Solid gold taps and a slide from the bed to the pool: how the super-rich customise their homes in 2018
The illuminated letters that spell out the name of London's landmark Centre Point building have been used as a guiding light by Londoners for decades. Designed by architect Richard Seifert and built in 1966, the tower is currently undergoing transformation into luxury apartments, crowned by a ￡55m penthouse complete with terrace.
Nevertheless, those three-metre-high characters must remain, insisted English Heritage, and they have been given their own revamp in neon and mesh so that the penthouse’s eventual owner can see through them. That, however, was not enough to sway one prospective buyer. “He asked if the letters could be changed to his own name,” reports Daniel Ritterband, director of communications for the tower’s developers, Almacantar.
It is, perhaps, the ultimate example of wealthy buyers’ desire to take bespoke to an extreme. They want homes fully personalised with status symbols that no one else can replicate. Indeed, those who routinely deal with the super-rich have no shortage of these sorts of stories to tell.
Charu Gandhi, founder of the design house Elicyon, considers herself a “dream maker” for very wealthy clients. “They ask for things that often turn into a huge challenge – but it usually works out,” she says, recalling one client’s request for a grey Baccarat crystal chandelier. It didn’t exist, so Elicyon persuaded Baccarat - in tandem with Philippe Starck – to create it. When the first version was not grey enough, they kept going until they made one that was perfect.
Part of this extreme attention to every detail is that the really super-rich have time on their hands, thinks Gandhi. “They are so successful, they aren’t busy any more, so they can make time for anything if they really want to do something. They also know far more about design now. The Milan Salone del Mobile used to be just for the industry, but now it’s all over Instagram.”
When you’re that wealthy, you can afford to indulge in sheer whimsy, too. Tim Macpherson, head of London at property advisors Carter Jonas, mentions a client who adapted their home to include a chute that ran directly from their bedroom to the basement pool, “for optimised convenience for a morning swim”.
High-net-worth types are also pioneers when it comes to man caves too, Macpherson adds. “It’s common for a man cave of 20ft by 20ft to be fitted with tech in excess of ￡250,000, including multiple screens, virtual reality headsets, the finest sound systems and animated chairs that shake.”
There’s just no place for compromise in this world of wealth. Mark Lawson, head of high value and residential estates at The Buying Solution, says that where once summer houses, river houses and follies on country estates were simple places of respite, “the uber-wealthy now turn them into fully equipped areas where they can decamp for the whole day without having to return to the main house.
"This will include a smart outdoor kitchen, extravagantly-designed living room, spa and sauna. I’ve seen art galleries built in the grounds, complete with professional kitchens so that lunch can be served after admiring the collection.”
Tree houses haven’t escaped a full makeover either. Many now come with full plumbing, wiring, heating and fibre optics, says Lawson. And you can never have too many places to swim. He knows of one house with five pools – one indoor, one outdoor, and the rest on the terraces of three of the bedrooms.
Elsewhere, a homeowner known to Will Watson of Middleton Advisors had a watery specification of a different variety. “She wanted to install a special filter system throughout her house so the running water for the showers and baths was as drinkable as Evian. It’s supposedly better for the skin and hair.”
The practice of spending millions on an impeccably designed property – and then ripping it all out – is a well-rehearsed one in certain circles. Many buyers have an allegiance to a particular private members club or hotel and commission the designers to replicate the look in their own home.
One buyer at Chesterfield House in Mayfair had a specific love of The Dorchester, reports Caroline Takla from The Collection, “so they flew in the prestigious Parisian designer Jean Louis Deniot to turn their three-bed home into a hotel suite with a smaller area created for their butler and chambermaid”.
More exacting still was the new owner who had their 30,000 sq foot listed country house taken down brick by brick – then rebuilt exactly as it was. “They weren’t content with doing a standard retrofit to bring their house’s plumbing, electrics and interiors into the 21st century, so this was the only way they believed the finish would be up to scratch,” says Mark Lawson.
Some requests pose huge logistical challenges, such as one designer’s Shanghai-based client who defiantly didn’t want anything that had been made in China in his new penthouse. “The paint could have been supplied by the manufacturer’s Chinese outlet, but instead it had to be shipped over from the UK. The Chinese authorities wouldn’t allow the paint, so we had to ask the manufacturer for the secret recipe. We eventually got enough information to satisfy Chinese customs,” the designer recounts.
On occasion, a request is just too extreme to accommodate, however. For one owner in a famous London development, the 182 steps from the building’s entrance to her own front door were just too onerous – so she asked that the entire building's entrance be moved. This was one whim too far.