The maid has just tiptoed out, after opening the curtains. Through the
floor-to-ceiling windows, the morning sun reflects off the glittering sea
and, as you stir to wakefulness, you wonder just what it is you can see on
the horizon. It can’t be St Petersburg – that was months ago – or New York,
though you still haven’t unpacked all the shopping from that little
interlude. Perhaps today’s the day you arrive in St Barts.
You’re all at sea – in your own penthouse with wraparound terraces, a
twin-bathroom master suite, a fully wired home office and hotel-style
concierge services at your beck and call. It has cost you an eight-figure
sum for a 50-year lease. And now, my son, in the words of Minder’s immortal
character Arthur Daley, the world truly is your lobster. Your new home is a
private apartment on Four Seasons Ocean Residences, a 48,600-ton cruise ship
that its developers hope will become the latest lifestyle choice for the
seriously loaded.
Kristian Stensby, chief operating officer of Ocean Development Group, one of
the partners behind the scheme, sums up his vision: “I just think it’s a
unique way of life. You can circumnavigate the globe in the comfort of your
home – and stay in touch with your investments.”
Secure a luxurious berth (anything from a one-bedder, with prices starting at
£1.875m, right up to a fourbed triplex, from £20m) and you will be able to
enjoy perpetual yet ever-changing sea views, turning up in all the right
places at just the right season (Rio for carnival, perhaps, or the Caribbean
for Christmas). Added to this is the appeal of an attentive level of service
– and the knowledge that you’ve left the riffraff floundering in your wake.
All your seafaring companions will also own property on board: there’s no
place for anyone who can’t afford the financial commitment. That is a lesson
Stensby and his partners say they have learnt from the last high-profile
attempt to get the rich to extend their understanding of the concepts of
“offshore” and “flotation”.
For we have been here before. The 644ft, 43,500-ton World of ResidenSea,
launched in 2002, was billed as the ultimate private property enclave for
the seriously loaded: residences on board sold for between £1.45m and £5m,
and the London-based property tycoon Peter Beckwith was among the
multimillionaire buyers. Despite the hype, the project was not so much
shipshape as pear-shaped. Its itinerary and business plan turned out to
accommodate anyone who could afford a package holiday in one of the vessel’s
regular cruise cabins, and soon the wealthy owner-residents were in mutinous
mood.
Says Stensby, who made a close study of it while planning Four Seasons: “The
demographics and expectations of owners and cruise passengers are totally
different.” Which is a tactful way of interpreting reports that the
ResidenSea holidaymakers were allegedly downing alcohol provided as part of
their all-inclusive deals to the point of vomiting, falling down or
fighting. Resident wives, meanwhile, did not take kindly to “gold-diggers”
claimed to have been primping their assets in the La Prairie spa, then
hanging around the bars in the hope of luring a wealthy husband (probably
theirs).
“So,” Stensby says, “we decided our ship would be wholly residential: 112
private residences, no cruise cabins.” Early plans to sell some of the
properties on a shared-ownership basis were scrapped. Other decisions, he
adds, were “that it would be operated like a private club, with any revenue
generated being paid back into a homeowners’ association; and that Four
Seasons would be our partner”.
The upmarket hotel chain has been involved in the project from day one. It has
directed the design of the living quarters and 70,000 sq ft of public space,
and has a 50-year management contract to run the on-board services, which
will include four restaurants, an 11,000 sq ft spa, a business centre with
secretarial and video-conferencing facilities, 24-hour concierges and two
designer shopping malls, dubbed Sloane Street and Bond Street. Construction
will start this summer in Finland, and it should be ready to have a magnum
of vintage bubbly smashed against its bow in 2010.
Marketing starts this month. So, who will want to buy in? Speaking to me from
a smart dinner party in Mumbai, Charles Weston Baker, head of international
residential sales at Savills, the selling agent, says: “Nobody here is
interested in London property. They all want to know about the ship.”
Stensby points out that at this level, “most will regard it as their second or
third home, or maybe fourth or fifth”. And Weston Baker makes it clear that
even if you decide to make your maritime penthouse your primary home, you
won’t get away with declaring yourself a citizen of the Four Seasons to
divest yourself of tax liabilities in the non-floating world.
“It’s not a tax issue,” he says. “You use the Caymans for that. Funnily
enough, quite a number on ResidenSea bought an apartment in the Caymans or
the Bahamas to have a tax base there. It is not a floating tax shelter. But
there’s no tax on board – except the service charge.”
Ah, the service charge. It is steep – at £52,500 a year for a one-bedder,
rising to £512,000 to deliver hot and cold running flunkies to a
four-bedroom triplex penthouse. But the target market should take that kind
of sum in their stride.
As for whether you’d be able to get a mortgage on a property in a construction
that has a declared shelf life of just 50 years . . . “Well,” says Danny
Warman, vice-president of real-estate investment at the Florida-based
Bayview Financial, one of the vessel's backers, “we anticipate that buyers
will make their own private arrangements.”
But is it a good investment? If ResidenSea, now rebranded The World, is any
guide, it’s far from spectacular. Even though the resident owners there
clubbed together and shelled out a reported £40m in 2003 to buy out the
financial backers and take over the running of the ship themselves, prices
on the vessel have in no way mirrored the huge hikes in the world’s prime
real-estate locations. The Cruise Line, a UK resale agent, and Hans
Christian Magnus, an agent based in Norway, have studio flats (converted
from the old cruise cabins) at a mere £400,000, two-bedroom flats from £1.2m
and a four-bedder for £3.7m. It’s not an investment, Magnus says, but a
second home, though he also points out that there’s a lively rental scene
for flats on the ship, which was packed out for its recent sortie to
Antarctica.
Four Seasons, on the other hand, declares that, on its vessel: “There is no
rental programme in place for homeowners to rent out their residences” –
though it doesn’t rule out the possibility that owners might get together
and decide to institute one, or that an individual may choose to do so. For
now, that means you’d really have to want to make a floating residential
community your home (or one of them). But Olivier Beumer, an international
sales executive at Savills, is refreshingly direct about the financial
reality: “It’s a depreciating asset. It’s not an investment, it’s a
lifestyle choice.”
Stensby reckons the life on board will appeal to “modern-day explorers”. They
will differ from the traditional kind, presumably, in several ways: rather
than agonising about whether to use huskies or ponies on an Antarctic
adventure, they will wrestle with which interior design to choose for their
cabin – contemporary, maritime or traditional? When they are bored with
writing their travel journals, they can pop down a deck or two and buy a new
Chanel handbag, or order staff to prepare a dinner party for 12 in their own
kitchen – and have it served on their own roof terrace. If they suddenly
find they have more pressing business elsewhere, they can summon a Sikorsky
S-76 to whisk them away.
They certainly won’t be taking any unnecessary risks. The security
arrangements are on what you might call the paranoid side of prudent: the
220 staff (and the prospective buyers, for that matter) will be thoroughly
screened and on-board movement will be controlled with biometric scanners.
There will be a resident security crew, though Stensby declines to “go into
specifics” about whether or how they will be armed. If prospective buyers
are still feeling a bit jittery, it might help to know that the ship will be
“affiliated with an antiterror group with intimate knowledge of the vessel.
Should something happen, they will dispatch within an hour”.
Happy cruising.
Four Seasons Ocean Residences sales: David Vaughan at Savills International,
020 7016 3814, www.savills.com/abroad
