On 15 July 2021, Membership Collective Group rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker MCG. The IPO priced at $14 a share — the bottom of the indicated range — and raised roughly $470 million on a $2.8 billion valuation, according to the Davis Polk deal record and the Business Wire pricing release of 14 July 2021. Four years and one month later, on 18 August 2025, the board agreed to be taken private at $9 a share in a $2.7 billion transaction led by Tyler Morse's MCR Hotels and a consortium that included Ashton Kutcher, Apollo Global Management and Goldman Sachs Alternatives (CNBC, 18 August 2025).
The arithmetic is straightforward and slightly brutal. A shareholder who bought at the IPO and sold into the take-private took a 36% nominal loss across four years in which the S&P 500 returned over 60%. The $9 figure was described, accurately, as an 83% premium to the unaffected stock price (Fortune, 18 August 2025) — which is another way of saying the market had revalued the company at roughly $5 a share before the bid landed. The membership model, in public-market terms, did not work.
The mechanism of the disappointment is now well documented. At IPO, Soho House reported roughly 119,000 members across 28 houses. By the third quarter of 2024, the membership had grown to approximately 267,000 across more than 42 houses (Hollywood Reporter and Sherwood News, 2024-25 coverage). The growth was the thesis the IPO had required — but the growth, by the company's own subsequent admission, had compromised the proposition. The 2023-24 membership cull in New York, Los Angeles and London, and the public letter from founder Nick Jones acknowledging that the houses no longer felt the way they were meant to feel, were the operational reckoning. The 18 August take-private was the structural one.
What this episode tells the UHNW reader is something the industry has been circling for a decade. A members' club is, in essence, a scarcity contract: the value to the member depends on the discipline with which the operator refuses the next thousand applications. That discipline is structurally incompatible with the public-market obligation to grow revenue every quarter. The two MCR principals — Morse on the operating side, Kutcher on the cultural — have indicated that the private vehicle will allow Soho House to slow the opening pace, hold the membership cap in the flagship cities, and rebuild the curation that the public-company structure had taxed. The early signal is the appointment of Andrew Carnie's successor and the explicit framing of the 2026-27 plan around "fewer, better" rather than "more, faster".
The wider implication for the membership economy is the one that should interest the family-office reader. ZZ's Club in New York and Miami, Casa Cipriani, the Twenty Two in London, Casa Tua's expanded footprint, Aman Club at the Crown Building — every one of these is owned by a private vehicle, deliberately structured to avoid quarterly disclosure. The Aman Club's $200,000 initiation and $15,000 annual dues (South China Morning Post, 2024) are, in private-market terms, defensible because the operator can refuse the next member without explaining the decision to a research analyst. Soho House, for fifteen years, was the exception that tested whether public markets could price a scarcity good. The answer, after four years and a $2.7 billion delisting, is that they cannot — not on a quarterly cadence, and not without breaking the thing being priced.
The institution survives. The Greek Street kitchen still works. The Shoreditch House rooftop still works. The fifteen-year-old member in Notting Hill still walks in. What changes is the cadence of the corporate disclosure cycle, which moves from a quarterly earnings call back to an annual letter to shareholders — and that, in the membership business, is the whole game.
— Camille Vedy
