(ABC News Photo Illustration)

A new high-rise under construction in Westwood is taking on the paparazzi — and it just might win.

The Carlyle Residences, a 24-story tower of luxury condominiums, is said to be the first building that is specifically designed to thwart the prying lenses of celebrity photographers.

The property is set to open in 2009 and promises round-the-clock patrols by “Israeli-trained VIP” security guards, sub-terranian parking with private elevators that open directly into apartments and high hedges that shield the swimming pool and yoga lawn.

The developer says the shape of the building itself, a crescent, minimizes views into the Carlyle from neighboring buildings.

Thomas Elliott, chief operating officer for Elad Properties West, said the company was responding to complaints from celebrities and elected leaders about aggressive tabloid photographers.

“We are reaching out to the Hollywood community to do what we can to ensure their safety and security,” he said.

Condos will range from 2,700 to 5,000 square feet and will go for around $3-to-$5 million.

Elliott would not say whether any celebrities have purchased any of the condos.

Giles Harrison, a paparazzo who has worked in Los Angeles for 14 years, said the project is a “waste of advertising”. “Paparazzi don’t go into buildings to get shots. They wait until people go out and about. I have yet to see a paparazzi shot that came from the inside of a private residence.”

The idea that Dubai will soon boast the most expensive real estate in the world is not as absurd as it sounds.

All it takes is a modest extrapolation of growth trends for rentals in the Dubai International Financial Centre, and a continuation of the current cooling off in markets like London Prime and this is a fact.

Dubai’s office market continues to suffer from an acute shortage of space, with 98 per cent occupancy in the new financial zone, the Dubai International Financial Centre, which has been hugely successful in attracting global financial firms to the emirate.

The latest recruit this week is Thames River Capital, a boutique fund-of-funds investment manager based in Berkeley Square.

The latter told AME Info that rents in this prime London location had fallen by around 30 per cent and that the rent it had just agreed in Dubai was not far off the rent it had just paid for additional space in Mayfair.  Full article

People tend to purchase fractional properties in places they frequent for vacations.

A fractional property is an alternative to a second home. Luxury fractional ownership properties appeal to those looking for amenities found in homes valued in excess of $3 million.

Globetrotting interior designer Carl Ross knows what rich people want — more of everything luxurious, and then something unexpected. So that’s what he has bundled into the model apartment for the Hyatt Corp.’s newest vacation real estate venture in Florida.

It’s a $100 million, fractional ownership project of 44 designer-furnished apartments called Hyatt Siesta Key Beach. It will be located on the sand where the old Sea Castle Resort used to welcome tourists who were considerably less wealthy than the buyers of this new property are expected to be.

But the designer’s sand-and-glam model apartment isn’t at the picturesque beach location; it’s on the Tamiami Trail, in the Hyatt Vacation Ownership sales office. It’s a one-bedroom unit, not the two- or three-bedroom apartment that will be standard at the actual beach property.

Since he established his firm in 1996, Ross has made a name for himself successfully tricking out resorts, spas, casinos, themed restaurants and luxury boutique hotels all over the world. He knows what appeals to the rich and famous. At the moment, that doesn’t seem to involve piling on the glitz.

Ross analyzes what brings clients to a particular destination and then pulls the magic of that site into the apartments with subtle layers of color, texture, art and sculptural objects that reference the illusive allure of the destination.  Full article

Ultra rich, billionaire Virgin Airline boss Richard Branson is moving ahead with building a luxury Australian island retreat for his Virgin airline staff despite protests from local environmentalists.

Plans for the $4 million (Australian dollars) nine-hectare estate at Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, have already been scaled back from those first outlined by the British tycoon.

Last week, bulldozers and builders were working on the redevelopment on heart-shaped Makepeace Island in the middle of the Noosa River.

But environmentalists were still concerned about the removal of trees and the 85-year-old timber Queenslander house on the island.

Sir Richard bought the island for $2.86 million in May 2003 and now owns it in partnership with Virgin Blue Airlines managing director Brett Godfrey. The idea was to turn it into a Balinese-style retreat for the owners’ families and for use by Virgin staff.

In style, it mimics Necker Island, Sir Richard’s private Caribbean island.

On Makepeace, there will be three villas attached to the revamped timber house, a lagoon pool in landscaped gardens, tennis court and two-storey kitchen. All the buildings will be on stilts to deal with flooding.

Stal tre hustranslates into the steel tree house. Joel Sherman of JLS Design desired to create a modern design that fit its luxury environmental market. He succeeded and more.

His contemporary design utilizes a tree house theme. The house is lifted high into the canopy of the surrounding trees. The residence is 2,500 square feet and a breathtaking marvel of design and construction.

Full article

Realtor Kurt Rappaport is very well known in the Los Angeles area. Not only does he earn a huge income by being a co-owner of the swankiest and most exclusive boutique brokerages in the L.A., but Kurt also makes millions of dollars by personally listing and selling the luxurious homes of the very rich and famous in Los Angeles.

For those of us who don’t him by name, you’ll probably recall this. He sold his own huge house on Calle Vista Drive in Beverly Hills to Tom Cruise and Kate Holmes in April of 2007. The amount was a shocking $30,500,000.

So where did Kurt Rappaport and his wife end up? They purchased the enormous house owned by auto accessories and tire tycoon, Lawrence Kraines (Kraco).

It was on the market for almost a year, but the 12,981 s.f. mansion finally sold for $15,990,000. Nice discount off the asking price of $18,950,000.   Full article

The developer rebuilding New York’s World Trade Center unveiled plans on Tuesday for an 80-story hotel a block away, saying he was unbowed by fears of a recession or a softening of New York’s real estate market.

The new 912-foot (278-metre) tower, due to begin construction in June and be completed in 2011, will combine a luxury hotel with apartments. The project was announced as the pace of huge real estate deals has slowed, credit has tightened and Wall Street is still struggling in the swamp of subprime mortgages.

Developer Larry Silverstein referred to “negative trends” in financial markets while announcing the project and answered his own rhetorical questions on whether the Financial District was vulnerable to downturns in the financial markets that have caused vacancies to spike in the past.

“The answer, in a word, is ‘no.’ In two words, ‘Hell no’,” said the man who took out a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center six weeks before it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Silverstein said his confidence reflected the commitment of elected officials to the World Trade Center’s rebuilding, the decision of 184 non-financial companies to relocate downtown, and easy access to the area through public transportation.

Moreover, downtown Manhattan needs more hotel rooms, he said, in part to accommodate visitors to the four very tall buildings he is constructing at the former World Trade Center site, including the Freedom Tower, which at 1,776 feet (541 meters) will be the tallest building in the United States.

Downtown Manhattan “will be … a model for cities all over the world. Unprecedented, unimaginable, unbeatable,” he said.

The new skyscraper will eclipse one of its nearest and most admired neighbors, the historic Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic classic that stands at 792 feet.

Robert A.M. Stern Architects will design the hotel at 99 Church Street. Silverstein partnered with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts to run the hotel on the first 22 floors. There will be 143 condominium apartments on the rest of the floors.

The new tower will have 175 hotel rooms, including a 3,700 square foot (344 square meter) suite. The biggest apartments will be 6,500 square feet — enormous by New York City standards.

Silverstein did not say how much it would cost.

Article by: Joan Gralla – Reuters

They want big houses — several of them — with ornate exteriors, situated on golf courses, designed by golf professionals. Sound like a typical wealthy American home buyer?

Nope. It’s their affluent counterparts in China, who are plowing their rapidly accumulating wealth into Western-style mansions. “We assumed they would want houses with an Eastern influence,” says Dave Jenkins, a community design director, at Sater Companies, a small Florida firm, which recently started designing luxury homes in China. “We were wrong.”

Hired by a Chinese developer of a large luxury community South of Shanghai, Sater Companies has designed a handful of “villas” with a Mediterranean influence. These houses, which will cost up to $1.5 million, typically include sleeping quarters for a live-in maid, a main kitchen, and a separate “work kitchen,’’ situated away from the main living area because the cooking tends to be smoky.

Rendering courtesy of Sater Design Collection, Inc.

Mr. Jenkins says the new development will include hotels, golf courses and homes for about 20,000 people, stretching over 10 square miles, when it’s completed. “It’s like Vegas, Monte Carlo and Taos, all rolled into one,” he says.

Many U.S. real estate companies have shied away from the Chinese market because of legal entanglements and government restrictions on foreign developers. But when considering that prices of luxury homes in China rose 13.5% in 2007, according to Chinese government statistics, U.S. builders may find China too tempting to pass up, if business at home stays slow.
Article by: Michael Corkery – Wall Street Journal

Despite a steep downturn in the U.S. housing market, the luxury home market remains strong in throughout the U.S.  A record breaking $175 million real estate sale in Colorado breaks a new national record for the highest value home ever sold. While the overall U. S. housing market has taken a downturn, wealthy home buyers continue to invest in homes at the very top of the market.

Evidence of the strength of the luxury home segment was revealed in late November with the sale of the Trinchera Ranch in Colorado for a record-setting $175 million. This sale breaks the U.S. residential sales record of $103 million set earlier this year in New York’s Hamptons.

Sellers of the Colorado property were the heirs of the late Malcolm Forbes, who acquired control of the historic Trinchera ranch in 1969. The buyer is billionaire hedge fund manager Louis Moore Bacon, who appears as number 286 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. Trinchera is the largest ranch in Colorado and its 171,400 acres contain five residences, as well as a Western style lodge with 16 bedrooms.

Although the Colorado sale set a U.S. sales record, it fell short of the world record residential purchase, also set this year, with Sheikh Hamad of Qatar’s acquisition of a penthouse condominium in London for £100 million – equivalent to about $200 million at the time of the sale.

“Although the vast Colorado ranch, the ocean front lot in the Hamptons, and the London penthouse condominium are not apples-to-apples comparisons, they are each indicative of the health of the very top of the world’s luxury home market,” said Laurie Moore-Moore, Founder of The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, an international organization which tracks the luxury home market and trains luxury real estate agents.

“These sales illustrate the fact that there are more rich households than ever before and the world’s wealthiest have shifted more of their investment dollars out of alternative investments like commodities and into multiple residences.

Based on this year’s World Wealth Report from Merrill Lynch and CapGemini, the world’s über rich have invested 12% of their total portfolios in homes other than a primary residence,” said Moore-Moore. “In short, there is more money than ever competing for homes at the very top of the market. The luxury residential market is the good news story in real estate.”

Mike Montpetit, a real estate professional with Town & Country Realty and member of The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, agrees. “In most markets across the country, the very top of the market remains healthy – luxury is the ‘sweet spot’ in real estate.”

The real estate market is in shambles, with foreclosures increasing by the day. But that doesn’t mean the entire housing market is left for dead. During the first quarter of 2008, Americans are expected to spend about $170 billion on home improvement. It’s a huge number, but is down 2.5% from Q4 of ‘07.

If you are one of the millions looking at re-modeling, you don’t need to break the bank. The key is to prioritize your home makeover project and set an affordable budget.  Where to start? If you’re looking to sell your home, Taniya Nayak, president of Boston’s Big Design says, “Luxury goes a long way in the kitchen. It also helps with the resale of the home.”  Full article

Park City, Utah started its humble beginnings as a small silver mining town in the Wasatch Mountains.  No more.  This winter mecca is now a hot ski destination, but also an appealing place for second home buyers.  Real estate is booming and baby boomers are quickly snatching up homes in the $2.5 million-plus range.

In the Tuhaye community, homes have been selling for an average of $600 a square foot! Park City offers home buyers breathtaking views, world-class ski resorts, as well  as a charming, historic community that definitely hasn’t forgotten its humble roots.  Full A rticle