Concierges in luxury developments lift the lid on the demands of their super-rich clients — but have we reached ‘peak amenity’?
A bath full of honey? No problem. A fleet of sports cars transported by jet overseas? Sure. A Hermès Birkin bag in less than 24 hours? Leave it with me.
The requests that the concierges at the UK’s most expensive residences have to deal with are unusual, to say the least. “We are their pocket PAs,” says Lydia Varaona, the director of residences at the Peninsula, a luxury development next to Hyde Park where apartments are reported to cost up to £100 million.
“It is like we are part of their household and they can dial us whenever they want.” One of the residents once called Varaona from a hotel room overseas and asked her to have room service come and pick up his plate. Is it ever annoying? “No, it’s so fun, we find it really endearing,” she says — despite being called from all over the world at any time of day or night by the owners of the Peninsula’s 24 apartments.
According to the Land Registry, the owners include Todd Boehly, the American chairman of Chelsea FC; the Chinese automotive tycoon Chun Kiu Mak; and Sarath Ratanavadi, the chief executive of Thailand’s Gulf Energy Development.
“The majority of my colleagues have a background in hotels or residences,” Varaona says — she used to look after the equally picky owners of One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge. Unlike hotel residents, however, the owners at these developments stay for long periods at a time and return again and again. This means learning their individual preferences, from how they take their coffee to which newspaper they read and when.
The residents have their own pool, gym and spa, and access to all the hotel services, from an in-house chocolatier to private chefs. “Nothing seems weird. We’ve delivered specially crafted menus for owners and pets, cooked someone’s grandma’s cookie recipe for them, shipped a collection of sports cars to the south of France for a summer break, and found a seamstress in the middle of the night to alter a dress,” Varaona says.
It is the little things that impress most, though. Varaona and her team often take care of paying for an owner’s TV license, council tax, congestion charges, set up their broadband and organize their mode of transport.
Sylvain Bunel, the general manager at Regent’s Crescent, a high-end development in a redeveloped John Nash designed terrace next to Regent’s Park, says: “The true essence of our service lies in our ability to assist with mundane tasks. Residents rely on our team for various tasks, ranging from grocery shopping to finding a handyman. These activities form the backbone of our service and contribute significantly to our residents’ quality of life.
” At the Bryanston, a luxury tower of 54 apartments next to Marble Arch, the general manager, Hugo Pena, reports that “dogs are regularly towel dried by a member of the team after walks in the rain and then make a beeline for the concierge desk, where they know they’ll be given a treat”. “There are occasions when they ask for something that is not possible, like membership to Annabel’s,” says Dean Main, the founding partner of Rhodium, a super-prime management and consultancy firm that runs services for developments around the world, including the Bryanston.
But they did manage to bag a Hermès Birkin within 24 hours, organize a video meet-and greet with Justin Bieber and fly a pony out to St Tropez for a child’s birthday. More ordinary requests include organizing personal trainers, spa treatments, caring for pets, finding Michelin-starred personal chefs, sourcing artworks and PA support. For these Main’s staff have access to the company’s extensive black book of contacts. “We can get chefs from places like Nobu and Koya to come when they’re not working,” he says. A resident in a Rhodium managed Knightsbridge apartment asked whether the plumbing could handle a bath full of honey that his partner wanted as a spa treatment.
The plumbing, he was told, could cope. Of course all the requests, from the mundane to the ridiculous, are paid for by the residents — much of it via the steep service charges they pay. Roarie Scarisbrick, a partner at Property Vision, which finds properties for ultra-wealthy clients, says service charges at the £10 million-plus flats and homes he sources are usually between £15 and £20 a square foot — a 50 per cent increase on a decade ago. A £20 service charge for a 3,500 sq ft apartment would cost you £70,000 a year. Scarisbrick says service charges now often go even higher — although the top-end developments tend to be coy about how much they ask for.
Tom Rundall, a partner in the prime central London developments team at the estate agency Knight Frank, says the three biggest factors contributing to the service charge are building insurance, utilities and staff costs. “The costs on all of those have gone up. So, funnily enough, whether you’ve got a 25m pool, a cinema room or a boardroom doesn’t make a huge amount of difference.
It’s the actual staffing costs that is a killer. As soon as you go for 24-hour security and concierge the service charge goes whizzing up,” he says. “But if you had to employ those people in your own private household, then you’re going to pay a housekeeper, you’ve got to pay a gardener, you’ve got all the building maintenance that we all have — actually it’s more than a service charge. And I know that for [most people] the numbers are bonkers. But for the global elite it weirdly makes more sense to go into these buildings and just pay your one-off cost and you’ve got everything.”
Scarisbrick suggests, however, that we may soon be reaching “peak amenity”. He says: “Where does it all end when every swimming pool has to be a metre longer than the last? When will we reach peak opulence? “The finishes I see are getting more and more luxurious, with every surface excavated from some specialist quarry or carved from the rarest tree. I used to gasp at the best book-matched marble but now I’m immune.”
Source: The Times