There is a door on Calle Velázquez with the number 27 set into an oval of glass. You push it open and you find a hall of pink marble columns, a coffered ceiling and a lantern that has hung there for more than a hundred years. The first time I walked through it I thought I had the wrong building. Since this week it is Montclare’s second office.
We began in Amsterdam in 2023. There was no office and there was no team. There was me, a laptop and one idea: that an international client should not have to walk through four firms in four countries to build what is really one thing.
What we did not know then was how often that work would end up in Spain. A Dutch holding, properly built, with the treaty position settled before anything is incorporated, and then the file lands in front of a notary in Madrid, a bank asking for documents nobody had anticipated, and an asset that somebody has to go and see. For two years we closed that distance with flights, phone calls and other people’s diaries. It worked. You could feel the seams.
So we went looking for a door. Not a desk somewhere new and bright, but a building that was already standing when the first of the deeds we now review were signed. We found it on Velázquez.
Amsterdam remains the house and the engine room. That is where the structure is designed, the treaty position decided and the tax answered for. Madrid is where it becomes something that exists, with the same firm in the room.
The structuring work lives at montclarecapital.com. The financing, which has grown into a practice of its own, lives at montclarecapitalfinancing.com. Two sites, one firm answering for both.
Two cities, twelve desks, clients from Spain to the Gulf, and the same person on the phone when a bank asks, two years later, why the structure was built this way.
None of this happened on its own. Thank you to everyone who opened a message from a name they did not recognise, who answered an email that arrived unannounced, who gave twenty minutes on a call to a firm with no address to put on the invoice, and who then put a file in my hands anyway. None of you owed me any of that.
To the next one.