It is not often that a Mayfair financier walks away from a firm that had deployed more than £150 million into UK growth businesses and decides, instead, to build his next chapter around beach clubs, galleries and bottled water. But this is the path Luke Davis has taken. After 15 years in finance, spanning stockbroking, trading and the founding of IW Capital, Davis stepped away from the City and into a very different kind of enterprise, channelling capital and conviction into regional economies, coastal towns and cultural industries often overlooked by traditional investors, through Rockwater, Helm Art Gallery and Drip water.
Davis now sits behind a growing portfolio of ventures built around parts of Britain that institutional capital has often struggled to understand properly, coastal towns, experience-led destinations and cultural spaces that do not fit neatly into conventional investment categories. Where his earlier career was about allocating capital into other people’s businesses, this phase is about building his own from the ground up.
At the centre is Rockwater, the hospitality brand that started on Hove seafront and has since grown into a broader lifestyle platform. Publicly, Rockwater presents itself not just as a restaurant or bar, but as an all-day coastal destination: rooftop dining, beachside food shacks, private event space, comedy and jazz nights, craft workshops, sea swims, yoga, Pilates, sauna sessions and a rotating programme of community-led events. Its Open Water membership leans even further into that positioning, framing the brand less as a venue and more as a curated social club by the coast.
In fact, Rockwater reflects a broader shift underway in British hospitality. The strongest operators are no longer simply selling food and drink; they are building environments people want to organise their lives around. In Hove and Branksome, Rockwater’s public programming already spans everything from Wim Hof sessions and kids’ yoga to football screenings, supper clubs and live comedy. Its planned Sandbanks site has been described as the brand’s largest to date, with local reporting saying it is intended to operate as a year-round hub for dining, wellness and entertainment.
If Rockwater is Davis’s hospitality play, Helm is his argument that culture can be built in a similarly open, commercially minded way. Helm Art gallery has positioned itself against the old codes of the art world, combining exhibitions with a bar, events and a more social atmosphere than the traditional white-cube model. This instinct towards accessibility has already helped it land attention-grabbing programming, including a major Fatboy Slim takeover tied to the release of his book, built around 40 years of music history and memorabilia.
Then there is Drip, the premium canned water brand operating in a category that increasingly behaves more like fashion or entertainment than FMCG. The company has publicly described itself as a lifestyle water brand, and its most high-profile commercial move to date has been a multi-year global deal with UFC, which announced Drip as its official water partner from 2025. Matchroom Boxing has also announced Drip as its official water partner, underscoring the brand’s effort to grow through sport, identity and audience affinity rather than through the usual supermarket-led playbook alone.
Davis is building around overlooked spaces where experience, community and commercial value now overlap seafront real estate, accessible cultural venues, and consumer categories that can be repositioned through branding and distribution. The throughline is not simply ambition, but a particular kind of operator logic, identifying assets or sectors that feel underused, then giving them sharper identity, broader relevance and a business model designed for repeat engagement. Not so much a shift from leaving capital behind but rather moving closer to where it meets real life.