A visit to the Kindersley household is a confusing experience. For a start,
they have three identical front doors in a row, with no way of telling which
knocker to knock. And the terrace itself is in an area of south London that,
though handy for the West End and undoubtedly greatly gentrified, is hardly
the sort of place you would expect to find one of the country’s richest
families.
Yet this is the home of Peter Kindersley, 66, co-founder of the publishing
firm Dorling Kindersley, who made £100m when he sold up to Pearson eight
years ago. Today, the illustrated reference books he created are published
worldwide, and it all started here, in a two-bed end-of-terrace Victorian
house in Kennington, where Peter has lived with his wife, Juliet, 67, for
more than 40 years. Their daughter, Rosie, 40, lives in the two houses next
door – which explains all the knockers.
The couple met while studying at the nearby Camberwell School of Arts and
Crafts in the early 1960s. At Juliet’s instigation, they bought No 2 Methley
Street in 1964 for £5,250, lent by family. The area was rough, but handy for
Mayfair, where Peter was working for an advertising agency.
“My parents lived in the country, my father commuted, and the marriage
failed,” Juliet recalls. “I wanted to live as close to the centre of London
as possible, so Peter could walk to work. When I saw this house, it was
derelict and divided into three stinking flats, with no bathroom and a
toilet in the garden, but I could see that the proportions were beautiful.”
They did all the work themselves, but when Rosie was born, in 1967, the
house was still barely habitable. Her brother, Barnabas, followed three
years later.
By 1972, Kindersley was working for publishers Mitchell Beazley where, as art
director, he was responsible for The Joy of Sex, an illustrated manual that
has sold more than 8m copies. Two years later, he quit and founded Dorling
Kindersley with Christopher Dorling. “I left in a huff because I didn’t
agree with their publishing policy,” he says. “I wasn’t allowed to work for
anybody else for a year, and when I started on my own, in the back room, the
company had to be in Juliet’s name.”
The plan was to publish highly illustrated nonfiction books. Producing such
books was expensive, however, so, to make the process cost-effective, they
were sold initially to America and Europe, then in the rest of the world as
well. “We built the international co-edition market,” Peter says. “No single
publisher could afford to produce these books. We created a network of
publishers all over the world who wanted good reference books for children
and adults.”
However easy the couple make it sound, it was undoubtedly a struggle. “We had
no money and two kids,” Juliet says. “But the man next door was the
secretary, another man who lived up the road was our lawyer, and they worked
for nothing. As the company grew, it took over the house – I would be stuck
upstairs in one bedroom with the children.” The basement of the three-storey
property was let out for extra cash, and the two children continued to share
a bedroom until they left home.
The company was successful from the beginning, employing a large international
sales force speaking Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, German and more.
“Other publishers had nothing on us,” Peter says. “Their foreign rights were
dealt with by one person in a basement; we had 20 or 30 people. And we
printed everything in one place to get huge economies of scale. We always
published at least 100,000 copies of each of our books.”
The Kindersleys were interested in sustainability long before it became
fashionable, commissioning a little-known author called John Seymour to
write The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, which was bought by Faber and
Faber and sold more than 1m copies. A baby book by Penelope Leach, which
appeared in 1976, was to became a modern classic. “Then it really began to
work,” says Peter, also a photographer. “We used lots of photographic
illustrations and started the Eyewitness series.”
By 1982, the Kindersleys were publishing books themselves. In 1991, Bill Gates
invested £8m, selling his stake for £45m a few years later. Even then, there
was no question of swapping the house they loved for somewhere bigger. In
any case, by now, the area – once home to Charlie Chaplin, always popular
with MPs because of its proximity to parliament – had attracted other
affluent buyers. Robin Cook, the late foreign secretary, lived in their
street at one time; Paddy Ashdown still does. Jack Straw and Charles Kennedy
are nearby.
In 1997, Rosie, who was working at Books for Cooks, the Notting Hill
bookshop-cum-kitchen, as well as running the DK cookery list, bought No 4
for £250,000. A month later, the woman in No 6 said she was also selling,
and at the same price, so Rosie bought that too. “That meant I could have
three bedrooms, as well as a bathroom, and a library,” she says.
Rosie knocked the lower-ground floors of her two houses together to create one
large kitchen. Upstairs, a door leads straight to her parents’ house, while
a gate between the gardens gives the family dachshunds – Rosie’s Otto and
Ludo, and her parents’ George and Sidney – freedom to roam. The houses are
connected in style, too: both mother and daughter admire the rich colours
and patterns of William Morris. Juliet’s walls are hung with paintings of
family, friends and home; so are Rosie’s.
Walking from the original house to its neighbour is like stepping into a
mirror image with dramatic embellishments, such as the glass chandeliers in
the library. There is nothing quite as dramatic, though, as Juliet’s
bathroom, in an unusual top-floor conservatory built in 1971. Venetian
blinds provide privacy, but the glass ceiling is open to the skies.
In 1972, Peter and Juliet bought Sheepdrove, a derelict farmhouse on the
Berkshire downs. For years, they stayed in a caravan there at weekends and
in school holidays – they didn’t get electricity until more than 20 years
later. It was at Sheepdrove they first became concerned about modern farming
practices and began to acquire land. “If little bits of land came up for
sale, we would buy them to create a little pesticide-free zone, an oasis in
the middle of the madness,” Juliet says. “We were a couple of hippies,
really, like all our friends, only they couldn’t afford to buy land.”
The farm now extends to 2,250 acres and produces organic free-range chickens,
beef, pigs and lamb for sale by mail order or in their butcher’s shops in
Bristol and west London. All animals get special treatment, especially the
chicks, which are played recordings of farm sounds and have a see-through
conservatory. There is also an Eco Conference Centre and the Sheepdrove
Trust, which gives about £1m a year to various charities.
Both children play active roles in the Kindersley enterprises. Barnabas, who
has run the family’s organic olive grove in Ibiza, now oversees Neal’s Yard
Remedies, which they bought in 2005 for £10m. Rosie and her chef husband,
Eric Treuille, have a biodynamic vineyard – where grapes are harvested
according to the phases of the moon – in the Lot, France. They also run
Books for Cooks, which Rosie bought in 2002. “The sale of DK felt like a
‘get out of jail free’ card,” she says. “It had become a corporation. The
money gave us the opportunity to become more involved in the things we were
really interested in.”
And that, for the Kindersleys, means food – from healthy soil, plants and
animals – and family. Rosie and Eric have a son, Orlando, who will be three
next month, and, two years ago, Juliet suggested to Rosie that they all move
closer to the bookshop, where Eric also works. Although still attached to
the street in which she grew up, Rosie eventually agreed.
So, a year ago, the family bought a five-storey house in Notting Hill. Rosie
and Eric will occupy most of the place, but Peter and Juliet will live in
the basement when not in Berkshire. “The wonderful thing is, it’s happening
slowly,” Juliet says. “We’ve been renovating the house for a year, trying
to get flaky old green consultants to decide how to make it eco. We’ll just
be exchanging a horizontal life for a vertical one, with our family.”
And that, for these super-rich old hippies, is what counts.
Peter and Juliet’s two-bedroom house is for sale for £890,000, and Rosie
and Eric’s three-bedroom double property is for sale for £1.6m, both with
Winkworth; 020 7587 0600, www.winkworth.co.uk
www.sheepdrove.com
