THE JOURNAL
For a glimpse of how the one per cent live, spend an hour in the company of Mr Max Aniort, cofounder and CEO of Le Collectionist. In less than a decade, the luxury travel brand has established itself as the number one luxury holiday home rental service in Europe. From villas in Ibiza to chalets in Courchevel and rugged retreats on the tiniest Greek islands, Le Collectionist offers them all and provides a full concierge service, too, tailoring each vacation to your very demanding needs. They’ll find you your ski monitor, they’ll get you the best table at the club; they’ll even, apparently, find you a 1970s Jaguar Coupé, should you need it.
“If you just want to eat roe and detox and do yoga all day, fine,” Aniort says. “If you want to party all day, fine. We don’t judge. I think both are cool.”
Le Collectionist reports a turnover of €100m a year, but its vibe is relaxed, assures Aniort – “We’re not bling”. At 37, he seems the same, a sweet, almost geeky presence in serious spectacles and mussed-up hair. He describes himself as an “old person in a not-very-young person’s body”. Speaking from his Parisian office – it’s 6.00pm and it’s his 11th meeting of the day – he shows me a framed picture on his desk of his husband, Loïc (an executive at Kering) and their one-year-old daughter, Thelma.
Home comforts are important to Aniort wherever he goes, whether it’s on holiday or for work. “I love to create a routine,” he says. He immediately susses out where to buy his coffee, his bread, his flowers. “I love to travel to new places to discover things, but I really like settling down somewhere.”
He was born in “the middle of nowhere”, in a small town in Brittany. (In fact, its name, Landerneau, has become a byword in French for a small place where everybody knows each other’s business.) His life changed radically when his father, a helicopter pilot, brought the family to Saudi Arabia for work.
Aniort lived there from ages seven to 14. As a child, he really enjoyed the fun parts. “It’s just sunny all the time, you swim, you play tennis.” Summers, meanwhile, were spent on the small Greek island Kalymnos. So, when he had to return to France to pursue his studies at a military school in Brest, it was a shock. “I’d take the bus and not pay for it,” Aniort recalls. “I said to the conductor: ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t know we had to pay for the bus. For me, it’s like mass-market transportation.’” He was promptly fined.
Aniort loved school. He was, he says, “the boring guy in the front row”. It propelled him first to Paris’ prestigious Lycée Henri-IV, then the equally top-tier business school HEC Paris. His early twenties were spent working in finance, with spells in Hong Kong, London and New York. “They were my apprenticeship years,” he says. “People say, ‘take some distance’ – I think you have to do it literally. Like, OK, take distance… Go to Hong Kong!”
Yet, he realised he didn’t like his work much. He began to work with an old friend from college, Mr Olivier Cahané, who was starting to dream up Le Collectionist, motivated by a horrible holiday in Spain where a so-called luxury apartment was anything but. They were convinced that they could do better, providing a high-end, tailor-made service for both renters and property owners complete with concierge service and more. Airbnb was already thriving, but “nobody thought it could work with luxury,” Aniort says. “So, we said, ‘Let’s try one summer and we’ll see.’”
“I was 27, and these are houses that are worth millions, and you turn up with a beard and long hair – people aren’t massively reassured”
The beginnings were basic. “We really did everything. You’d get a call and say, ‘Oh hi, I’ll put you through to this department’, and put the phone down, then pick it up again speaking in a different voice.” (Today there are more than 200 people employed by the company, with dozens of offices worldwide; Le Collectionist acquired four smaller agencies last year thanks to a €60m investment.)
The first summer, they focused on Deauville and St Tropez. “It was really hard, because I was 27, and these are houses that are worth millions, and you turn up with a beard and long hair – people aren’t massively reassured.” Today though, it’s far easier to get people on board.
“All the owners know each other; these are really small destinations. They’ve all been going for years, their kids know each other, they go to the same parties, same restaurants. So, they’ll have a barbecue, talk about their properties and be like, ‘Who do you do it with?’ Our owners are our best ambassadors.”
Le Collectionist prides itself on its range of homes. “There’s a curation, but we don’t want to be snobbish. We don’t want to tell people, ‘This is beautiful’, or ‘this is awful.’” A heavy-beamed old manor house is as welcome as a modernist glass box: “Sometimes you can be like, ‘I want to live like the Tudors’, and another time, ‘Be in Black Mirror.’”
The top requests from holiday-makers? “Chefs, always first. Then a boat trip, then ski monitors.”
Any bad behaviour? “Of course, we have party people in Mykonos and Ibiza – it would be such a big lie to say no. But when we see people beginning to order dozens of bottles of champagne from the concierge, or a DJ, we’ll say: OK, this isn’t the right property for you. We just switch them somewhere else.”
Aniort doesn’t think that all these glamorous boltholes have changed his own taste. “I’d prefer a finca in Ibiza rather than some vast thing. Last year on holiday, we first did a sublime house in Antiparos, then did a small one – much less high-end, a real holiday house – and to be honest I felt happier there. You could come in with sandy feet, it didn’t matter...”
Le Collectionist has, however, made him a stickler for good service. “I don’t think I was as attentive before to details – to furniture, to design, to the art in a house. It educated me, but it didn’t change me.” His favourite property is a villa in Provence, where he was photographed for this story, at his suggestion.
The long-term aim for Le Collectionist is to become number one not just in Europe, but globally. As Aniort continues to dot the globe in pursuit of new collaborators and clients, perhaps his chief obstacle is, somewhat surprisingly, that he has a fear of flying. Luckily, the desire to be where he needs to be tends to trump his initial terror. Also, he takes the train wherever possible. Just this coming Friday, for instance, he’ll take the train down to Marseille – where he and Loïc have a second home – with little Thelma.
Why the name, by the way? “Because we love Thelma & Louise,” he grins sheepishly. So, if they had a second daughter, would she be…?
“Ah non!” Aniort says. “That would be too cliché.”
Mr Louis Wise is Assistant Editor at the Financial Times HTSI