Rolf Sachs on art, values and a peripatetic life
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Mwah, mwah, mwah. “You kiss three times in Switzerland.” This is the first lesson that the artist Rolf Sachs has to impart. The door swings open to the St Moritz Olympic stadium, as his Swiss residence is known about town; the summer sun shining down on the ski town.
Sachs has spent much of his life advising the family office, which is based in Zug, 200km from St Moritz. Born in Switzerland in 1955, he is the son of Anne-Marie Faure and Gunter Sachs, the late German photographer, himself the son of Willy Sachs, the industrialist owner of Fichtel and Sachs, a manufacturer of ball bearings, and Elinor von Opel, of the automobile dynasty.
A mathematics graduate from the London School of Economics and of investment theory from Menlo College in California, Sachs says his financial background has informed him as an artist.
“I think being a creative guy helped me quite a bit,” he says. “They are obviously two very different fields, but they are fields which help each other. Hopefully every big bank manager is also a creative.”
Sachs runs a diverse portfolio of about 30 businesses within the family office. “I would rather have a water company than a furniture maker,” he says. But Sachs is keen to look beyond traditional investing to younger ventures in particular. “Start-ups,” he says, “are very exciting. It takes good management and creativity to get them to be successful.”
Nowadays, he balances his commitments to the family office with his work as a designer of furniture and as a conceptual artist. When we meet, he is back in town for the 10th St Moritz jazz festival, where he is, by all accounts, a local celebrity, laughing off the suggestion that he is “Mr St Moritz”.
Sachs grew up across the continent, being educated at Swiss boarding schools — first, at Le Rosey in Rolle and later at Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, 20km from St Moritz.
In 1966, some years after the death of his first wife, Sachs’ father married the French film icon Brigitte Bardot on Bastille Day and in 1969 got married for a third time, to the Swedish model Mirja Larsson. When Gunter Sachs died in 2011, he was said to have been worth £277m, having inherited part of his father’s fortune in 1958. An avid art collector, he was one of the first Europeans to buy Andy Warhol’s pop art pieces, some of which were included in the family’s 2012 Sotheby’s sale, which raised £35m.
This was the glamorous context in which Sachs grew up. He inherited strong values of politeness and respect from his father. “He was a true aesthete, very taken by beauty.” He takes after his father in this regard too. “I am a highly emotional person.”
Now, as an artist, working across disciplines in both art and design, he is a member of the advisory board at Sotheby’s, a trustee of the Design Museum in the UK, and is currently building two studios, one in Wandsworth, London, and another in Rome, home to his partner, fashion designer Princess Mafalda von Hessen.
His is a peripatetic life, mixing his work for the family office with creating and collecting art. Sachs has properties in London’s Fulham, in St Moritz and in Rome. His tailor, Cifonelli, is in Paris and the family estate is in Bavaria, where he spends time with his three children — Philipp, 31, and Frederik, 29, who both work in finance; and Roya, 26, a curator in New York.
Sachs spends much of his time on planes. In October 2016, the British prime minister Theresa May described those who believe themselves a “citizen of the world”, a “citizen of nowhere”. Such people, she claimed, “don’t understand what the word ‘citizenship’ means.” Sachs is, one assumes, one such character. “I feel strongly related to Switzerland,” he says. “I was here at school; then I came to London for university; then to America. I am French and German, educated in Switzerland, living in Rome. My creative language is German and we come from a prominent German family.”
Home is everywhere. “When people ask me, ‘Do you feel at home in St Moritz?’, I say, ‘It’s like my second home, but I don’t have a first one.’ ” His children, meanwhile, were educated at English public schools and “speak very proper English, better than German”.
His membership of two of the world’s most exclusive clubs, the Cresta Club and the Dracula Club, both in St Moritz, suggest he is part of the “global elite”. Over the trees from his house is the infamous Cresta Run, the ice toboggan track, home to the Cresta Club. Sachs is one of the men who make it happen. And it is only men — women ride just once a year. “If there were women it would be much more competitive,” he says.
Sachs has been riding the Cresta since he was 13, but now in his sixties, he rides the run just 15 times a year or so. The group gathers, as they have always done, at the Sunny Bar in St Moritz’s Kulm hotel, owned by the Niarchos family, school friends of Sachs, where photographs of the British aristocracy hang on the walls.
Sachs disputes the idea that the Cresta is ultra-exclusive. “One thing that doesn’t cut it is arrogance. It’s a family.” At the Dracula, founded as a non-profit in 1971 by Gunter Sachs; every prospective member has to demonstrate “bite”, or sharpness of character and intellect. Chairmen of banks, beware — the Cresta and the Dracula are not networking venues. “We don’t want to be that,” Sachs says. “We want to have fun, eccentric evenings.”
Sachs is himself quite the eccentric. Leisure time is not his métier. He has no guilty pleasures per se and does not watch television; there is no Netflix marathon to complete. “What I love is to have humorous lunches with friends which last a long time,” he laughs.
In London, these take place at La Famiglia on Langton Street in Chelsea, or at Bellamy’s in Mayfair. Sachs is a member of 5 Hertford Street and of White’s, but rarely attends the latter, “because I don’t wear a tie”. This not does preclude him from dressing smartly. In a downstairs cloakroom of his St Moritz home, piles of scarves hang on hooks. He estimates that he has as many as 200.
Apart from scarves, he collects chairs. There are 56 in the kitchen and sitting room alone; 26 around a giant table covered in design magazines. A Mondrian painting is on his shopping list, “but they’re quite expensive”.
Collecting is hard work. “It’s a full-time job somehow,” he says. “As an artist I am a bit more preoccupied with what I want to do than hoarding.” Nevertheless, surfaces around the house are scattered with memorabilia mixed with art.
A trophy commemorating the mysterious “Cresta Run Drunken Crab 2001” sits on a windowsill; another cup reads “Cresta Run 1968, last run of the season open, Gunter Sachs”.
The “stadium’s” tower, which is visible across the valley, flies the Olympic flag. From up here, the view over Lake St Moritz is spectacular.
Most of the money Sachs spends goes on collecting art, with transport and the maintenance of his various homes close behind. “I don’t indulge in major luxuries,” he says. “You have to keep things running and enable your children to have a similar life.”
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