Leadership Series Event

Harry Handelsman

Developer of St Pancras Renaissance Hotel and Chiltern Firehouse

Harry Handelsman is the man behind the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. A 10-year labour of love that reinstated one of Britain’s greatest buildings and reunited Kings Cross with its gothic masterpiece and the catalyst for its regeneration.

He is the developer behind the Chiltern Firehouse. One of London’s oldest fire stations reborn as its most talked-about restaurant, bar and hotel. The Firehouse has been raising pulses in Marylebone since opening in 2014 by channelling the decadence and bohemian spirit of a bygone era – where everyone’s an insider and no one wants to leave.
Harry Handelsman is a man that makes beautiful, impactful buildings.

Born in Germany, raised in France and Belgium and educated in Canada, it was New York, and the artists he met in Manhattan, that inspired Harry to develop the concept of London loft-living. Upon moving to the capital, he found a property market in need of new ideas but blessed with great buildings. The tired façades of the capital’s old factories and warehouses hid the huge windows and high ceilings he was looking for.

Harry’s eye for scalable beauty and clockwork instinct for a postcode’s potential transformed these derelict structures in unloved locations into some of the most desirable destinations in London.
Today, the loft apartments that began Harry’s legacy have been joined by film studios, fashion hubs, design hotels, office space and world-renowned restaurants. MLC buildings adorn every rung of London’s property ladder, connecting 150 years of extraordinary architecture.

When Sir John Betjeman described the St Pancras Hotel as “too beautiful and too romantic to survive”, he’d clearly never met Harry Handelsman.

RSVP by 4th February 2018 – sgallagher@irelandfunds.org