I evaluated billions of dollars of luxury spend targeted at the UHNW

Last week, I spent hours evaluating billions of dollars of luxury spend targeted at attracting the UHNW. If I’m honest, I was bored, really bored. Imagine the buyer.

I was judging a major international branded residences competition, with brands including Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, Six Senses, St. Regis, etc. I went in expecting to see the future. Instead, after listening to some architects wax lyrically for 20 or 30 minutes about a groundbreaking new way of living, I found myself thinking:

You cannot possibly think this is as special as you are telling me it is.

What I saw was not a branded-residences problem. It was a luxury problem in concentrated form.

I studied financials, designs, plans, renderings, technology and value models. Each represented hundreds of millions or billions in investment designed to “attract” UHNW buyers.

This became impossible to ignore: Luxury looks distinctive in isolation but put the global competitive set in the same room and the repetition becomes impossible to ignore.

The interiors resolved to a handful of aesthetics. Sustainability features repeated. Even the categories became familiar:

The urban tower

The residence embedded into the landscape

The ecologically inspired retreat

The amenities didn’t fare any better:

Restaurant. Spa. Speakeasy. Fitness. Cigar lounge. Library. Tea room. Farm-to-table garden. Local cultural programming. Automotive lifts. A Zen garden. Again.

I want to say this louder for the people in the back: Those are boring and expected. Everyone has them now. Literally everyone.

Place is being asked to do far too much work. In many cases, it is being asked to be the whole value. A spectacular location is not a differentiated proposition.

When you tell me you have created a groundbreaking new relationship between people, place, ecology and residential living, then show me a $20M villa that looks like a very nice $20M villa I could find in six other countries, the story and product have parted company.

The same thinking is moving through private clubs and ultra-luxury hospitality, where placemaking, wellness, sustainability and familiar amenities are treated as the idea rather than ingredients supporting one.

And we are in a boom. Brand prestige and extraordinary locations can cover a lot of intellectual laziness...for now.

Until they can't.

Every developer contemplating the next big luxury project should ask harder questions before the architect starts drawing:

If you hire the same architects, advisors and designers as everyone else, give them the same assumptions and benchmark the same projects, why expect anything other than the same answer?

Out of everything I reviewed, one project genuinely stood out. One.

After evaluating this much of the top luxury market at once, one is a very uncomfortable number.

This is why the real work has to happen before any design brief becomes sacred, before the amenity list hardens, and before millions are spent executing an idea nobody challenged.