The price of gold smashing through the $3,000 barrier this month is sign of the times. So too is the recent trend for London’s wealthy to stop wearing expensive wrist watches in the streets for fear of theft. One place where these trends cross over is at a gothic-looking mansion in the middle of London’s Park Lane as the city’s rich look for a steel and concrete safe haven for their treasures. The former Barclays Bank branch on the north-south carriageway has what its owners say are the world’s safest private vaults. As Fort Knox and the Bank of England are state institutions, the key advantages of being private include a burgeoning list of concierge services, including a Rolls-Royce chauffeur for a trip to inspect their deposit boxes. For a glimpse inside the facility Sean Hoey, the managing director of owner IBV International Vaults, swings back the reinforced steel doors and explains what a client expects. A listed building with historical features, including original fireplaces, oak panelling and suspended ceilings, at ground floor, Stanhope House unveils its secrets on the floor below. Just to access to the stairs requires recognised fingerprint and retina scans. When you get downstairs there is a substantial step, a three-a-half tonne, high-grade steel door and a mantrap (a set of double doors like an airlock where the second only opens when the first is locked). “You come in to what is this beautiful building from the outside and it's got a modern twist,” says Mr Hoey, a veteran of safeguarding the treasures of Harrods department store. “The only way in to what is stored here is that the alarm is turned off and that happens when someone puts their finger on the pad and unlocks the box with their key. We've got security on the door and we've got everything monitored by our monitoring stations.” In a nod to IBV’s origins in the port city of Durban there is even a link to an operations room in South Africa backstopping the surveillance on the ground. Mentioning safety deposit facilities in the UK inevitably brings to mind notorious incidents that have been spotlighted in movies and the press such as the Brinks Matt bullion robbery of 1983 and the Hatton Garden heist of 2015. Stanhope House offers more than just storage. It is tapping into a gold rush: the precious metal has added two-fifths to its value in recent years. In the underground cavern there is the lavishly appointed Gold Room where potential buyers can inspect bars and coins to buy as an investment. The attraction of buying in this way is that the gold never has to leave the room and IBV will even buy back the investment if the owner wants to move on. In a lot of gold storage facilities the bar has been ordered up from the stores but in Stanhope House it sits in the locker until the owner wants to use it. "Even now with the price of gold at $3,000 an ounce, the experts have just been telling us that they're expecting it to go even higher," said Mr Hoey. "There's a lot of people that buy the gold here with us and then want to sell it back to us. We do buy back." The odd client buys in bulk. It is a trade that is very much part of IBV's roots as the owner of the business, Ashok Sewnarain, tells<i> The National</i> that he first got the idea while queuing in the Standard Bank in Durban. Formerly known as Standard Bank Vault Safe Custody, it expanded after converting its first former bank facility in Durban in 2004 to other major South African cities and five years ago to London, plus Switzerland and most recently Dubai. Where once there were 3,000 safes in the vaults, there are now 561 of varying shapes and sizes. "When it was Barclays they were obviously dealing with more UK clients while we're dealing more with international clients," he said. "If you are living in the UK you may only want a small safe to put your passport and jewellery in there. If you're international, you tend to go for the bigger safes and store bags and then go back to Saudi Arabia, or go back to China, knowing that they're in a safe haven in London." In the UK there are often reports of how upmarket areas of London are plagued by gangs that target the personal items of the rich. Stanhope House, once one of 10 grand mansions that lined the eastern side of Hyde Park and now a neighbour of the Dorchester Hotel, is indeed a haven from that. "We see many headlines about personal crime in London and a lot of it revolves around the things that people feel are very precious, like their jewellery, their watches, their handbags. There's a lot of clients that tell us, 'I need somewhere to store my watch because I'm scared about what will happen'." According to Metropolitan Police data, the number of luxury watches – valued at over £3,000 – stolen has in some years peaked above 2,000, and has averaged around 1,700 annually since 2019. With the top end of the handbag market booming, the accessory is a recent favourite in the storeroom. "When the clients are here they can feel comfortable, sit down and relax," he said. "They come in maybe before going out for dinner that night, take their jewellery and what they need to wear that night and off they'll go to the event that they were invited to, then they come back the next day and put the jewellery back in the safe. Or the men store the watches here and they may come in and switch their watches and then come back after a couple of days and then switch back again." As a veteran of London's Knightsbridge and Mayfair hotspots, Mr Hoey has seen some boggling sights as well as extreme opulence. Discretion being a watchword, he is not about to divulge the more outlandish instances. "As long as they pass our vetting procedure, obviously we've got to do our client checks, we take international clients as well as UK," he adds. "There's no requirement to ask a client what they're storing in their safety deposit box after the client checks – if we asked then some are not going to come to us. Our terms and conditions are nothing illegal, drugs, elephant tusks or money laundering. But obviously, once they go into this room, they can shut the door, total privacy."
