It takes all sorts. The day in 2004 that Karen Millen received a half-share of
£54m was a sad one. She had sold a controlling interest in her eponymous
high-street chain and was wealthy but bereft: “It was the end of
everything,” she says.
Not for long. The woman who started a fashion empire in 1981 with just a few
lengths of cotton and some shirts knocked up at her mum’s kitchen table is
made of stern stuff. Now she has shown that when life gets tough there’s
nothing like a bit of home-improvement therapy to sort yourself out. Since
parting with Kevin Stanford, both her business partner and the father of her
three children, and her business, she has spent some £10m on various
home-decorating projects.
She started by redoing the family house in Wateringbury, Kent, that she and
Stanford bought eight years ago for £750,000. They had already spent £2m on
remodelling it and Millen reckons she has spent another £2m changing it yet
again. As therapies go, this one is pretty top-end, and it appears to be
working.
“I’ve got my life back together,” she says. “It took me a while to adjust and
find out who I am after being part of a big company and part of a couple for
so long. There were difficult times, but I have good friends and family, and
I’m an optimistic person. I knew life would be difficult for a few years,
but that it was just a matter of going through it.”
Certainly, if you can judge by appearances, this woman is absolutely fine. At
45, her slight, boyish figure is dressed in tight jeans and boots, her
blonde hair immaculate and her lips glossed.
Millen’s story reads like the plot of a gold-embossed paperback, the tale of a
Kent teenager who liked to make her own clothes and who went on holiday to
Morocco where she met and fell in love with Stanford. She was 19 and had
just finished a City & Guilds fashion course at Medway College, he was
20 and halfway through an engineering degree at Thames Polytechnic that held
little interest for him. Together they built an international empire of more
than 100 shops. They had three children and lived in an 18th-century home
set in five acres of Kent. But while the business flourished, the
relationship didn’t.
“You grow apart and start becoming different people and wanting different
things,” Millen says of the break-up. Stanford has since had a baby with
another woman, and Millen is philosophical about the way things have turned
out. “I think we did incredibly well to achieve what we did and still
be friends, though it’s sad that things had to end the way they have. We
just didn’t quite see it through.”
Millen is only beginning to make sense of it all, two-and-a-half years later.
At first, she just needed a rest. “From day one, the business was full-on,
and as we got bigger, the pace became ever faster because we were up against
so much competition,” she says. When Bau-gur, the Icelandic retail investor,
offered to buy 49% of the company for £26m, they accepted. That was in
October 2001.
“Two-and-a-half years later they offered to buy us out completely,” she says.
“By then the company had grown into this big chain store. It was fantastic
but I had begun to lose the passion I once had for it. And Kevin and I were
going through the break-up, so the offer came at the right time.
“It was like giving your baby away,” she says of the sale. “Kevin and I had to
travel up to Birmingham to go to the solicitors together. It was quite
bizarre and, yes, there were tears.” That was a Friday. On the Monday she
went to the company’s head office in Maidstone to say goodbye. “A lot of
people had worked for us for years, it was like a big family,” she says.
When she went home she had no relationship and no work.
For years, she had worked all hours. Now, with untold wealth at her disposal,
she chose to stay home and look after the house and children: Josh, now 16,
Jordan, 15, and Jake, 9.
“The emotional stress of ending a relationship and a business was a
life-changing experience, but I adapted well to my retirement,” she says.
“It was nice to be around, cooking meals, doing school runs, and it wasn’t
until then that I realised how exhausted I was.”
Her idea of exhaustion is different from that of most people. To make the
house her own, she knocked down walls, moved doors, and replaced the almost
brand-new kitchen and bath-rooms.
The vast modern glass and chrome pavilion that the couple originally added to
the house has been transformed: now it has a colonial feel, with dark wooden
ceiling, floor and panelling. It’s reached via a wooden corridor, with a
bubbling water feature on either side — it’s a bit like crossing a
swing bridge over a waterfall. The kitchen was ripped out and replaced with
a Bulthaup one, the walls polished with marble plaster and the hall is
furnished with pieces sourced personally in Paris.
At the same time as redoing the family house — “I know I’ve spent more
than it’s worth, but it’s my home and I wanted to put a bit of my soul into
it” — she bought a three-bedroom flat in Bel-gravia. It cost
£3.1m two years ago. “I’ve already spent £2m on it, and I haven’t finished.
I don’t even want to look at the bills.”
Not that she’s bothered. “At the end of the day, I want what I want,” Millen
says. “I couldn’t just spend my whole life in Kent.”
After the break-up, she started going to charity events, and is typically
direct about her original motives: “I wanted to meet people,” she says.
“I always try to pull a positive out of a negative, and one of the nicest
things about being alone is that it has opened a whole new world.”
It was at a charity do for the Teenage Cancer Trust in November 2005 that she
met Sol Campbell, the England defender then playing for Arsenal, who she
went out with for a few months.
Millen is also helping to set up a charity for teenagers with life-threatening
ill-nesses. and is involved with a vocational project for the charity Hope
HIV, which works with children in sub-Saharan Africa affected by the Aids
pandemic, after being approached by a teacher at her daughter’s school for
assistance.
She has already made a couple of trips to Africa. “I don’t want to dabble in
things,” she says. “I will help to set up a school to teach sewing, and will
be there to support them, but I only plan to get totally involved in one
charity.” She has recently bought a third home, an unfinished hilltop house
in Deja in Majorca. “It’s unbelievably expensive there,” she says. “This has
seven bedrooms, but it cost £2.75m, and I’m going to have to spend that
again on it. You don’t get a lot for your money.”
Millen is just getting into her stride. “I feel as if I should be doing more
now,” she says. “I’d like to do something with interiors professionally, but
I haven’t got that much confidence in myself and I’ve got used to having my
own time.
“I’d like to dip in and out of projects, maybe have a bit of a lifestyle
store, where people could have a coffee, an experience, and there would be
music, books, furniture, maybe a range of evening wear ...”
We haven’t heard the last of Karen Millen.
