Inside the three-bedroom, fifth-floor apartment at the Old War Office (OWO) on Whitehall, London, there are White Company sheets on the bespoke Lambro Interiors bed, glassware by LSA in the cupboards and string of pearls plants on the shelves. In the living room, above the fireplace, is a striking portrait by Ross Head. Glazed pendant lights by ceramicist Rich Miller hang above the dining table, and antique books bound in turquoise covers sit on shelves. But no one lives here. Yet.
The apartment is on the market for £18mn through Knight Frank, Savills and Strutt & Parker, and everything inside it is included in the sale, from the hand-pressed flowers in the guest bedroom to the Raffles-branded bathrobe hanging on the door. Even the smart lighting is preprogrammed with different settings for day and night.
The buyers will “just need to bring their luggage,” says Linda Morey-Burrows, founder of interior design studio StudioMorey, which created the space. “It’s not just the way it looks, it’s the way it feels and functions. It is designed so you can genuinely believe it could be your home.”
Super turnkey homes, where the interiors — often fully styled by an in-demand interior designer — are included in the sale, are becoming a staple of the super-prime property market. Not just in London and the US, but from the Middle East and Istanbul to Barbados and Madrid. “It’s a growing trend,” says Morey-Burrows. “To walk in and have all the stress taken away — that’s what people want.”
Such properties cater to buyers who often have multiple homes across the world. It spares them the cost and hassle of renovation, but also gains them access to the taste, style and little black book of the most sought after designers — without the wait. “It’s the ultimate convenience,” says Noble Black, broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
The Whiteley, which launched on Queensway in February, has apartments by Linda Boronkay, Kelly Behun and Joyce Wang. Joyce Wang Studio’s design includes antique Georgian chandeliers, two commissioned artworks by Colombian artist Armando Mesías and rugs and tapestries from the Aubusson region’s Pinton.
Mayfair’s 60 Curzon, meanwhile, recently unveiled a £10.95mn show apartment by designer Tatjana von Stein, inspired by the building’s art deco roots. Earlier this year, Chelsea Barracks launched the £45mn “collector’s house” designed by Brigitta Spinocchia Freund, for sale via Knight Frank and Savills. It features murals by artist Robert Cooper, collectible design pieces including dining chairs by Pierre Jeanneret and an original 1950s Noguchi light in the study, and even a selection of vinyl records.
Such an upscale take on the turnkey concept “is much more common in markets such as Los Angeles and London. New York is catching up,” says Black. It was already popular in branded residences, and the trend is evolving: in New York, he says, it is now “incredibly common to have ‘staged’ apartments, that people purchase and negotiate the staged furniture into the final price”.
In London, the super turnkey concept has evolved over the past 15 years, says Rupert des Forges, Head of Prime Central London Developments at Knight Frank. Demand grew after the pandemic, which disrupted supply chains and caused the costs of potential renovations to soar. “There are more schemes than there have been at any point,” he says. In super-prime developments such as One Hyde Park, The Whiteley or Chelsea Barracks, des Forges estimates that around 25 per cent of the apartments will be what he calls “dressed”. The appeal to developers is that it helps buyers to visualise the space and speeds up sales. At the OWO, nine of the 85 residences were fully furnished. Four of these turnkey apartments have sold — the fastest of which went within two weeks. “They usually sell in weeks rather than months,” says des Forges. “The reality is: if you dress, you sell.”
For designers, the challenge is to create a space that feels like a home while still appealing to a range of possible buyers. “We try and imagine the characters that are going to live there, but there’s got to be some thread of universal appeal,” says Morey-Burrows. In StudioMorey’s OWO design, which is intended to be bought “as seen”, the artwork, furniture and objects are selected from independent boutiques and galleries to evoke a collection that has been carefully formed over time. “We wanted it to feel like a family home.”
Brian Ludlow, chief executive of LA-based Creative Art Partners, buys art for branded turnkey residences across the US including for Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental and Rosewood, while also running a “resident concierge art programme” that sells art to homeowners in new developments. It is not “six prints all behind glass with the same frame — that’s like living in a hotel,” says Ludlow. “We build a collection that feels like a journey in art that has taken time to build. It’s informed by different references and periods in their life. That’s the fun challenge.”
Marco Credendino, founder of craft homeware supplier Artemest, was initially wary of turnkey design projects. “It’s almost the opposite of what we’re trying to do,” he says. “People don’t want to buy a house where their neighbour has the exact same living room. Uniqueness is key.”
For Artemest, the solution was to offer tailored design and an “extremely customisable” experience for clients. The company’s recent projects include a $12.8mn apartment at a new development on New York’s Upper East Side, and a $13.5mn penthouse at The Greenwich, in the financial district. Artemest used data from its online shop — “we know exactly what the tastes of a specific neighbourhood are” — to create detailed buyer profiles for each of the projects. “We are psychologists,” laughs Credendino.
The Greenwich penthouse had a “safer” design, while the Upper East Side project, designed with a local family in mind, was “much more eclectic”. It incorporated a kids’ room with curved shelving and colourful paper-clay pendant lamps. In the dining room, it matched the blocky marble table legs to the building’s facade. “What we like to offer is the feeling that you have a unique set of items in your apartment, with multiple stories to tell.”
This explains the appeal, then, of a smaller section of the turnkey market: homes, furnished by their owners, who choose to part with everything when they sell. Last year, Black, for example, sold the Sag Harbor home of interior designer Bryan Graybill for $15.5mn within two weeks. Besides the art and Hermès china, the sale included the entire contents of the house.
Jo Eccles, founder of buying agency Eccord, recently purchased a £32mn house in Notting Hill for a client, which included “absolutely everything”. For the seller, who was moving abroad, this saved the hassle and expense of relocating 10,000 sq ft of interiors, much of it made bespoke for the property. The buyer paid £200,000 for the contents and was able to move in straight away.
Sotheby’s International Realty says that of the UK new-build developments it sells, 92 per cent offer at least one furnished unit — and those are typically the ones to sell first. Eighty per cent are bought “as seen” (although artwork sometimes needs to be negotiated separately).
Super turnkey homes come at a premium, of course. Eccles puts this at around 10 to 15 per cent, which is also the percentage that Artemest charges, including a full marketing package. StudioMorey charges a fixed fee of between 18 and 31 per cent of the total project spend.
Buyers, however, are paying for something beyond simple convenience; the vast network of niche furniture and decor suppliers assembled by designers over their years of experience — and their personal brand.
“You’re paying for someone else’s taste,” says Eccles. “A lot of people just don’t have the vision. To take a blank canvas — a lot of people struggle to see what it would look like with furniture, let alone to create that themselves . . . It’s hard to make something exquisite that’s both practical and beautiful.”
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