Members-only Focus Dinner with Peter Candler, Managing Director of Rivergreen Developments

Multi award-winning developer Peter Candler is a man with strong local roots and a global perspective. With a career that has taken him around the world and brought him back home to the North East, his award-winning projects embody international vision with local application.

In the intimate surroundings of a Focus Dinner, members can share in his knowledge, not only of property, design and construction but also how to balance creativity with the commercial necessities of running a business. On a broad level, this is an event for anyone trying to forge a path between a dream and reality.

Peter is managing director of Rivergreen Developments, a Durham-based property company specialising in high quality residential and commercial projects with environmental considerations at their heart.

This approach has earned the company a mass of awards and commendations from professional bodies such as the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Civic Trust. The company headquarters at the Rivergreen Centre, Aykley Heads, won The Journal’s prestigious Landmark Award in 2006 and the following year Peter was personally recognised by Constructing Excellence in the North East for Outstanding Achievement.

Peter will also explain his reasons for taking on the extensive programme of the restoration of Jesmond Dene House to become a showcase venue within the North East.

He’ll uncover the partnerships involved in bringing back to life a building with a remarkable history, and the investment needed to become regarded as one of the finest hotels and restaurants in the North East.

Within his own industry, Peter has proven that an imaginative agenda can be brought to life in something that works – you just have to have the vision and drive to pursue the practical solution.

Through his multi-award winning projects, he has shown that modern, high-tech and commercially viable buildings do not have to be at the expense of the environment, proving the two can work in tandem for the good of the people who use them now and for generations to come.

Quiet but inspirational in style, Sunderland-born Peter is innovative in the way he manages projects, creating groups of equals across a variety of disciplines, mixing creative types with academics, practical folk with theorists. 

His professional “toolkit” was formed from time spent with Morgan Grenfell in the City and with San Francisco-based project management giant Bechtel, the seventh-largest privately-owned company in the US whose projects included the Channel Tunnel.

Of Rivergreen Centre, which has a host of environmental credentials including an internal double-height rammed-earth wall that moderates temperature and humidity, he says he doesn’t want such projects to be categorised as “a fad or a fashion”.

As he says: “It’s just being a responsible developer doing things because they’re the right things to do rather than doing them because the rules say you should. I believe that if you do something you do it to the best of your ability. When you stretch yourself you stretch the big world around you.”

This is a members-only dinner and is charged at £75 + VAT per person. Please note that we will have to charge in full for cancellations within 72 hours of the dinner. The dinner will commence at 6.45pm therefore guests are advised to arrive at around 6.30pm.

Dinner places are strictly limited to a first-come, first-served basis we therefore recommend you don’t delay in securing your place with us.