In the autumn of 1997, Alistair Vere-Pemberton — a family office advisor who had spent the previous decade moving between Geneva, Hong Kong, and the Gulf — invited eleven families to dinner at Asherfield House in Gloucestershire. No agenda was circulated. No speeches were made. At the end of the evening, each family was left a small card embossed with a single word: aurello.

The word is not a place. It is not a person. It derives, loosely, from the Latin aurum — gold — and the diminutive suffix Vere-Pemberton's Milanese grandmother applied to things she considered worth keeping. The society has never offered a more formal explanation. Members stopped asking.

The Dubai chapter opened in 2003 — not in the city, but in the desert beyond it, in a compound that doesn't appear on any map its members have shared. Singapore followed in 2011: a door on Emerald Hill with no name on it, which is its own kind of name.

The society provides family office services, corporate advisory, and private introductions for Members and Fellows. It also provides three addresses where members may eat, think, and be left alone — which, in the experience of most members, is the more frequently required service.