussing the disease, treatment and its side-effects. He is straightforward about his own treatment – a radical prostatectomy – in a way that’s honest and deliberately normalising. Things are “not quite as easy as they used to be,” he says, but he was lucky, everything functions as it is should and, most importantly, he is well.

He finds it hard to understand men who refuse screening because they are worried about the consequences of treatment (it can sometimes lead to incontinence and impotence). “You can’t do anything if you’re dead,” he says. He is specifically frustrated by the absence of a national prostate-cancer screening programme in Britain. He blames this on “old data and institutional thinkers” and suggests the number of men dying unnecessarily amounts to a disgrace. He believes a screening programme is coming soon and speaks about this with the focused certainty of a man who has decided this, above all the other things he has done, might be the most important.

What was his first thought when he heard his cancer hadn’t spread? “Relief,” he says. “Such relief. And then I was determined to do something about it. To tell people. Because this is something you can do something about.” He is quiet for a second, in the way of someone deciding whether to say the next thing.

“What I’ve done professionally – I’m proud of that. But if I’ve managed to save even one life by talking about this… that’s the biggest purpose. That’s more than the clubs, more than any of it.”

Returning to work, with a new company and no team, was stranger than Jones had anticipated. “I had had this whole infrastructure and then suddenly I had none at all,” he says. “I had to rebuild everything.”

But now he has this. The St Clement is at 180 The Thames, on Temple Place, and on a curve of the river that gives it the most extraordinary views of the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, St Paul’s, the City and Canary Wharf. It’s close enough to the City to feel alive and far enough from the usual tourist drag to feel undiscovered.

The development is new, built with Jones’s longtime property developer partner Mark Wadhwa, with whom he also created 180 Studios and Soho House Berlin, among others. Alongside the hotel, Jones and Wadhwa have also developed a collection of private apartments – serviced by St Clement – for those who want something more permanent than a hotel stay, but with all the ease that implies.

From the moment you walk through the door, St Clement announces itself as something quite different from the dark, velvet-draped sensuousness of Soho House. It is cleaner, softer, smarter – more mid-century in its sensibility, with a light touch that feels almost Scandinavian. The palette is warm but restrained. Nothing is trying too hard, which, again, is the hardest thing in the world to pull off. The interiors were designed with Alex Eagle and Sophie Hodges – collaborators who, Jones says, were invaluable in keeping him from retreating to what he already knew. “They kept pushing me,” he says. “They’d say, ‘we can’t just go back to your comfort zone. We’ve got to push this.’”

Art is everywhere and genuinely good. A Richard Prince – belonging, Jones mentions almost in passing, to his nephew – anchors the lobby, alongside a painting by his daughter, an artist. The feel is personal without being indulgent. Custom-made tiles and bespoke designs run through the building like a thread. Much of the furniture is vintage, sourced by Wadhwa and Eagle (his wife), and it gives the rooms the feeling of somewhere accumulated rather than installed.

The bedrooms are large, even the “bog-standard ones”, as Jones calls them (they are anything but). There are 90 rooms and 15 suites. The vast loft suites, with wrap-around terraces, offer what Jones describes as some of the best views in the city. As does the jaw-dropping expanse of the two-storey penthouse.

But it is the rooms themselves that reveal the real thinking. Suitcases have their own dedicated cupboard, lacquered pull-out drawers contain every amenity you could conceivably need, leather-handled weights and yoga mats sit in each room. Books and candles are arranged in the bathrooms, while the mirrored cabinets are stocked with complimentary products from artisan beauty brands.

Downstairs, there is a speakeasy-style bar called Bobby’s and a restaurant, Café Clement, that Jones intends to become, as he puts it, “part of London, not a hotel restaurant.” He says this with the certainty of a man who has done exactly this before, several dozen times, in cities across four continents.

He is delightful company: funny, self-deprecating (“I always had people who were better than me,” he says of his teams) and proud of the things he did brilliantly. Greek Street, where it all began, and New York, where 21 years ago he took the Soho House idea to a city that had never heard of it and couldn’t quite see the point. “Why would we want to pay for that?” was the prevailing reaction to the idea of a member’s club.

“It’s a tough city,” Jones nods. “And so that was brutal. Building a business can be really, really tough. And we were constantly trying to fund the new places we were building. We ran out of money when we were building the Miami house back in 2008. We were stuffed. I remember going to the bank in New York and thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do this’. In the end, I just said to them, ‘Can you just show me the naughty step?’ And then, luckily, they gave us the money to finish.”

When not in one of his own establishments, Jones’s ideal evening now is an early dinner and home by 9.30pm. He loves pubs – The Bull in Charlbury, for instance, the Devonshire in Soho – and enjoys Josephine Bistro in Marylebone, The Dover in Mayfair and the Super 8 team’s places.

Does he worry about London? He has watched it for three decades with a closer eye than almost anyone – the nightlife, the restaurant culture, the social habits, the way people spend and drink and gather and, increasingly, don’t quite gather in the same way they used to. And it has changed, he says – more than people quite want to acknowledge. Post-Covid, he had expected the city to erupt. Instead, it went to bed slightly earlier. “Talk to any restaurateur in London and they’ll tell you the 6.30pm table is the one everyone wants now,” he says. “The 8.30pm tables are the easy ones to get.” Young people, he observes, are simply living differently – more health-conscious, less interested in drinking, less likely to stay out until the small hours. “It is a bit different,” he says. “There’s been a shift.”

None of this, he is careful to say, means London is finished – far from it. The city’s restaurant scene, he insists, still has extraordinary vitality. There are still restaurants impossible to get into, still a restless appetite for the new. Despite this, he has no plans to open a second St Clement. “I’m super excited to go full circle, get back in the lobby, be here with the team, love the customers.”

He stops, aware of how this sounds. “That probably sounds like something people say about golf,” he adds. “But it’s genuinely everything.”

It does not sound like something people say about golf. It sounds like something said by a man who came close to not being here at all, who has spent several years recalibrating what here is worth, and who has arrived at a reasonably clear answer.

Outside, the Thames moves past the Embankment in its torpid, indifferent way. Inside St Clement, Nick Jones watches his team deftly flick back and forth across the lobby between bar and brasserie and allows himself to look, just for a moment, like a man who knows precisely where he is, and is very happy to be there.