Home improvement, jet setter-style
Thursday, 18 November 2010 12:34 PM
The popularity of ‘improving not moving’ has soared over the past couple of years, but while most of us are content with a nice new bathroom suite, the rich and famous have altogether loftier aspirations. So what’s at the top of jet-set wish lists these days? Ele Cooper finds out.
“We’ve just started work on an underground wine cellar with vaulted stone ceilings and columns, which is being constructed beneath the courtyard of a listed building,” says Neil Quinn, a partner at high-end architecture firm Yiangou. “And we recently built an underground car park with underfloor heating and air-conditioning for the client’s collection of classic cars. We get some pretty unusual requests.”
High-end homeowners tend to have a lot more space to play with than most of us – so what do they do with it? Apparently, libraries are in vogue right now, and on such a project Yiangou will work alongside specialist cabinet makers to design bespoke shelving and panelling. Quinn adds, “We are also designing a lot of orangeries at the minute. They are a popular alternative to the modern conservatory, which tends to be very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer – really only suitable for tomatoes! Orangeries are much more solid but still have lots of glazing, so clients end up with a beautifully light room which they can use every day of the year.”
Image: Yiangou
But not all of Yiangou’s clients have such ‘normal’ requirements – in fact the firm has recently been given its weirdest commission yet. “We’ve been asked to construct a miniature railway the size of a paddock to house a client’s private collection,” Quinn confides. “It’s an unusual one to apply for planning permission for – I’m not sure they know what to make of it.”
One far more mainstream requirement amongst Yiangou’s clients is to have über-high-tech audiovisual and lighting systems. The latter often connect indoor and outdoor spaces and are, naturally, centrally controlled – but it gets better. “We often work with technology which allows the client to alter things such as the heating from a remote laptop; they just sign into a building management system and from there they can do pretty much anything, even down to opening and closing their curtains,” says QuinnSustainability is becoming an increasingly common consideration for wealthy home improvers. Quinn tells us about the Earl of Ronaldshay, whose biomass heating system is fuelled by the woodland on his property. “But he has staff onsite who manage it,” points out Quinn – in other words, don’t try this at home, unless home happens to be a sprawling country estate complete with groundsmen.
Unsurprisingly, high-tech, high-end projects come at a price – Quinn estimates that the wine cellar, for example, will cost around a quarter of a million pounds (and that’s before it’s been stocked with vintage Krug). On hearing dizzying figures like these, it’s tempting to ask whether Yiangou’s clients even have budgets. “It would be rare for us not to be given any budget at all,” Quinn says. “Our clients didn’t get wealthy by being frivolous! Like everybody, they’re looking for value for money and that’s what we provide.”
If there’s one thing we’ve all learned over the past couple of years, it’s that nobody’s immune to a recession: some of Yiangou’s more cash-strapped clients have even had to reign in their spending on finishing touches like state-of-the-art hi-fis. Poor things...
Neil Quinn is a partner at Yiangou. For more information, see www.yiangou.com or call 01285 888150.
