The man restoring Parisian brasseries to their golden-age glory

He was immediately in demand, consulting for owners of nightclubs and designing two himself: the gloriously Second Empire Le Carmen, in a house once lived in by Georges Bizet, and Faust, the largest nightclub in Europe at that time. Set under the Pont Alexandre III, it was a project far too big for its budget. ‘It worked in the end,’ recalls John. ‘But, as the French say, it was bien de loin, mais loin d’être bien – good from afar, but far from good.’ It was a punishing experience. The wonder was that an Englishman, unqualified in design, and whose French was at first limited, could achieve so much. He needed a rest.

‘At that point I was going out with a girl who was living a lovely life growing her own vegetables in the Loire Valley. I felt as if I’d lived two careers in a short time. I moved down there, but she dumped me on the day I arrived. Instead of going back to Paris, I stayed in the area and undertook what I thought of as a self-taught creative MBA. I researched the work of great art nouveau and art deco designers on the brilliant Galerie Marcilhac website and taught myself perspective drawing so I could brief architects more effectively. It was a chrysalis period.’ This was his version of the art-school training he had longed for as a teenager. His father, a self-made Birmingham business-man, had told him he should accept the place he had won at Oxford to read modern history, and John had followed his advice: ‘Take the brand name. Oxford will open doors.’

After 18 months in the Loire Valley, John was tempted back to work by the owner of 15 of France’s best-known brasseries, who had the vision – and the budget – to return them to their former glory. This led him to him found The Guild of St Luke (now G.S.L.) – a name commonly used by guilds of painters in medieval Europe, as St Luke is the patron saint of artists. ‘I’m the conductor of the orchestra, but it’s a team effort – like a medieval guild – and we’re able to attract top talents. Everyone shares the limelight.’

At a planning meeting in the emptied shell of Terminus Nord, John surveys the architectural drawings with some of these artisans. There is 78-year-old lighting maker Jean-Pierre Lorence, who brushed away a tear when he realised his father had installed the Sixties lights he was about to replace. But John is certain the place must evoke the feel of 1925, when the brasserie opened. It was an era of hard, shiny surfaces and the glamour of travel; later accretions just have to go.

Jean-Pierre has produced for inspection a prototype of the new lights John has designed in the manner of Eckart Muthesius. There is cabinet maker Lucinio da Silva, and Benjamin Craig, a French-American decorative painter, who has worked in Hollywood and for the New York stage, as well as for decorators like Jacques Garcia in Paris. He has brought in painted sample boards, mimicking marquetry in different fine woods, for the back room at Terminus Nord. ‘It’s extraordinary how craftsmen differ,’ John says later. ‘Plasterers are happy go lucky. They are like butchers, happy people; they come in as a gang, all singing. Decorative painters are all angst-chic, gloomy and introspective.’ Whatever their temperaments, these specialists form a team around him for every project.

Over the years, John has made some radical choices. At Bouillon Julien, he chose sea-green paint for the walls and installed prune-coloured banquettes. ‘Are you crazy?’ said the owner, who felt brasseries should always have nicotine-yellow walls. This was how it looked in the days when Edith Piaf and Ernest Hemingway were regulars. ‘It looks a bit Wes Anderson now,’ says John. ‘And so it should. With the bright stained-glass ceiling by Charles Buffet and the art nouveau women in the wall paintings, the colour stands out.’ For other projects like Brasserie Flo (now Floderer), he simply had new rattan seats made and restored the cigarette-blackened wall paintings.

John’s set-up is flexible: there is no head office and his art director, De Rrusie, who does all the graphics for G.S.L., is currently travelling and works out of his van using an iPad. He took a job as a doorman at Faust to get a chance to show John his designs, which were better than any John already had. ‘De Rrusie is so creative – he can turn his hand to anything. We were lent a flat above one of our projects, which had a piano. After three months, I could just play Chopsticks and he was playing pieces by Dave Brubeck.’

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John’s living arrangements are pretty flexible, too. His London flat was carved out of the drawing-room floor of a large white stucco house, overlooking a tree-lined square. He has decorated its tall walls with plasterwork samples and there are piles everywhere of his reference books, including some by his hero John Ruskin. He and his girlfriend Leonora Chance, who works in PR, drive around occasionally in his 1981 Bentley. He bought it because that was the last moment when cars of that kind were made by hand, and for its solid chrome handles and the heavy clunk as you shut its doors. It is beautiful but temperamental and seems frequently not to be working.

When in Paris, he borrows a room in the apartment of an old friend, the designer Valérie Vais, who lives conveniently close to the Gare du Nord. ‘Restoring historic monuments is an honour and a privilege. I’ve always been inspired by the past. When I look at the Moscow metro, I can see 20 potential restaurants in there. I will never go towards anamorphic, futurist forms that are generated by computers,’ he says. With a new London project in hand – a cutting-edge restaurant in Mayfair – it seems he may not be taking the Eurostar weekly for quite some time.