Mark Birley was the man behind London’s smartest Mayfair nightclubs. As the proprietor of the exclusive and expensive venues Harry’s Bar, Annabel’s, George’s and the Bath & Racquets Club, he entertained and coddled the rich and famous with his attention to detail and love of luxury.

Mark Birley was the son of Sir Oswald Birley, the society painter, and his beautiful but temperamental Irish wife, Rhoda. Home life was stormy and Birley would often retreat to his father’s studio to escape his mother’s rages. He was sent away to school at Eton, where he pretended to be ill to escape early morning lessons.

After school, Birley went up to Oxford, but was asked to leave after he failed his Prelims in the first year, because of self-confessed idleness and too many late nights on the town. He joined the art department of the advertising company J.Walter Thompson, but soon realised that he was not suited to working for other people. He set up his own agency in New Burlington Street and organised the advertising in Country Life for the antique dealers Mallets of Bath. This venture was relatively short-lived and soon after he acquired the concession to Hermés for a token sum and set up shop.

Spread over two floors, the shop, on the corner of Jermyn Street and the Piccadilly Arcade, was a blueprint for Birley’s later enterprises. Customers were encouraged to adjourn upstairs to a comfortable sofa where they could make telephone calls, smoke and have a cup of coffee amid the luxury of the silk scarves.

It was these principles of good service and high quality that Birley was to apply to his nightclub empire, starting with Annabel’s, the club he opened in 1963 and named after his wife. He told all the barmen: “If a girl arrives before her date, sit her down and give her a drink. It doesn’t matter who pays for it.”

Harry’s Bar followed Annabel’s, a joint venture with the American shipping tycoon James Sherwood. The pair arranged that the bar be split with Birley owning 51 per and Sherwood 49 per cent. Although the two were to be business partners for many years, they never really became friends and their partnership could be be said to have been mismatched from the outset.

As well as Birley’s other bars: George’s, the Bath and Racquets Club, Mark’s Club – all within walking distance of each other in Mayfair – Birley was also silent partner to Nina Campbell, the interior designer, in her furnishings store, which they set up together in the early 1970s.

Tall, handsome, well-dressed and usually to be found smoking a Cohiba cigar, Birley was, to many, the perfect example of an Englishman; he set a great deal of store by good manners and courtesy. He was also fastidious, carrying a notepad around with him when he visited his clubs to take down details of things that weren’t quite right. His venues were characterised by an extreme attention to detail, which extended to wrapping halves of lemon in muslin so the pips did not pop out when squeezed over Dover Sole, and he would sit at the same table at Harry’s Bar every lunchtime to keep an eye on proceedings.

In many ways, Birley appeared to have a charmed life; he had plenty of money (although he had always had to work hard for it), many friends and a relaxed, laconic lifestyle. He always wore the finest clothes and handmade shoes; yet he was no fashion-conscious dandy; rather, obsessed with quality in all aspects of his life.

But Birley was demanding and could at times be childish in the pursuit of getting his own way, occasionally nicknamed “Surly Birley” by friends. He admitted that he thought he made a bad houseguest and was happy to spend most weekends in London. His life was also marked by tragedy. One son, Robin, was scarred for life when a Siberian tigress mauled him on a visit to Howlett’s, the zoo owned by John Aspinall; in 1986 Birley’s eldest, Rupert, went missing off the coast of Togo and was eventually presumed dead.

His wife, Annabel, by whom he had three children, abandoned him for his former schoolmate Sir James Goldsmith, but despite their divorce, the two remained close. He never remarried, leading to constant speculation that he never recovered from the very public betrayal, and although he had plenty of girlfriends, Birley reserved his real love for his businesses and his various dogs. Inscribed on a cushion in his South Kensington house were the words “This house is maintained for the comfort and security of my dogs. If you cannot accept that, then you cannot accept me – so go away.”

Although they did not, on the whole, lose money, Birley’s nightclubs were not primarily moneymaking exercises; Birley simply enjoyed them. He was not an overtly commercial creature and once said, when asked what he did: “I feel like I am a bit of an artist.”

The annual turnover of Annabel’s Group never exceeded £10 million, partly because Birley refused to cut corners or to keep his eye permanently on the bottom line. However, the recession in the early nineties was unkind to Birley’s enterprises. The heydey of Annabel’s was in the Seventies, when the Prince of Wales went there to dine and dance away from the glare of the flashbulbs, but, later on, it was considered old-fashioned. The clubs flourished on the assumption that the clientele would have money to burn; by the early nineties this applied to only a handful of members. Even the casual observer would notice Annabel’s stood three-quarters empty most weekends. Things got so bad – partly because of the significant financial outlay Birley made in 1989 on his luxury Mayfair gym, The Bath & Racquets Club – that Birley was forced to sell off some of his wine cellar to interested members of Annabel’s.

But, with an upturn in the economy in the late 1990s and early in the new century, the fortunes of Annabel’s and the rest of group’s concerns were back on an even keel.

In 2005 it emerged that Birley had in 2001 made David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, an honorary member of Annabel’s, worth £3,000. Blunkett failed to report this on the register of Members’ interests. Matters were made worse because Blunkett had met a subsequent girlfriend, Sally Anderson, in the club. Some were bemused by Birley’s gift to Blunkett, a Labour minister, as Birley had once said of Margaret Thatcher that he would “crawl over jagged rocks, proffering a bottle of whisky, if it would bring her back to power”.

In the same year a row broke out between Birley and Sherwood, over their stakes in Harry’s Bar. At the outset, both parties agreed to a change of control clause, which stipulated that if one partner wanted to walk away from the venture, he would offer his stake to the other. In 2003 Birley’s health declined rapidly and his children, Robin and India-Jane, took over the running of the club. In 2005 Birley decided that he wanted them to take his share in the club when he died. Sherwood refused, citing the original agreement. The row was acrimonious and split London’s smart society down the middle. In June this year Birley sold his nightclubs, including Annabel’s, to Richard Caring, a fashion tycoon who owns a string of London restaurants, including Le Caprice and The Ivy, for an estimated £100 million.

Mark Birley, club proprietor, was born on May 29, 1930. He died of a stroke on August 24, 2007, aged 77