For the overseas investor who has it all, what better trophy to add to the portfolio of properties you will never visit than an apartment with its own “sky pool”? London may already have a fairytale Sky Garden, but now Irish developer Ballymore plans to introduce a “world first” all-glass swimming pool bridge between two apartment blocks in Nine Elms, allowing its residents to float 10 storeys up in the air.
There are plenty of good reasons why no one has done this before – but that hasn’t deterred the plucky developer Sean Mulryan – ever keen to adorn his developments with an outlandish gesture that no other project can claim – from giving it a go.
“My vision for the sky pool stemmed from a desire to push the boundaries in the capability of construction and engineering,” says Mulryan, who grew up in poverty in rural Ireland, but now presides over a vast property empire with more land in London than the Duke of Westminster. “I wanted to do something that had never been done before.”
Designed by engineering giant Arup Associates with Eckersley O’Callaghan, plus aquarium specialists Reynolds, the 25-metre-long pool will be completely “structure free” and made of 20cm thick glass sheets, through which swimmers will be able to gaze at the lesser residents of Wandsworth below. Not that there will be much street life to behold: the £1bn Embassy Gardens scheme will be London’s most secure residential zone, its mighty blocks of 2,000 luxury flats huddled in a fortified arc around the new US Embassy.
Views of the embassy from the pool are trumpeted as a key selling point. But it is a curious decision to suspend an all-glass bridge beside a building that believes itself to be at such risk of a terror attack that it cowers behind a 30-metre-deep bomb-blast zone.
Having an aerial aquarium of oligarchs next door will surely only add to the temptation for any budding bomb enthusiasts. Not that the owners will ever be around to use it: it’s likely to turn a similar shade to the sludgy green tiles of the buildings that support it, making it the world’s first slimy pond in the sky.
Henry Pryor, a buying agent for wealthy clients, said he thought the plans for the pool were “genuinely crackers” and wondered “are there enough exhibitionists to fill it?”
“It’s not easy to say for sure what the extras like pools, tennis courts and home cinemas add to a home,” he told the Guardian. “But for the first time I can honestly say that, while my admiration for the architect is close to reverence, this absurd addition must surely be the biggest mistake I have ever come across.”
The addition of the pool appears to be the result of the recent involvement of EcoWorld, a Malaysian property investment company that now owns 75% of the scheme, having formed a £2.2bn joint venture with Ballymore. It is a marriage that has souped up many of the company’s projects, adding a big dose of bling for the Asian investor market – where most of this development has so far been sold, with one-beds starting at £666,000 and penthouses going for £5.5m.
EcoWorld and Ballymore are not alone in pimping up their developments to match the expectations of this new kind of client. On the Greenwich Peninsula, where Hong Kong developer Knight Dragon is busy building a £5bn new quarter, they have lured the talents of former Habitat design impresario Tom Dixon to decorate a select number of £2.1m penthouses with “high concept interiors”, inside a bulky cluster of angular glass towers by SOM.
For sale exclusively through the Modern House, these glitzy confections mix “art deco motifs” with “robust and industrial materials [to] lend a strong British narrative”, apparently drawing on the history of Greenwich through the use of copper, leather and wood. Stair balustrades will be lined with colour-changing diachroic glass, bringing a whiff of the Essex boy-racer, while your kitchen splashback will be made by the people who do the London Underground signage. Fancy.
Residents of the Upper Riverside will have exclusive use of an entire floor dedicated to “wellness and relaxation”, complete with what purports to be the highest residential swimming pool in London on its 15th floor. It might be nothing compared to the glass-walled fish tank of tyrants by the US Embassy, but it will offer views of the Millennium Dome and the empty cable cars of the Emirates Air Line. And as you’re doing lengths of the luxury lap pool, you can be content in the knowledge that the lavish facilities were used to inflate the project’s total building cost, and thus reduce the developer’s affordable housing requirements – as recently exposed in the project’s viability assessment.
But the Greenwich Peninsula won’t hold the title of highest swimming pool for long. Back on the steroidal muscle beach of Nine Elms, Middle Eastern developer Damac Properties is planning the luxury monument to end all luxury monuments: a 50-storey totem pole of tack in the form of the Aykon Tower – where every element will be wrought by the hand of Donatella Versace herself.
“Live the complete Versace lifestyle,” purrs the brochure, “a fantasy turned into reality.” From waking up in your silken Versace sheets to drinking coffee from your Versace cups, every element of your luxury lifestyle will have been carefully calibrated by the undead queen of the Milanese fashion house. After all: “Versace is the true celebration of life.”
A place in this “global symbol of opulence” starts at £711,000 for a studio (a car space is an extra £50,000), which comes with access to the residents’ private health club. This includes the fabled 23rd floor swimming pool, inspired by “the Greek and Roman myths that are part of the Versace DNA” – from where you will be able to look down on the sheikhs nervously paddling in their glass fish bowl.
But don’t get out your chequebook: sadly, all of the Thames-facing apartments have already been sold. Indeed, they were snapped up by Middle Eastern and Asian investors before the project had even launched. The building won’t be completed until 2020, but that still leaves plenty of time to make a profit before it opens. Agent Hamptons believes buyers need only put down a 5% deposit now (around £50,000 on a typical one-bed flat) and another 20% over the next 18 months, to walk away with a projected £230,000 profit on a £1m apartment without even stepping inside.
On the other side of town, even the borough of Hackney is getting in on the aerial swimming action, with the launch of a project that marks the latest implausible chapter in the stratospheric rise of London Fields – once a gang battleground, now a hipster war zone of bearded brunchers.
Meet the Warehaus by Union Developments, a boxy brick hulk of aspirational warehousey flats, on the market from half a million for a pokey one-bed. Just as Tom Dixon drew inspiration from Greenwich, the Warehaus is apparently “constructed from materials traditionally used and found in Hackney”. Old beer cans and syringes? No, “brass, wood and steel” is the traditional Hackney palette of course.
Not to be confused with the nearby Arthaus (more overpriced lofts, also by Union Developments) the main selling point of Warehaus is a glass-bottomed rooftop swimming pool that floats above the communal atrium – so you can get to know your neighbours from a whole new angle.
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