One Hyde Park opens its doors for the first time today, with a lavish ceremony catered by Heston Blumenthal kick-starting proceedings.
The £250 million Candy & Candy scheme holds the world record for the highest price achieved per sq ft at more than £6,000 (£65,000 per sq m). Its four buildings, on the edge of London’s Hyde Park, house 86 apartments and three retail boutiques.
So far more than half of the apartments have been sold, with sales totalling £1 billion.
Christian Candy said: “After five years of immense hard work and dedication from a world-class team we are delighted with the quality achieved and believe it is the best in the world for any multiple residential development.”
The owner of the project, Project Grande, has invited 350 guests to the opening, including TV celebrity Simon Cowell.
The development group behind London’s http One Hyde Park residential project will pay back more than 900 million pounds ($1.4 billion) to its banks after work on the complex finishes next week, the Financial Times reported.
Project Grande (Guernsey) Ltd. will pay back the majority of the 1 billion-pound loan that was provided by Eurohypo AG, HSH Nordbank AG and Helaba, the paper said.
The development is a venture between Christian Candy’s CPC Group and Qatar Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani’s Waterknights. One Hyde Park features some of the U.K.’s most expensive property with space selling for more than 6,000 pounds per square-foot, the FT reported.
Designed by Richard Rogers, the apartments are intended as the last word in luxury. Certainly, they retail at prices unheard of in London or virtually anywhere in the world - £6,000 a square foot, which means a four-bed apartment reaching from the front of the building to the back overlooking Hyde Park costs just short of £60million.
The top penthouse has gone for £135million. In all, the Candys say they have sold half the 86 units.
What do you get for that sort of money?
Bomb blast-protected windows, fortress-type security, computerised lighting and audio, use of a state-of-the-art gym complete with private exercise and treatment rooms and 21m "ozone" swimming pool, saunas, steam rooms, squash court, golf simulator, "virtual" games room, wine cellars, business suite and meeting rooms, entertainment rooms, Park Library, underground car park, car cleaning and valet parking ... the list of accoutrements and gadgetry goes on and on. There are separate entrances for staff and room service from the restaurants of stellar chefs Blumenthal and Boulud at the Mandarin Oriental should they so desire (there's a connecting tunnel for the 60 hotel staff who will service the apartments). Plus "Candy & Candy" interiors if they want them, with oodles of marble and porcelain and silk and leather wall coverings.
But buying an apartment in One Hyde Park, the brothers argue, is about much more than acquiring a property in which to live and entertain and rest your head for the night. They say it's also to do with acquiring the most prestigious address in the world. Their reasoning is that London is the planet's pre-eminent financial centre and a tax haven for many rich foreigners. Its best residential location, they maintain, is at the top of Sloane Street, the City's most fashionable shopping street, bang opposite Nicks and directly adjacent to Hyde Park. And that spot has been renamed by them One Hyde Park.
To reinforce the message of international, top-of-the-market appeal, the ground floor commercial spaces at One Hyde Park have been sold to Rolex watches, McLaren performance cars and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.
The Candy brothers are aiming One Hyde Park at the sort of jet-setters who already have bases in New York, Singapore, Dubai, wherever - and need somewhere central in London.
These are purchasers, too, who have not suffered much in the credit crunch, if at all, who have money to burn and can afford to buy an apartment running into tens of millions, seemingly with their loose change.
As if to emphasise that, they say the £135million penthouse was bought by someone making a casual enquiry via the internet on a weekend afternoon. That's right. Such folk exist, apparently. There you are, casting around on Google because you're bored and a few clicks later you're on your way to spending north of £100million. They won't say who he is (it is a male), but "he's not an Arab, not a Russian".
Raised in Surrey and educated at Epsom College Nick Candy was a failed accountant turned junior advertising executive and Christian was in banking when they bought a flat in 1995 in Earl's Court for £122,000, aided by the loan of £6,000 from their grandmother, and sold it for a £50,000 profit.
That was their first development. Since then they've gone on to create waves, with ever more extravagant schemes. They turned a 19th-century building in Manresa Road in Chelsea into 16 "eight-star" apartments, one of which cost £27million and set a then London record. At Chesham Place in Belgravia, they built another luxury block. They decamped to Monaco and lived in La Belle Epoque, the penthouse apartment occupied by the banker Edmond Safra until his death in a fire allegedly started by his nurse. They sold La Belle Epoque for £199million last year.
But it's not all been plain sailing. They've also become associated with failures: the former Middlesex Hospital north of Oxford Street or as they dubbed it "Noho Square"; Chelsea Barracks and in California the site of the defunct Robinson's-May department store on LA's Wilshire Boulevard. They were quick to attribute the blame. Problems at Kaupthing, the Icelandic bank that funded Middlesex Hospital and Los Angeles, were responsible for those flops. On Chelsea Barracks, they took to court their ex-partner, Qatari Diar, the mighty Qatar sovereign wealth fund, when it got cold feet over the plans after Prince Charles declared his opposition.
Nick Candy has recently returned to London where he oversees Candy & Candy, their interior design and development management operation. Christian Candy has continued to live in Monaco, a tax exile, flying back and forth, and running CPC, their Guernsey-based investment company (as well as everything else, Christian is currently trying to take over a £35million gold-mine in the Philippines and he's just launched Omni Capital, a secured bridging lender to wealthy borrowers and small-scale developers mostly in the smartest London postcodes).
