Home interiors designed to make you feel something
Man caves, movie theatres with Versace popcorn holders, curated art collections, acid-green accents, customised everything … just some of the new essentials in styling up the home.
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On the 10th floor of the Time Warner building in New York, two days before the Presidential Inauguration, more than 200 marketing executives, retailers, analysts and researchers assembled to glean some insights into the rebooting of luxury in 2017.
And if there is one thing the speakers at Luxury FirstLook 2017: Time For Luxury 2.0 agree on, it is that there is a notable shift in the perception of luxury – from acquisitive to inquisitive, from expensive to experiential, from the old “I am what I own” to the new “I am what I do”.
Luxury is about emotion and the experiences a purchase brings. Home interiors in 2017 are as much about how they make you feel as they are about the brand statement.
“What’s really hit in interior design in the past two years is eclecticism,” says Perth interior designer Christian Lyon. “It’s very much about making your own statement. The cookie cutter look has completely gone.”
To that end comes layering; customised curation; investment collections; big, brave ideas; peerless craftsmanship and the story-telling in the design that brings a new interior to life. Lyon, who designs the inside of everything from beach shacks and boats to palaces, planes and penthouses, likes anything he does to be emotive, “to evoke a reaction”. From the strategic use of colour (“I have a very emotive connection to chartreuse and lime greens, and that bright spring new-leaf green that has just been voted the colour of 2017”) to the way a museum-quality collection of Paul Evans furniture might announce discerning ownership.
Australian interior architect Blainey North, too, likes to get to the bottom of how something will make her clients “feel”. For example: what does an underwater world feel like when there is no natural light and everything’s moving around you?
That was the question that drove North’s design of Crown Towers Perth’s Crown Spa, inspired by refractions of light seen on the surface of water from underneath and by the cruciform arrangements and circular vestibules of Roman bath houses.
Meanwhile, clients Marly Boyd and her property developer husband John Boyd wanted their 43rd floor apartment atop the ANZ Tower in Sydney’s CBD to feel like being on a luxury boat. Achieving that required a 3D mapping tool (the space had three different planes of curvature, all intersecting) and joinery that required the specialised skill of a guitar maker. A ribbon of black lacquered wood links all the different spaces – a modernist cornice that morphs into the balustrade, traces windows and bar units, and turns up in the bedroom as a bedside table.
“I live and die by how a client feels about the project … if they are happy, I’m so happy,” says North, who revels in scale. Her clients have included Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Shane Warne and Kerry Stokes, as well as James Packer’s Crown Resorts. North recently completed The Revy apartments on Sydney’s Darling Island, and is working on a new international store concept for British fashion designer Alice Temperley MBE.
“You create a miniature community for each project,” North says. “The builders, tradespeople, the client and my team. And if you all work together really well, something amazing will happen … better than you could imagine.” The return to that individual workmanship is, for North, where luxury environments are going – both in top-end residential and in commercial spaces such as luxury hotels.
Interior designers are consummate sleuths, art curators and investment advisers. Their little black books are an unrivalled entrée to the zeitgeist. As well as keeping an eye out for works by Paul Evans on his travels, Christian Lyon sources works by contemporary Paris-based artist designer Mattia Bonetti, Irish light sculptor Niamh Barry, and Hervé van der Straeten, who makes desirable jewellery, furniture and lighting.
“Van der Straeten works with beautiful mid-metals and bronzes, with many different finishes such as silver gilding,” says Lyon. “He works with materials like velum and hair on hide and exquisite stone samples, and he even incorporates antique panels into some of his work, like vintage Chinese Coromandel screens.”
North’s recent discoveries include French designer Coralie Beauchamp, who creates lighting designs from fibreglass and leather; a New York company called Egg Collective, which makes clever tables, mirrors, bookends and objets from polished brass with lacquer coatings; beautiful fine sheets from textile titans C&C Milano; and Apparatus, a New York lighting and furniture laboratory whose pieces radiate industrial glamour.
“We used a pendant of theirs made of horsehair in a four-storey-high [residential] entry space,” says North. “Giant strands of looped woven horse-hair with lights underneath.”
Versace, Roberto Cavalli and Fendi are on Michael Chard’s speed dial. Luxury brand director and creative director of Palazzo Collezioni (which distributes all three of these lines), Chard worships at the shrine of Gianni Versace.
He tends an exclusive club that loves the juxtaposition of drama, classicism and colour that the Italian house delivers. “Sometimes clients want Versace from the front gate to the back gate – tiles, architecture, fretwork, exteriors, pool design, landscaping …” says Chard. And when that’s done there is always the plane, yacht, helicopter and Lamborghini to style up.
The Versace look, says Chard, is “confident, unapologetic, bold”. “In a cinema room, there might be panelling in Versace fabric and/or Versace wallpaper … fully decked out, right down to the popcorn holders. These clients love the detail. They want the big picture, but they’ll look at every cornice, every edge.”
Chard will work outside the Versace aesthetic, however, working it back with personally sourced antiques and other befitting luxury interior offerings. “We do a lot of beautiful floors where clients want hand-inlaid parquetry. We’ll get thousands of pieces manufactured. There’ll be an artist who does all the flooring, sometimes mixing marble with timber. We might incorporate semi-precious stones.”
Walls are also a great canvas – especially for mirrors, with patterns etched into the glass, coloured to complement the interiors, and skilfully lit. And the ceilings? Maybe a cloudy, airbrushed sky, or an ambitious collage of works by great masters, Versace symbols incorporated, painstakingly painted onto a lounge room ceiling over several months.
Devotion to the Versace aesthetic doesn’t come cheap. “The average room is about a quarter of a million dollars to furnish,” says Chard, “and up to $400,000 with a more customised finish. That’s just furnishing – you could easily spend a million dollars all up just with the furniture. The dining room is usually the most expensive – there’s the table (it may need to seat 20), cutlery, napkins, glassware and porcelain to factor in, too.”
Oh, and throw in the big square turquoise crocodile skin-covered tray for the coffee table, at less than $3000.“What I celebrate with Versace is the layering of colours,” says Chard. “Be daring; don’t be afraid of layering colours. I love the juxtaposition of old and new; for example, patterns from the classic Gianni period (1980s) but given different colourways.”
In 2017 the trademark Versace gold and black is making room for a more muted monochromatic palette. Upcoming collections see grey, taupe and turquoise – a fresh look that marries with a simplifying of borders and cornice details, and opts for “clean” lighting, flush to the ceiling in place of chandeliers.
Chard’s clients, many of them self-made millionaires and out to celebrate their achievement, understand scale. If there is a standout trend in 2017, he says, it is “Big”. Bragging rights? You bet. “They want everyone to see it and say ‘Wow’. You can feel the emotion in the room.”
Chard has one client who is building a seven-bedroom home with spacious underground bunker, bowling alley, a 10-metre “lolly wall”, full-sized cinema, pool tables, air-hockey court, pinball machine room, spa, and lagoons with waterfalls. “It’s like Disneyland inside,” he says. “She has grandkids and she wants it to be almost like a theme park.”
Indeed, maintains Chard, with the diamonds around the dial of his Breitling watch beaming, homes are the new holiday. “Our clients like to travel, but once they have a home that is actually more luxe than a luxury hotel, its finishings more high grade, they just want to be home to enjoy it.”
The trend towards big houses, says interior designer Greg Natale, brings with it the man cave (most likely with a pool table, and/or several TV screens), media room, butler’s kitchen, a beautifully finished cellar and a master suite that is essentially a mini apartment with lounge room, dressing area, huge walk-in wardrobe and ensuite.
Acclaimed American potter, designer and author Jonathan Adler puts Greg Natale up there with Kate Moss, Roger Federer, Noel Coward, singer Adele, Ellsworth Kelly and Marc Newson. All of them, he writes in the foreword to Natale’s 2014 book, The Tailored Interior (Hardie Grant), have “it” – the enviable and elusive “ability to make perfection look effortless”.
“Any great designer has to get the detail right,” says Natale, who set up his Australian design practice in 2001 and now has 16 product lines under licence, from cushions and rugs to bed linens and candles.
His studio in Sydney’s Surry Hills is evidence of an ordered mind. There’s a mathematical precision and a palette of black and steely grey in the gridded gates, terrazzo flooring, rugs, leathered granite reception desk, geometric tiling and marble stairs.
Some years ago, Natale came to the rescue of Australian prisoners of mid-century minimalism, putting pattern, layering and personality on top of it, to further evolve the Hollywood Regency style that people like Jonathan Adler and Kelly Wearstler were doing in the US.
“Americans do layering really well,” notes Natale, who tends to look to the US and France for inspiration before he looks to Italy.
In New York at 101 East 63rd Street, just off Park Avenue, sandwiched between a Church of Science Sunday School and a building listing dentists and podiatry tenants, is the townhouse that kick-started Natale’s passion for modern interiors.
Built for American fashion legend Halston, who entertained a who’s who of the avant-garde there in the ’70s, it is one of only three Manhattan residences designed by modernist architect Paul Rudolph.
“It was clean, really modern, but sexy and sophisticated,” says Natale, who might well be describing his own aesthetic. “The exterior was all black steel, the interior all white; the spaces were incredible.” Think 9.75-metre ceilings, a wall of windows and a skylight, floating staircase, double-height master suite, and a 149-square-metre terrace on the top floor.
Who else inspires him? He admires the style of Tom Ford; the “choreographer of spaces” William Adler; Jean-Louis Deniot; David Chipperfield; India Mahdavi; and David Collins, “an English designer who had quite an American look – very layered, very beautiful”.
What’s in store for the coming year? Natale admits he’ll be glad to see the back of the colour red, feature walls and retro-Scandinavian. He’s seeing kitchens moving away from black or white to shades of blue or even green. Hot, too, in living rooms are blush pinks and olive, and organic malachite-like patterns in textiles. Maybe a little cubism in the patterning, too.
Natale’s team is factoring in age-specific kids’ spaces (to cater to the first family and the second), bespoke libraries, joinery that’s fitted and fixed, and every runner and rug custom-made. Covered outdoor spaces are being given the same attention as that devoted to indoors – lots of layering with rugs, cushions and weather-resistant materials.
“The art is a big part of all properties. We source the signed Warhol and five great key big pieces … sometimes a client will have a collection, often they don’t, but we’ll do the whole art collection if needs be.
“An interior designer needs to be a good art buyer. We curate art collections. I get to act out my art-buying fantasies on my clients!”
Fundamentally, says Natale, interior design is about being practical and not overly clever. “It is about creating great, warm, comfortable spaces; that’s why the layering plays such an important part in what we do. It’s where the psychology lies.
“Who doesn’t want to feel glamorous and amazing when they come back to their home?”
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How the Most Rare and Valuable Watches Are Traded Among Elite Collectors
Some of the world’s most interesting watches spend decades being traded privately before we learn about them.
Before social media became the lingua franca of the watch world, there were forums. And on those forums, collectors—especially collectors of vintage Rolex—often traded timepieces amongst each other.
The advent of Instagram in the early 2010s, coupled with the explosion in interest in vintage timepieces, drew attention to this corner of the watch world, and with that attention came increased competition for the finest examples. In the case of six- and seven-figure watches, high-end dealers, like James Lamdin, founder and vice president of vintage and pre-owned watches at Analog:Shift, became trusted intermediaries, negotiating sales for pieces not once or twice but often multiple times as they made the rounds of the collector community.
“There are watches out there that may not be massively rare by reference, but are by example,” Lamdin tells Robb Report. “Tropical patina, ghosted bezel, or celebrity provenance—it’s that watch. When those watches go into a collection, usually it’s with the implicit understanding that they’re valuable and people will want them from you and will make you a profit when you sell them.”
The best dealers have built relationships with collectors around the world and often have first right of refusal when those pieces come back to market. But even still, the most coveted models can still slip through their fingers.
Eric Wind, of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla., has lost and found some of the world’s most storied watches. In 2015, when he was vice president, senior specialist at Christie’s in New York, Wind came across a “super rare” 1957 Audemars Piguet Ref. 5516 perpetual calendar that had languished in rural Florida until the nephew of the original owner consigned it to Christie’s. The first perpetual calendar wristwatch to feature a leap-year indicator, the piece was one of just nine made by Audemars Piguet in the 1950s. Wind considers it “the one in the best condition.”
He showed it to one of Christie’s better-known clients, Patrick Getreid, owner of the OAK Collection, who purchased it in 2015 for $545,000. In 2023, Getreid consigned it to Christie’s in Hong Kong. That’s when Wind decided to give the piece another shot.
“I had registered to bid on it but at the last minute, I got cold feet,” Wind continues. “It was starting kind of high compared with what Getreide had paid for it. I was bidding remotely from Florida, but when no one else is bidding, you’re kind of wondering if you’re a genius or a fool. Is there something everyone else knows that I don’t? The question was about market value. The watch ended up passing and I purchased it via private sale—or private treaty, as it’s known—after the sale. I had two clients who really wanted it. I offered it to both, but one was more ready to pull the trigger and he got it. It never saw the light of day.” That Audemars Piguet perpetual calendar, Wind says, “remains one of my top five watches on the planet.”
As he reflected on the piece’s winding journey, Wind considered his own role in its comings and goings. “It was fun to be part of the lifecycle of that watch, from when it was discovered in rural Florida and consigned to Christie’s, and then sold to a great collector, who sold it again,” he says. “I imagine it will come back to me at some point. I don’t know if it will be two years from now or 40 years.”
Another grail watch that Wind helped shepherd to a client was an exceptional Paul Newman Rolex Daytona Panda reference 2623 with a full set and a tropical dial that was sold by a small Swedish auction house just under a decade ago. “Another dealer got it,” Wind explains. “I was still at Christie’s, and I fell in love with the watch. This dealer who had it for a year then sold it to an Italian dealer, who then sold it to a collector in Asia. I was tracking the watch on Instagram and saw the collector post it. By that time, I had become a dealer.
“I made an offer to the collector to purchase it on behalf of my client,” he adds. “It had been owned by a Swedish boat captain and had been given to him by the family he worked for, the equivalent of the Rockefellers in Sweden. We had to arrange shipment to the U.S. by Malca-Amit armored transport. Whenever these high-value watches move around, you have to deal with armored shipments, customs, proper transportation, and a lot of paperwork. It takes some time but it’s well worth it.”
Both the AP perpetual calendar and Daytona were original and unpolished—“the kind of watches I look for,” Wind says. “It’s funny how watches circle around. Within the high-end watch world, we’re not talking about thousands and thousands of watches. We’re talking about a relatively small amount of great watches.”
Eric Ku, a high-end vintage dealer in Northern California, certainly knows the drill.
About 15 years ago, he was offered a first-of-its-kind 1996 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona “Rainbow” reference 16599 in white gold on a leather strap.
“I’ve been hunting jeweled Rolexes for a really long time, before it was a cool thing,” Ku, cofounder of the online auction site Loupe This, says. “The watch first surfaced to me around 15 years ago. It was offered to me by a dealer in the Middle East and was coming from, allegedly, a member of a royal family. At the time, the pricing was completely different than it is today. After going back and forth, I offered $130,500 and the seller wanted $136,462. I lost the watch. I was gutted. I’d been stalking the watch. But at the time, relative to the market, it didn’t make sense for me. It was a really tough time, might have been around the financial crisis. I felt confident it would come back to me, but it didn’t.
“Then, in 2012, Rolex introduced its new rainbow Daytona,” Ku says. “I had no doubt about the authenticity of the watch I’d lost out on, but seeing the new rainbow Daytona completely validated me and erased any scintilla of a doubt that I had about the watch. Fast forward a couple years: The watch was offered to me again privately, by a different person in the Middle East at a significant multiple of the original offering—let’s say in the mid six-figures. I bought it.”
In 2017, Ku sold the watch to an important collector based overseas, “a person of very high taste and connoisseurship who appreciated the rarity of that watch,” he says. The collector, by Ku’s reckoning, also appreciated the story of its journey. “Dealers and old collectors always like trading war stories,” he says. “What’s the one thing that got away and then it came back? The collector got sold on the story.”
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“It’s probably the sexiest watch of the season,” Ku says.
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The Jewel Private Residences in Surfer’s paradise are an adventure in style. Located steps from the ocean, between the prime coastal locations of Surfer’s Paradise and Broadbeach, these fully complete apartments with access to five-star resort living on absolute beachfront have been attracting prestige property buyers, bon vivants and design aficionados since they went on the market.
So much so that the 100 apartments released to the market in three stages have been snapped up for a cool $200 million; the 30 apartments in Stage Three that were released last month have totalled $60 million in sales.
It’s not hard to see why. Located in a $1.5 billion three-tower landmark district encompassing two towers dedicated to the Jewel Private Residences, as well as the five-star hotel tower The Langham, Gold Coast, these stunning apartments with their distinctive glass curtain walling system, present a unique opportunity for savvy buyers. In fact, the precinct offers the first prestige international hotel and towers with unfettered beachfront access to be built on the Gold Coast in 30 years.
Says Total Property Group managing director Adrian Parsons, “Jewel steps straight off the sand into The Langham Gold Coast’s luxurious five-star amenities, including the Lagoon Pool with swim-up bar, 26 & Sunny Café, restaurant Akoya and T’ang Court, lobby bar, and wellness facilities.”
Not that there is much reason to leave these life-style-envy-inducing homes. In addition to the unrivalled views, the residences contain state-of-the-art gourmet kitchens with stone benchtops with 60mm edges (some with large island benches and waterfall edges), stone splashbacks and top-of-the-line Miele appliances. Premium residences feature sumptuous bathrooms appointed with stone-top vanities, black glass framed walls and free-standing baths.
The building, the result of a collaboration between Oppenheim Architects and DBI, employs sophisticated facade technologies to ensure shading from sun and shelter from the wind, delivering a 5-star green star building, that is as handsome as it is sustainable. Put simply, it represents the pinnacle of luxury living on the Gold Coast—the best of the best.
A perfect fit for Robb Report, in other words. Which is why we are thrilled to be partnering with Jewel Private Residences on our Car of the Year 2024 event (COTY) being held on the Gold Coast next week. As one of our marquee events of the year, COTY is a 2-day adventure, celebrating excellence in automative design and engineering, bolstered by an exciting program of activations featuring not only the world’s top motoring marques but also some of the world’s leading luxury brands. An experience not to be missed and simply the best.
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Champagne Bollinger Just Released a Limited-Edition, James Bond–Inspired Bubbly
The Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition comes with its own carrying case and glasses.
When it comes to drinks, James Bond may be best associated with a martini—shaken, not stirred, of course. But the secret agent has been known to enjoy a glass or two of bubbly as well.
Champagne Bollinger has long been the Champagne of choice for Bond, and now the house is honouring that relationship with a special-edition bottle that commemorates the 60th anniversary of Goldfinger.
Whether you’re a Bond fan or a Champagne connoisseur, the $5,950 Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition package is meant to appeal to both sensibilities.
The star of the show is the Champagne, of course: Here, Champagne Bollinger is offering a 2007 vintage Magnum, made from hand-picked grapes and aged 17 years in the house’s cellars. Spicy aromas on the nose are contrasted with notes of fruit, brioche, and honey. The Champagne has been packaged in a bespoke Globe-Trotter Air Cabin Case and comes with four Champagne Bollinger 007 glasses in which to enjoy the bubbly. Limited to just 200 individually numbered pieces, it’s a true collector’s item.
Champagne Bollinger has enjoyed a lengthy relationship with the James Bond franchise, dating back to when Roger Moore popped the first bottle in 1973’s Live and Let Die. Since then, the two have become almost inseparable, and Champagne Bollinger is proudly being served at the very first official James Bond bar, which just opened in London. If you can’t snag the limited-edition set for yourself, you can at least imbibe in a glass of the good stuff at the 007 at Burlington Arcade.
That bar and the special Champagne Bollinger package are all part of the festivities celebrating 1964’s Goldfinger. The film and Bond’s ensuing legacy have established him as one of the biggest (fictional) names in the luxury world, with his love of expensive watches, fast cars, and fine spirits.
While it’s unlikely that many of us can channel the special agent when it comes to his escapades and hijinks, we should delight in the fact that we can embrace our inner Bond by sidling up to the 007 bar or throwing back a glass of the Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition. It’s exactly how our favorite M16 agent would want us to honour him.
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Golden Touch
Discretion is the better part of glamour at the glittering Maybourne Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles does not want for star wattage, but for years now, the city’s hotel scene has been a little lacklustre. So news that the beloved Montage hotel has been completely redone under the Maybourne brand (the British powerhouse that operates Claridge’s, The Connaught, and Berkeley Hotels in London, and the recently opened Maybourne Riviera on the Côte d’Azur) should come as a boon to Australians looking for a new Tinseltown bolthole.
Situated within Beverly Hills’ famous Golden Triangle, just north of Wilshire Boulevard and Four Season’s Beverly Wilshire, and one block from the world-renowned luxury retailers, restaurants and celeb-spotting of Rodeo Drive, The Maybourne Beverly Hills offers a chic retreat from the designer flexing at its doorstep; a rare escape in the heart of this storied enclave that flies under the radar like a cap-wearing celeb dodging the paparazzi.
Set amid the manicured, Mediterranean-style Beverly Cañon Gardens plaza, which unfolds from the hotel’s west entrance, the new incarnation of Montage Beverly Hills (55 suites and 20 private residences, each with a balcony or patio with a courtyard or city view) still evokes the grand estates of Old Hollywood while feeling like you’re in a European mainstay.
Revealing a restrained new guestroom and suite design by Bryan O’Sullivan, a blue-chip art collection and some of the most solicitous staff in town, the Maybourne speaks in a laid-back Californian accent but still holds true to the luxury touchpoints of five-star service for which one of the world’s most exclusive neighbourhoods—and hotel brands—is known.
“It’s reassuringly British when it comes to service—it’s a culture of yes,” says Linden Pride, the Australian restaurant and bar owner behind the award-winning Caffe Dante in New York and Bobbie’s, the new speakeasy opening this month below Neil Perry’s new Song Bird restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay (page 40). Pride should know; he lived at the Maybourne for almost a year while he and his partner, Nathalie Hudson, set up Dante, the stunning new restaurant and bar on the hotel’s ninth-floor rooftop. “Looking out from the roof onto lemon and olive trees, it’s easy to forget that you’re in Southern California, not Europe.”
Opened last year, Dante has quickly become one of the hottest reservations in town, luring in celebrities from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin to the entire Real Madrid soccer team. Like its sister outposts in New York (besides the Greenwich Village original, a West Village location opened in 2020), the focus here is on non-threatening antipasti and aperitivi in a produce-driven menu of fresh familiar stalwarts, with the addition of wood-fired dishes from a giant pizza oven at the heart of the room. Just as it does in New York, a negroni cart does the rounds, and each afternoon is welcomed with a martini happy hour.
It’s all fittingly Cali-chill. The only drama in the place is a striking ceiling fresco by Los Angeles artist Abel Macias, which dominates the 146-seat room. “Nathalie and I had just been to Europe when we decided to open up here,” Pride recalls, “and the Sistine Chapel blew us away. When we saw the domed ceiling in this room it was a no-brainer.”
Dante joins a string of newcomers in the area, including New York transplants Café Boulud, Marea and Cipriani. Don’t look now, but with arrivals like the Maybourne and Dante, one of the world’s stuffiest cities—yes, Beverly Hills is its own 14.8 km² metropolis—might just be entering a new golden age.
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Hibiki 40 Year Old Resets the Bar for One of Whisky’s Most Exalted Names
The legendary blender reasserts itself in the industry’s uppermost pantheon with its oldest and rarest blended release ever.
Over the last decade, whiskies from Suntory’s famed Hibiki stable have gone from a top-shelf staple to the new byword for luxury in the increasingly rarefied world of Japanese whisky. As stocks of its famed age statement blends drew ever lower, the air of exclusivity around the distillery grew and grew – something that has stuck around even as the brand’s new flagship blend, Harmony, became more readily available once more.
It’s becoming clearer, however, that Hibiki still has a few exceptional tricks up its sleeves. Twenty-one and 30-year-old age statement whiskies have released in the past few years to critical acclaim, confirming that Suntory still has some particularly rarefied output yet to unveil. Now, in the brand’s boldest move yet, a 40-year-old blend is set to hit the market in extremely limited quantities, taking Hibiki’s already lofty benchmarks of rarity and lineage to new heights.
As with Hibiki’s other blends, Suntory’s Chief Blender, Shinji Fukuyo, has spent years perfecting a blend that brings some of Japan’s oldest and finest spirits into perfect harmony – achieving a smoothness and complexity that takes the brand’s hallmark qualities to a new plane. Single malts from Yamazaki, Hakushu, and Chita all feature, having been individually aged for four decades to form a true expression of the place they were made, before making their way into the final blend.
Truly a multi-generational blend, Hibiki 40 Year Old is designed not just as an expression of the skills and expertise passed down through generations of individual distillers, but that of Fukuyo’s forebears, legendary Suntory blenders Shingo and Shinjiro Torii.
The result is a final liquid rich with sweet fresh fruit, light citrus zest, and spice, supported by a luxurious undercurrent of acacia honey and dried fruit. Each crystal bottle is adorned with a mother-of-pearl inlay and decorated with a handcrafted label from Japanese washi artist Eriko Horiki.
While age statement single malts in the four- and five-decade category have become increasingly the vogue in recent years, never before has a blended whisky been attempted with such old stock—a unique challenge for its maker.
“Behind the elegance and bloom that is typical of Hibiki, there is a sense of subduedness,
like that of an old temple, and a wabi-sabi patina due to the long aging process,” says Fukuyo. “I would like people to enjoy the pure and pure aroma that has been sharpened over the years; the tranquility of old temples and storehouses and the nostalgic warm feeling that accompanies them.”
Limited to just 400 bottles, Hibiki 40 Year Old will release on October 4th, with bottles retailing at $75,000.
Australian fans of the brand will have the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the Hibiki 40 Year Old experience, including a taste of the exalted liquid, at an exclusive event at Clare Smyth’s Oncore on October 24th, 2025. Tickets are available for $1,800 per person.
