Property Report EXCLUSIVE: Hyde and Chic with Nick Candy

By Terry Blackburn, Editor in Chief

Photo by Martyn Goodacre

With claimed apartment sales of over £1 billion, representing over 60 per cent of the development, One Hyde Park could well be the luxury property success story of the decade. The development’s charismatic front man Nick Candy, CEO of Candy & Candy London, has set his sights firmly on the Asian market for the next round of buyers. Property Report South East Asia caught up with him at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, between a series of meetings with potential local investors.

To say that One Hyde Park, The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, represents the ne plus ultra of luxury real estate investment could be an understatement. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the 86 apartments, when fully fitted, are set to redefine the word lavish. Six show units offer a range of interior design options incorporating the finest raw materials, most luxurious furnishings and the latest in cutting edge home technology.

Prospective investors are invited to take the Candy & Candy vision as their starting point to creating their own dream home to match the project’s stratospheric price tag. Sales include £136.4 million paid for a penthouse, the most expensive apartment ever sold in the UK and the second most expensive in the world. Developed by Project Grande (Guernsey) Ltd, a joint venture between Nick’s brother Christian Candy’s Guernsey based development business CPC Group and His Excellency, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani, the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Qatar, One Hyde Park was launched in 2007. Candy & Candy are development managers and interior designers to the project, which was completed in January 2011.

Cash conversions
Nick and Christian Candy have come a long way since their first apartment conversion and resale in London’s Earls Court, financed by a US$10,000 loan from their grandmother. Candy & Candy has rapidly become preeminent in the world of high-end interior design, and a long list of celebrity and high net worth business clients have helped propel them to the top of their profession in a little over a decade.

Before One Hyde Park, Candy & Candy mostly focused on single property conversions and interiors. Two previously planned large-scale developments, in London’s Chelsea and Beverly Hills, failed to come off due to various legal and financial wrangles, leaving them with a lot riding on the success of One Hyde Park. So far it appears to be paying off; the right development in the right location at the right time.

“With the turmoil that’s currently going on in the Middle East, they’ll be a huge flight of capital coming into London,” Candy says. “People in the Middle East want a safe haven for their money and London has always traditionally been a safe haven. The predictions on high end residential are very, very good. For prime residential, Savills’ research department is single digit growth this year but in 2012 they expect an 11 per cent increase.”

Candy says that buyers have come from all over the world, with most coming from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Asia though is an increasingly important market for him with investors from Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Thailand already signed up.

“There’s two advantages for Asian buyers right now,” he says. “One is that local currency is buying more Sterling than ever before, so the trade is pretty strong, especially in Singapore, where the Singaporean dollar has done very well and puts you at a 20 per cent discount in a prime residential area with just a currency play. Chinese money is accounting for a huge amount of purchases in central London. Not just Knightsbridge but as far as Canary Wharf, the Chinese want to have investment in London. Asia is a massive market, not just for One Hyde Park but for any central London property developer today.”

Candy also believes that the Mandarin Oriental brand name attached to One Hyde Park is one of the keys to attracting Asian buyers, due to its familiarity and association with high quality in the region.

“They truly understand what Mandarin Oriental stands for and this is their first European residences,” he says. “In terms of specific requirements a lot of them back home in Asia will have a lot more staff than a typical Western family would. So one of the issues is, do they need as many staff in London? One of the great things about having Mandarin is that they’ve got all the staffing levels there, so it’s like living in a hotel, but you have your own apartment.”

With Asian investors long used to branded property investment opportunities through long established brands such as the Banyan Tree and Amanpuri, to more recent entrants such as St Regis and Alila it may come as a surprise to many that One Hyde Park represents the Mandarin Oriental’s first foray into branded properties in Europe and that the whole concept is relatively new to the continent. This is something Candy expects to see change in the near future.

“Can you believe this is the first European branded residence for Mandarin Oriental? There’s not a Four Seasons Residences in London, there’s not a Peninsula Residences, there’s not a Ritz Carlton Residences, there’s nothing. For me there are only three capital cities in Europe in years to come – London, Moscow and Istanbul. The international demand won’t be there as much in places like Paris or Berlin.”

A touch of Asia
After embarking on an international tour seeking inspiration and ideas for aspects of One Hyde Park, Candy found much to admire in Asia: from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, to One IFC in Hong Kong and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, which he rates as an engineering marvel.

“We went to Hong Kong and saw the skyline and were very impressed with how it looks at night,” he says. “So one of the things the developer did at One Hyde Park was to commission James Turrell, one of the best lighting artists in the world, to create a unified lighting concept that interacts with the building’s architecture. His light installations illuminate the building’s four pavilions and the residential lobby canopy with a sophisticated computerised control that allows the colours to slowly change from sunset to sunrise. We wanted to make sure that One Hyde Park was as amazing at night as it was in the daytime and that was based on going to Hong Kong.”

Standing by lux
One Hyde Park has received a fair amount of criticism in the UK press for its perceived over- aluation and the wisdom of selling a super-luxury product during an economic downturn. British left wing daily The Guardian, also accused the Candy brothers of creating “a monument to the ever- idening gap between rich and poor and to the unique ability of the very wealthy to ride out the recession unscathed.”

Viewed from Asia, these criticisms can seem a little odd, where developers, with government encouragement, have long embraced all sides of the market from mass market to luxury, depending on where the demand is. Many, such as Singapore behemoths CapitiLand and Far East, and Thailand’s Sansiri, successfully balance large portfolios of developments at both ends of the spectrum. Developers that specialise solely in luxury tend to receive praise rather than criticism, as they help raise the international profile of cities such as Singapore, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Candy now seems philosophical about this very British attitude to success.

“In the UK we’ve got some of the best entrepreneurs in the history of the world, but there is a British psyche that does not want people to succeed,” he says. “I can complain as much as I want to each newspaper, but the more I complain the more backlash I’ll get, so it’s probably best just to shut my mouth and get on with it. There is a feeling in the UK that bankers shouldn’t get bonuses and it’s easy to apportion blame to just one set of people, but I think that’s the wrong thing to do. If these bankers don’t get bonuses they’re going to go to Hong Kong or Wall Street. For people in Asia it’s good to make money. People aspire to make money and to be successful tycoons. In America, they have the American dream and encourage that kind of success – in the UK we perceive successful people who have money to be a negative thing when really we should be celebrating and rewarding home-grown talent and success and entrepreneurs.”

Seal of approval
Whilst unwilling to reveal the names of any of the investors in One Hyde Park, Candy is happy to talk in general terms about them and extol the virtues of London as a global city that attracts such a wide variety of international buyers. Recent research by Savills shows that in the ultra-high end US$16 million plus bracket in London, only 1 per cent of buyers are British nationals.

“The biggest compliment that we’ve had is that we’ve had many buyers who are at the top of their industry in property across the world, whether it be in Bangkok, or Singapore or Moscow or Mumbai,” he says. “All these people who are top property entrepreneurs and kings of their industries in their local cities have all bought in One Hyde Park. They are very savvy people, they don’t want to pay more than it’s worth, they are very value orientated, they negotiate hard and for them to be buying in one Hyde Park is the biggest compliment it can have.”

The current huge amount of Asian interest in UK property goes beyond the exclusive confines of One Hyde Park and is now extending into all corners of London from Olympic rejuvenated Stratford in the east to White City, home of Europe’s largest shopping mall, in the west. Rather than reduce its attractiveness as an investment destination, painful spending cuts by the postrecession UK government as it enters an age of austerity have helped accentuate the divide between the capital and the rest of the country and have created a two tier economy between London and everywhere else.

“It’s worrying for the UK because to have a divide anywhere is not great, but London is so strong today,” Candy says. “It’s so resilient and bounces back very quickly, has huge consumer spending from the international market, hotels and restaurants are booming and with the Olympics coming, there’s lots to be very proud about. My worry for London is that unless they get their infrastructure right and update it pretty quickly, then we won’t be able to compete with Shanghai or Mumbai or New York. You can’t have things like Crossrail taking 20 years to get through – it takes us too long. We are updating our tube system, which is good, but my worry is infrastructure. I’ve got no other worries for London.”

New horizons
With One Hyde Park complete, Candy can now turn his attention to new projects, which in the short term will undoubtedly be on a much smaller scale. His ambition, however, remains firmly focused on the high-end.

“We would love to work in Asia, “ he says, “but we wouldn’t do it on our own. If we came to Bangkok, Singapore or Hong Kong, we would team up with one of the best local developers in the region. That’s the only way to guarantee quality. We can bring our design influence, our brand, the marketing, and our client base and even take care of the design internally, but we’re not a local developer. We need to team up with a firm that has the necessary knowledge and contacts, who can get planning permission, organise finance and set up projects that are locally driven.”

For more details on One Hyde Park
Email: RobertC@savills.co.th