The clubs where mums chill to 'stop going mad with parenting'

A LOT of entrepreneurs report falling into their careers by chance but Maggie Bolger says she "accidentally fell into parA enting" and that triggered her successful career building family clubs. After growing up in New Zealand, she took a gap year "and went travelling to Australia, Hong Kong and London, then got knocked up at 22 with my first child in London".

- Lucy Tobin

That was in 2000 - and she and her then-husband decided to stay in the capital; Bolger was soon a young mum with three kids under five. "That's when I began to wonder why a nice place did not exist for parents. Soho House was getting traction, as were lots of celebrity restaurants, but all parents' offerings were an afterthought."

Bolger would have her friends with kids over to her flat in Kensington, and do activities with them all. "It was just a way to keep everyone entertained and stop us going mad with the craziness of parenting. Then I decided that people might actually pay for something like this, so in 2006 managed to convince a friend's dad to rent me a garage off Gloucester Road, I got some Farrow and Ball paint and started a little club lounge with classes for mums and kids."

That former garage grew into Maggie & Rose, which had grown into two family members' clubs in Chiswick and Kensington and a plan for expansion in Asia, when Bolger decided to leave the business in 2019, with a pay-off and a 12-month no-compete deal.

She left, Bolger adds, "because we had done a deal with a PLC in China, they wanted to take the brand in a very different direction, and I decided I had to prioritise my health and my family [rather than] opening mass sites in China. It was a difficult decision."