The high style of Tyler Brûlé

The Australian Financial Review Magazine

October 2014

The doyen of style and global publishing mogul wants to get his hands on an airport. Next stop: Brisbane.

Tyler Brûlé has some well-intentioned counsel for Australian travellers. The editor of luxury travel magazine Monocle believes that shoes are a hindrance on long-haul flights. “But I would just advise Australians to always wear socks to the toilets," say the London-based style guru.

“I’m amazed at how many go to the loos barefoot," he continues in a tone not so much of hauteur as amusement. “If you ever talk to a flight attendant about the environment in there they’ll tell you it’s got to be the most toxic place on earth. There is so much emphasis at Australian airports on customs and beagle patrols, and everyone is freaking out about fruit, but I wonder what the Aussie abroad is bringing back in his toenails."

Brûlé is fond of Australia for the most rational of entrepreneurial reasons: it is the third biggest market after America and the UK for his global affairs, business and culture magazine, which is published in London for an international audience. But there’s another reason; Winkreative, the branding and design agency which operates alongside Monocle, has written a brand blueprint for the redevelopment of Brisbane Airport.

The gig has seen Brûlé visit the Queensland capital half a dozen times in the past two years, including in recent weeks to present an “intelligence report from the international travel market" at an event in the trendy James Street retail precinct. He judges Brisbane “perky and ambitious" but gently mocks the habit among some Australians for wearing board shorts on long-haul flights. “I know," he sighs. “The beach begins on the plane."

Recognisable by his permastubble, significant eyewear and natty wardrobe revolving around 20 blue blazers, Brûlé is not only a doyen of style but a rising power in publishing. His zeitgeist-defying penchant for print and traditional mediums such as radio position him as king of the new-trad niche.

It’s a good place to be. In September Japanese publisher Nikkei bought a 3 per cent stake in Monocle, valuing the seven-year-old title at $US115 million ($131 million). “We are obviously very happy with that," Brûlé says. I sense that behind this rather prim response there is a man punching the air and screaming: “Yessss!"

Not that he hasn’t done it before. In 1997 Brûlé sold his first magazine, Wallpaper*, to Time Inc for a reported $US1.63 million, only a year after founding it. The ever-widening web of Brûlé World now includes not only Monocle and Winkreative but a 24-hour radio channel, a personal weekly column in the Financial Times, shops selling male accessories – advertised in Monocle – and a suite of bespoke publications. Just about the only thing missing from this portfolio is a boutique airline branded Winkair.

But he’s thought of it. “There’s definitely an opportunity," he says. “Virgin Airlines is tired and British Airways when you fly with them, seem like they’ve given up.

“Would I like to buy two dozen 777s and run them on long-haul flights out of Heathrow? Sure. Did I make that much money [from the Nikkei deal]? No."

When we speak, Brûlé’s diary has the coming weekend blocked out for a trip to Tuscany, followed by a week home, then a business trip to Japan. It’s just as well he is still beguiled by flight, as the pointy end of the plane is his second home.

His love of aircraft began early, and for a time he considered training as a pilot. These days his mania for all things aeronautical is a function of the time he spends in the air and the airline accounts he has managed to secure. These include big players such as British Airways – Winkreative redesigned its business class cabin – as well as small. Toronto’s boutique Porter Airlines owes its winning raccoon logo to Winkreative.

Brûlé has worked with airports but never re-worked them. So when Brisbane Airport officials approached him to help hone their plans, they knew, in the words of one executive, that this aviation aficionado had “always wanted to get his hands on an airport". The key features of the airport’s upgrade are a new $1.35 billion runway, a $45 million facelift for its international terminal and Australia’s first dual apron taxi lanes.

Brûlé’s branding strategy is an attempt to weave a set of values and aspirations around these and other infrastructure projects. That he was unlikely to look at Brisbane through the Sydney-Melbourne prism was one of the reasons the Brisbane Airport Corporation approached him.

“From what we knew of Tyler we knew he loved airports, had very clear views on how they should work and how they should feel, and that he could bring a truly independent eye to our challenge," explains Brisbane Airport Corporation managing director Julieanne Alroe.

“He would bring no preconceptions or prejudices about what Brisbane Airport, and Brisbane, was or wasn’t."

Indeed, one of the things you get for your money when contracting Brûlé – and as he reportedly commands speaker’s fees of $US50,000, his services don’t come cheap – is thorough deprovincialisation. He places the Brisbane redevelopment in the context of other benchmark developments: the $35 billion Aerotropolis, or airport city, in Seoul; the Naoshima art island in Japan; the Jeune Rue district in Paris; a new urban precinct in Helsinki dedicated to wood; Manhattan’s High Line linear park and its subterranean counterpart, the proposed Lowline.

These were all sources of inspiration and aspiration; not surprising given there’s barely a place Brûlé hasn’t visited. “They didn’t have to put us on flights to go away and research what was going on," he says. “We already had that."

In the boom years of commercial aviation, airports were designed in the language of international modernism with a late industrial – often space age – aesthetic. The airport is still a machine for moving masses of people but it is increasingly glossed with a narrative anchoring it to the city, country and culture it serves. Brûlé’s research leads him to conclude that one of the keys to a successful airport in this age of non-stop travel is a sense of place.

“Let’s say I’m a business traveller pin-balling around the world," he says. “I’ve come from Jakarta and I’m on my way to Los Angeles, and I’ve just landed in Brisbane. It’s nice to know that I’m in the capital of Queensland, or if nothing else that I’m in Australia. A strong sense of place is important for any airport, but so many airports seem not to have received that memo yet.

“North America and Canada are particularly bad: you don’t know if you’re in San Francisco or Houston or Calgary. The good players, or those on the path to being good players, understand that."

Brûlé rails against duty-free emporia dedicated to the same international luxury brands pitched at the monied Chinese traveller. He boosts instead for distinctive local products; Finnish knives recently took his fancy at Helsinki airport. In his view there is never enough of the distinctive, crafty, boutique, sophisticated local stuff.

A powerful “made-in" aesthetic also runs through Monocle. The magazine gushes over handmade Bunaco lamps fashioned from Japanese beech, Italian door handles by Olivari, retro radios designed and manufactured in the Scottish town of Lanark.

Twenty years ago, while on a journalistic assignment in Afghanistan, Brûlé copped a bullet, two to be precise. One went clean through his upper left arm and the other his right forearm. Brûlé was not, as his career trajectory might suggest, advising the Americans on ways to rebrand the war effort or scoping the bazaars for wall hangings. He was doing a story on Medecins Sans Frontieres for German news magazine Focus.

What came next is the stuff of design world legend. With his wound cleaned and clamped, Brûlé was flown back to London for surgery. Recovering amid a sea of magazines with time to spare and a career to resurrect, he sensed a place in the market for a stylish, contemporary glossy with smarts. The result, launched in 1996, was Wallpaper*. A window onto international architecture, design, fashion, art and travel, its personality was proudly aspirational and global; it was a style magazine sans frontiere.

Brûlé had been working with not one but several media organisations in Afghanistan and his convalescence was spent haggling with “some not [so] gentlemanly or honourable publishers" for compensation.

“I decided then that I didn’t want to work for the big publishers again," he recalls. Gathering up the courage of his convictions, he took out a business loan and a fabulous new career was born; a fabulous new Tyler Brûlé.

There is a whiff of the fantastic in the 45-year-old’s back-story. Not only does his name sound like a riff on a French dessert, the openly gay style maven shot to the status of global media player from a childhood in Canada’s landlocked Winnipeg. The only child of a Canadian professional football player and a German-born Estonian artist, he was spoilt, he tells me, as a child.

But it wasn’t a conventionally privileged background. His first job was with bookseller WHSmith and he was paid, he recalls, in magazines. He left Toronto’s Ryerson University (ranked 701 in the world and equal last in Canada) without a degree, began his training with the BBC in Manchester in the late 1980s, and was a freelancer when wounded in Afghanistan in 1994. Two decades later, that’s all in the slipstream. He splits his time these days between his business offices at Midori House in central London, his home three blocks away and any cool place he chooses to be.

The term globalisation has become commonplace since its popularisation in the mid-1980s. For Brûlé it is a business axiom and a way of life. Wallpaper* and Monocle both reflect a global sensibility: they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. “With the world as our market, it made sense to publish a single edition that would appeal to readers from Jakarta to Hamburg, Sapporo to Washington," Brûlé wrote last year in his introduction to the Monocle Guide to Better Living, a celebration of the magazine’s ethos.

Founded in 1998, Winkreative also has its origins in this wide-angle global imagination. Its clients include BlackBerry, Lexus, Louis Vuitton, Mackintosh, Mini, Porter Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Taiwan Tourism Bureau, the government of Thailand, and Wimbledon. In keeping with the organisation’s global flavour, Brûlé in 2002 established a holding company in Zurich for Winkreative and Monocle. Sheltering beneath the same corporate umbrella is high-end menswear emporium Trunk Clothiers, whose operations manager, Swede Mats Klingberg, is Brûlé’s long-time partner.

The beating heart of the company, Brûlé insists, is the stand-alone magazine; a luxuriant island of print rising from a digital ocean. In 2005 it was a mere idea designed to fill a space as periodicals “shrank in format, reduced in frequency and dithered over strategy". By 2007 it was a reality.

It weathered the global financial crisis and has since flourished. Monocle is published 10 times a year at more than 200 pages and boasts a growing circulation, particularly in south-east Asia, of 77,000. The September edition was larded with $US1 million in advertising revenue and the cover price, $14.95 in Australia, reflects the considerable heft of the product.

“Good old paper," Brûlé fairly purrs, when asked to reflect on his uncanny publishing success. “Of course you can’t blink and have to be committed to it, and our readers know it and our advertisers know it."

Curated for the global aspirational class, it seems as if everyone with a copy poking from a briefcase or satchel might as well be wearing a badge emblazoned: Winner. You are what you read, or are seen to be reading, according to Brûlé’s theory of publishing success.

“If you want to say something about yourself you put a copy of the FT or the AFR under your arm," he says. “A lot of big publishers have forgotten that businesses are fuelled by advertisers which play on status and giving people the trappings of a better life. They forget about the value of their own mastheads, which I am frankly surprised by."

Brûlé has been inspired by any number of professions – design and architecture, fashion and aviation – yet governed by none. By training he is a journalist and by disposition an entrepreneur. Mark Landini, a Sydney-based, British-born designer whose clients include Volvo, Harrods in London and Loblaws in Toronto, distils the Brûlé magic to one word: style.

“He is without doubt one of the world’s best stylists. Wallpaper* was all about style, and Monocle is Wallpaper* re-invented and updated," says Landini. “Now there’s the Monocle 24 radio station; a great idea. He is using a medium that had become uncool and he made it cool again. That ability is in his gift." Landini stresses, however, that Brûlé is a “stylist", not a designer.

There is truth in this, but it’s not the whole truth. For Brûlé argues that while he enjoys the look of things, he wants them to function well. “I don’t like tricksy," he says. It’s a point on which Rachel Crowley, head of corporate relations at Brisbane Airport, agrees.

“He’s a contradiction in many ways," observes Crowley. “He cares very much about how things look but cares more that they work. He wants things to be beautiful but they must actually work. He’s all about modernity but is actually very traditional. He’s not one for just chasing the next big thing. He’s more likely to question whether a change is actually necessary. If something is comfortable, if it works, then he’d argue against change and very effectively at that.

“I think that’s the secret behind his commitment to print. He sees that it’s more than just a means of sharing information; that the experience of reading in print is a more enjoyable one than reading from a screen. He’s not a Luddite. He’s certainly not averse to technology, but he knows that there’s an added pleasure to holding a newspaper, or holding a magazine, that’s been not only written with care but made with care, that is worth the weight, and the wait."

The name Monocle – in truth a rather fusty title – was chosen deliberately to evoke a trace of the past. As a publisher and editor Brûlé maintains serious journalistic aspirations for his news and commentary services. Reporters and photographers are sent into the field to gather fresh stories with their “boots on the ground", as he puts it. Brûlé the journalist coexists quite happily with the high priest of style who wants for nothing. It may be too early to describe him as a media magnate, but he has struck a rich seam with his canny blend of old media forms and hip new media values.

The deal with Japanese publisher Nikkei hooks Monocle into a serious Asian news organisation supporting 36 foreign bureaus and 1300 journalists, some of whom Brûlé expects will appear on Monocle 24. The caveat, naturally, is ease with English; a big ask for Japanese journalists.

“Nikkei is the only strategic media investor we have," Brûlé explains in the reverberant voice of a man who knows how to hold an audience through force of personality. “The others are private investors and families, Swiss and Swedish. But it made sense. Nikkei is a serious company with a commitment to print, as we do. It launched the Nikkei Asian Review last year, with a geopolitical business focus on Japan and Asia."

He does not, on the other hand, expect the two companies to share copy, though he predicts the relationship will help Monocle to sell in Japan, where he can take advantage of distribution channels operated by Nikkei. He’s also prepared to consider Japanese content boxes and cover lines, and predicts that the two media companies will join forces on special projects. “If we had the time the [November] G20 summit in Brisbane would be something we could cover jointly."

Brûlé speaks openly and engagingly – nothing shy or withheld – in well-formed sentences blemished now and then by a weakness for corporate jargon: “vertical integration", “value-engineering". And when he fixes on a favourite subject he goes along at quite a gallop. Mention of the Qantas-Emirates marriage provokes an irreverent response spelling nothing but trouble. Invited to rephrase, he is more considered: “Many regard it as a one-way deal. It was sold as the coming together of two great brands, a bridge for travellers. In hindsight, that hasn’t happened.

“There was much talk of Qantas becoming a more Asia-focused airline but for a country that is a major player in APEC it is not a very well connected airline into Asia and the Pacific. And for a country that is very much on the rise you do not have a national carrier with much international presence. The deal [with Emirates] is a form of desovereignty."

It is some small consolation that British Airways, in his view, is not much different: “It was once much loved but is now a transport brand that you may have to use now and then because you have no choice."

He may be cranky about the direction of both Qantas and BA but he is not bleak about their ability to pull out of the nose-dive. The “forces of right" will, he believes, ultimately prevail. This somewhat Panglossian default position is consistent with what he calls Monocle’s “generally optimistic take" on things. A recent Monocle 24 briefing covered Ebola in the context of “what is needed to tackle" the virus; how Saudi Arabia can “partake" in fighting Islamic State; and Putin’s “plans for peace" in Ukraine. In Monocle’s world view, dark clouds are glimpsed on the horizon but the forecast is invariably fine.

At the time Winkreative was developing its blueprint for Brisbane Airport, the Brisbane Airport Corporation was holding a competition for the refurbished international terminal, won by Brisbane architects Richards & Spence. As Ingrid Richards tells it, the firm was thinking deeply about place at the same time Brûlé and his team began to articulate their ideas about place-making. “It’s probably the reason for our selection," she says. “We were asking ourselves what the terminal could say about Brisbane and Queensland, especially as a first and last impression, but not in a clichéd way; we didn’t want an Ettamogah Pub-style Aussie world."

Their winning design employs an outdoor theme in a spacious interior environment. Prominent features are an area of lawn, outdoor-style furniture, and a tropical garden with stone finishes. The outdoor-indoor theme flows into the retail space, which is modelled on an urban high street. “People spend a lot of empty time in airports in a kind of holding pattern, so we wanted it to be time well spent," Richards says. A giant work by Mornington Island artist Sally Gabori will run the full length of the arrivals area; thus the first image international visitors will get of Australia is a bright, bold artwork by one of its best known indigenous artists. Another work, by Brisbane artist Sebastian Moody, will dominate the departures area. The new terminal is due to be completed next year, with the runway on schedule for 2020.

Place was also an important element in Australian firm BVN Donovan Hill’s award-winning regional terminal at Christchurch Airport, completed last year. The building was designed to reflect the personality of New Zealand’s South Island, from the use of dark polished floors to evoke the riverbeds that crease the landscape to furnishings based on the form of kelp found along the coastline. The firm’s principal, James Grose, believes airports are best conceived as “points on our travels we can use to identify where we are".

Brûlé’s Brisbane Airport brand strategy similarly underscores the “thoughtful use of natural materials and design details" to impress a sense of place “into the fabric of the buildings themselves", such that “this energetic mix of people and place could only be in Brisbane". It offers a definition of “Brisbane-ness": vibrant, ambitious, relaxed.

Brûlé has caught the wave of globalisation and at the same time championed its alternative: localisation. When Monocle celebrated its “perfect little street" in the July/August 2011 edition, it chose an idealised English village with a few modern buildings wedged into the heritage streetscape and “a newsagent that doesn’t close on Sunday afternoons and devotes an entire wall to penny sweets and the other to magazines".

Local products would crowd out global luxury brands in his ideal duty-free hall, but this may not be a battle he is ever going to win. As Mark Landini explains: “Airports are the most lucrative shopping malls in the world. It’s a matter of who can pay the rents."

While agnostic on airport privatisation – Brisbane Airport is privately owned – Brûlé warns of the “real catastrophes we see where many airports that were much loved and efficient and worked for all the right reasons, then become compressed and end up being shopping malls that happen to host aircraft, as opposed to the other way around". He’s not even sure airports need to make money. Perhaps, he wonders, they are an essential service, a bit like buses or hospitals.

Brûlé though, is an enemy of mediocrity in whatever form it takes: fear of change, or the embrace of senseless change. As he put it in a recent Financial Times column bemoaning the proposed destruction of Tokyo’s Okura hotel, designed by modernist Yoshiro Taniguchi and built in 1962: “The last thing the travel sector needs is more hotels built and designed by a clutch of international firms with little or no personality." He should know; personality is not a quality he lacks. *