Robb Read: When Money’s Not Enough
How scarcity informs luxury beyond cost.
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About a decade ago, with the world economy beginning to recover following the global financial meltdown, a budding art collector flew from New York to the Art Basel Miami Beach fair to buy a painting. “In my head I was the dream person, the up-and-coming collector that they want,” he recalls. “I was a decent-sized collector but not well-known. Not a banker who wants to flip. Someone who would buy as a long-term investment.”
An admirer of the hyper-realist artist Karel Funk, the collector, armed with a budget of approx. $583,000, inquired at the 303 Gallery booth about buying one of Funk’s paintings, then priced around $58,000, “but of course there was no price on display,” he says. The gallerist’s curt response: “There are some in the Whitney you can go and look at.” Recalling the dismissal today, he says, “I now know that most of the art is spoken for before the fair and that it’s a game that it’s open to the public to buy.”
The gatekeepers of the high-powered contemporary art scene are an elite unit whose mission, it seems, is to deter the general public. Of course, this zealous exclusivity is not confined to the world of art. Across many categories of luxury objects or experiences, access to the most hotly contested trophies is restricted to a select few, and the conditions of entry are about more than money. You cannot walk into a Rolex dealership, a New York power gallery or an Hermès boutique, ask for a Daytona, a Jeff Koons or a Birkin and expect to be allowed to buy it.
The shop where nothing is for sale is a well-established marketing strategy. “The notion of scarcity is a really fundamental principle in psychology,” says Kit Yarrow, PhD, a consumer psychologist and professor emerita at Golden Gate University, San Francisco. “We want what we can’t have. When we are denied, it feels like a challenge to overcome and we are more psychologically invested.” For the affluent, the desire provoked by denial is acute, says Yarrow, “because it’s boring to have anything you want. We all look for ways to bolster our egos, and for some, it is the acquisition of the unobtainable, the love of a person or a product, and in some ways products are easier.”
That rejection—and the challenge to reverse it—is part of what drives the desire. “Luxury goods resolve people’s insecurities about their place in society,” says Luca Solca, a luxury analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “I have, therefore I am. These things set us apart from the crowd and make us special, in our eyes, and our peers’ eyes.”
The aforementioned would-be Art Basel Miami Beach buyer, rather than giving up in the intervening years, says, “I have since spent millions of dollars on art, but I had a similar experience with Hauser & Wirth only last year. I went in and asked about Mark Bradford, and they laughed and said, ‘Before we’ll even consider you, send us a list of the artists you collect.’ I humoured them and sent it in, and they were like, ‘Okay, come in tomorrow.’”
From the gallerists’ perspective, this tactic is meant not as a brush-off but as a method of safeguarding their artists’ reputations. “If a collector walks in who we don’t know, yes, they need to introduce themselves [and tell us] what they have done and why,” says Marc Payot, a co-president of Hauser & Wirth. The Swiss multinational gallery, which represents Louise Bourgeois and Glenn Ligon, among other superstars, is not “a shop where you buy art like a commodity, first come first served”. Instead, the gallery is merely “the business card”. It aims to place art ultimately not with members of the public but with prestigious museums, because “the long-term success of an artist is directly dependent on the presence in institutions.” The gallery’s role, says Payot, is not so much to sell as to “put the artists we represent into the context of art history”.
In the face of this ambition, novice collectors often turn to art advisers. “We are a bridge between client and gallery,” says Suzanne Modica, cofounder of Modica Carr Art Advisory. Gallerists “are looking for an intellectual curiosity” in would-be buyers. “They want to know that the client is seeing the artist as more than just a bunch of dollar bills that are attached to the wall.”
Brett Gorvy, cofounder of the Lévy Gorvy gallery and a former international head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, explains the pecking order
for art placement: “There is definitely a hierarchy—museums, private foundations, collectors with strong affiliations to museums, then prestigious collectors who lend to museums.” Only after this illustrious roll call will more quotidian collectors be considered.
There are tricks of the trade to get your foot in the door, according to one well-connected art adviser: “If you are extremely well-off you can become a trustee at a museum, which gives you cachet.” Sitting on a museum committee also enables connections to curators. At an art fair, “if you’re seen within proximity of curators, that can have a positive impact on your access.” But museum relationships are generally predicated on the expectation that, in addition to monetary donations, at least some of the works you acquire will eventually find their way to the museum in question, as a gift or bequest.
Many serious galleries—along with some sports-car marques—include language in sales agreements prohibiting buyers from flipping the objects at auction. Watch companies do not put such bans in writing but nevertheless keep careful track. Those who disobey in any of these categories risk being blacklisted. But new pieces by in-demand artists are often priced well below the sums they could fetch under the hammer, making the practice all too tempting for some. “When there is a big gap [in price] between the primary and secondary markets, we ask clients to give us a right of first refusal,” says Payot. “We have never sued, but access will be difficult in the future. The strongest protection is the relationship, but you can’t put a relationship in a contract.”
When it comes to art, there’s only so much an artist can produce, but even in the case of manufactured luxury goods, a tight supply translates to a ranking of buyers. Sports-car marques, including Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bugatti, reward their most loyal clients with first dibs on invite-only releases of special models. David Lee, a Ferrari collector who has appeared on Jay Leno’s Garage, says that access used to be “down to who you knew at the factory,” but a new tracking system tells Ferrari “exactly what cars you have, so they know whether you’re passionate or playing the game.
I have bought every car they released in the last few years, including ones that were not so popular. That data determines that I am a top client.”
Yet even favoured clients can have their privileges taken away. In 2017, Lee, who owns 30 Ferraris, was denied the chance to buy a LaFerrari Aperta, which had a run of only 210 models. His mistake, he believes, was discussing Ferrari’s secretive selection process with the Los Angeles Times. “Ferrari had told me I was in the running, but they had not yet decided,” he explains, so he told the newspaper he had not been offered one. The way Lee tells it, the resulting headline—basically, he owns a dozen Ferraris and has loads of cash, why can’t he buy the elusive $3.1-million LaFerrari Aperta?—didn’t go down well at Ferrari HQ.
“They read it over in Italy and thought I was using the media to pressure them to give me a car,” Lee says. “So for a few months we were on shaky ground. My relationship with Ferrari is very important, so it was really upsetting to me. They did not offer me a car.”
Quest for the Rolex Daytona: A Cautionary Tale
The hunt for a Rolex Daytona is the watch collector’s equivalent of the quest to find the Holy Grail. Despite their presence at major auctions, Daytonas remain near-impossible to find outside the secondary market. Though they’re relatively inexpensive by the standards of luxury watches—an entry-level steel-and-gold version retails for approx. $25,000—the Daytona’s mystique remains baffling.
I embarked on a mission to a Rolex boutique on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to see what the brush-off would be when I tried to buy the elusive model.
“I’m here to buy a Rolex,” I proclaimed to the doorman, who ushered me into a side room and into the care of a sales associate. I’ll call him James.
“I need to buy a birthday present for my husband, and I don’t know what to get,” I confided in James, who directed me toward a case containing Submariner watches. A steel-and-gold model would cost about $24,000, he said.
“I hear the Daytona is a good one,” I ventured. James looked a little sceptical. “We don’t have any in the store,” he said. “They’re very rare, and they all go to special clients.”
“Wow, do you have to go all the way to Switzerland to get one?”
“It’s even worse there,” he said. “You can’t just let anyone walk in and buy one. And that’s the right way to do things. Imagine if you saw someone wearing one and you asked where they got it and they said they walked in here and just picked one up. How would that make you feel if you’d been buying watches from us for years and had never got one?”
“Bad?”
“You need to put blood, sweat and tears into forming a relationship with the brand. You need to be a really loyal customer, and then we see it as a reward. So I can get you whatever you want, but it has to be realistic and not a Daytona.”
I left empty-handed but pleasingly reassured that money, liberally and strategically deployed, would do. LA marque’s signature red and has 1.1 million followers—says the relationship has since been repaired, and he is expecting delivery on five Ferraris this year.
The year before Lee’s dust-up, Preston Henn, an American flea-market mogul and two-time 24 Hours of Daytona winner, went so far as to sue Ferrari for damages, alleging the marque told his friends he was rejected because he was “not qualified” to buy a limited-release LaFerrari Spider. His qualifications were, according to court papers, the 18 Ferraris he had owned and the $1.46 million cheques he had mailed to Ferrari’s then-chairman, Sergio Marchionne (who had returned it). Henn accused the marque of “harming [his] reputation in the universe of Ferrari aficionados” but dropped the suit shortly before his death in April 2017.
Ferrari, which declined to comment about its specific allocation policies or criteria, is perhaps the best example of a company that successfully inspires in its devotees feelings not only of admiration but of identity. Lee, who is chairman of Hing Wa Lee, a watch-and-jewellery business outside Los Angeles, recognises the status anxiety in his Rolex customers: “For the client, it becomes an identity crisis. Where do they fit? How do they compare in this world? If they are able to get these very limited products, it shows they are considered to be at a certain level.”
Ferrari does not hide the fact that it deliberately keeps its production low to ensure demand is never satisfied. “The company was founded on one simple principle,” Marchionne told CNBC in 2015. “You only produce one car less than the demand for the vehicle.” To meet demand, he said, would “destroy the exclusivity of the brand”.
Yet Ferrari’s honesty about its artificially induced scarcity has not diminished the brand’s allure to its collectors, such as Barry Beck, cofounder of Bluemercury, the luxury beauty retailer. “With Ferrari, it has never been about money,” says Beck, who owns three Ferraris and collects Patek Philippe watches. “Many who have had the privilege to drive these cars or wear these timepieces have become devout, evangelical disciples and the brands’ best marketers.”
Similarly, even though the fabled waiting list for Hermès Birkin bags was exposed as a fiction by Michael Tonello in his 2008 memoir, Bringing Home the Birkin, the ardor of the brand’s fans has not dimmed. Tonello would ask for Birkin bags while shopping for scarves to flip on eBay and says the Hermès sales associates would tell him, “There’s a list, and there might even be a waiting list to get on the waiting list.”
Yet one day, after spending a large amount in an Hermès store, Tonello was offered a Birkin. “I realised that there was no waiting list,” Tonello tells Robb Report. He promptly switched to flipping Birkins. “They all have Birkin bags in the back. A Birkin is a reward for being a good customer. They don’t care who you are. You just have to spend money, and you have to know the formula.”
The same is true, he says, of watches: “Rolex won’t sell you a Daytona until you’ve spent a certain amount on other watches. Then you qualify for the private sales. It’s all a game.” Patek Philippe adds another layer, requiring clients to submit a formal application for special models. Beck recalls being told that a certain watch was “an application piece” (he initially thought this term had something to do with applied enamel). He included a Forbes profile to “grease the wheels” which, he says, ensured “near-immediate approval”.
Michael Hickcox, an avid watch collector and CEO of executive search company Expedition Partners, says that Patek Philippe allocates lesser models to new customers. “They want to hook you,” Hickcox explains. “People who try to go to the top straight away, they tend to be the ones who exit the hobby soon afterwards. They got what they want. They don’t spend 15 years saying, ‘I can’t wait until I have this one thing.’ Patek Philippe is going for the person who spends millions on watches.”
The flipping ban is an additional burden, particularly when sought-after watches from several prestigious makers can command twice their original prices. “I knew a dealer who sold a special watch [for a client] and that brand found out,” says Hickcox, adding that the dealer told him how the brand, in an apparent attempt to uncover the culprit, invited everyone who had bought the watch to a dinner. “The client had to call the dealer and ask to borrow it back. He did and wore it to the dinner, and the folks from the watch company never knew.”
Inside the inner circle, competitiveness does not diminish; it just becomes less purely financial and more about connections. At the dinners held by watch brands, executives toast their clients, who in turn make their cases for yet more coveted purchases. According to one watch-industry insider, the North American president of a renowned watch brand told the insider that at one such dinner he turned down a well-known entrepreneur’s plea to buy a special piece, even though the man had bought several other models in order to qualify. Only after the entrepreneur offered to speak at the graduation of the executive’s son did he relent.
Sometimes the dinners and events become as coveted, maybe even more so, than the items themselves. Lionel Geneste, a luxury-goods consultant, says the world of high jewellery is now dominated by an arms race of ever-ritzier events. “At the Paris shows Chanel did a dinner, Dior was at Versailles, Dolce & Gabbana now bring clients twice a year to Milan and Capri, Bulgari flies everyone to Rome and Van Cleef goes to the South of France,” he says. “It’s not that people are competing to be allowed to buy jewellery—they buy in order to be invited to these events.”
Jewellery produced by fashion houses is easy to acquire because it does not hold its value, says Fiona Druckenmiller, founder of FD Gallery, a Manhattan jewellery boutique. The same is true of contemporary pieces by Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari and Cartier, she says. Since they were acquired by large public companies, “you can get anything if you can afford it.”
Druckenmiller specialises in work by prestigious independent designers such as Hemmerle, Viren Bhagat and Joel Arthur Rosenthal, known as JAR, whose unique creations are much more difficult to obtain. To buy from these designers, she says, “it makes a difference if they like you.
This is a relationship in the true sense of the word, not just one based on money spent on collecting.”
With JAR, the only living jeweller to have had a solo show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (in 2013), “it’s hard to get in the door to begin with. You need an introduction,” Druckenmiller says. “And even then, if he feels like the woman is not a good ambassador for his pieces, he will say, ‘Nothing is available.’”
Independent watchmakers are similarly discriminating, selling only to collectors they deem worthy. “It’s somewhat a snob thing,” says Michael Hickcox, citing Philippe Dufour, Kari Voutilainen and Roger W. Smith, the latter of whom makes only 12 pieces a year. “You have to pay a £3,000 (AU$5,400) deposit to have the option to get on the waiting list. Several years later you get an e-mail saying, ‘Congratulations, you’re now in our production queue.’ You are not told what the price will be.”
Such treatment is bound to unnerve people unaccustomed to feeling powerless. A similar sensation has struck countless souls forced to face Manhattan’s most fastidious co-op boards, whose probing can be invasive and whose decision-making is shrouded in secrecy. Although the rise of Billionaire’s Row interview-free apartments has tempered some of the pickiness, for “old-school fancy buildings” a buyer has to have the right sort of money, says Lisa Chajet, a second-generation broker at New York’s Warburg Realty. Boards will want to know, “Did they make their money at Goldman or in casinos?” she says. Most favoured is “old money, a family trust that’s reputable and solid”. And if you come with a trail of paparazzi (Madonna) or a whiff of scandal (Richard Nixon), you’re probably better off bidding on a new apartment or a single-family townhouse. Once a co-op contract has been signed, Chajet’s approach is to get hold of the board list and call anyone who might have a connection with her buyer: “Maybe they both went to Yale, or they’re partners at law firms.” The most popular applicants? Doctors. “They don’t have the money that hedge-fund people have,” says Chajet, “but they have prestige.”
The preference for old money—and a WASPy family tree—is also alive and kicking in the notoriously exclusive world of private clubs in the Hamptons. While no one talks on the record for fear of being blackballed, insiders say the membership of several high-profile clubs in the enclave is largely comprised of elderly representatives of formerly illustrious Protestant families, who want to keep it that way. Membership is hereditary, according to those in the know; non-WASP new members are admitted rarely, and only in return for large donations to the upkeep of the club in question.
For many people, the effort required to obtain a supposedly exclusive object, be it an apartment or a wristwatch, is worth it, says Tonello, because it signifies success. “If you keep hearing about how hard something is to get, and how even famous people can’t get it, and then you get it, you feel like you are a master of the universe. I was in an elevator with a woman carrying a Birkin, and all these other women got in and saw her Birkin, and I could see them wonder who she was. She must be someone, a VIP? With guys, it’s the same with a watch. They send secret subliminal messages to others in the know. It says, I have arrived.”
Remember that art collector on a quest for a Karel Funk painting? The same gallery that rebuffed him at Art Basel Miami Beach finally offered him one several years later, for approx. $80,000. “I bought it,” he says. “Begrudgingly.”
This piece is from our new Design Issue – on sale now. Get your copy or subscribe here, or stay up to speed with the Robb Report weekly newsletter.
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This Collection of Lavish Private Estates Is Ready for Your Next European Vacation
From a contemporary château on the French Riviera to a palazzo on the shores of Lake Como.
Forget a resort. On your next European jaunt, you’ll have a slew of stylish estates where you can rest your head.
Luxury travel company Red Savannah just unveiled its Ultimate Estates collection, an assembly of private vacation rentals scattered across Italy, France, Greece, and Spain, to name a few. The 21 properties essentially function as a five-star hotel, with the added bonus of not having to share your space.
Want to stay in an English manor in the Cotswolds? How about a beach club-inspired villa in Ibiza? You can expect to find a minimum of six bedrooms no matter the booking, plus epic amenities like spas, private boats, gyms, tennis courts, wine cellars, and home movie theaters. In addition, each reservation comes with a full team of staff including chefs and a 24/7 concierge contact.
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“These highly experienced travel specialists act as personal travel assistants to organize bespoke itineraries, secure one-of-a-kind experiences, and ensure a flawless stay,” Red Savannah said in a statement. “Past arrangements have included delivering a Steinway grand piano by helicopter to Villa La Cassinella and arranging for a soprano from Milan’s La Scala to serenade guests during dinner on a wisteria-draped terrace overlooking Lake Como.”
For bigger parties and a glitzy beach-club vibe, look no further than the 10-bed Villa Xi on Ibiza. At the property—which is just down the road from the iconic Blue Marlin on Cala Jondal—you and your family can tuck your toes in a sandy bar area nestled underneath pine trees and, by night, hang by the palm-shaded Jacuzzi. The villa’s generous 10 acres offer up plenty of opportunities to stay active, from playing volleyball to swimming in the over-80-foot pool. The villa itself was recently completed in 2017 and is decked out with modern interiors that merge Scandinavian and Indonesian designs: Think en-suite bedrooms with Balinese-style showers and tropical shrubs.
Nestled in the heart of the French Riviera on the Cap d’Antibes, Red Savannah’s Domaine de la Garoupe is perfect for smaller groups perhaps seeking a respite from the famous Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. The château has nine total bedrooms, split between a main house (known as La Palombière) and two separate dwellings dubbed La Maison du Cap and La Petite Palombière. Altogether, the abode can sleep up to 18 guests and packs a ton of perks such as a private spa, a salon for hair and nail treatments, a gym, a wine cellar, and a 15-seat cinema. La Palombière acts as the property’s hub with a marble-clad kitchen, a drawing room overlooking the garden, and an outdoor swimming pool.
Red Savannah
If you’re looking for something with say, a tropical flair, the Ultimate Estates collection includes the Caribbean, too. There’s a massive 12-suite spread in Barbados planted right on the beach on the island’s northwest coast. The Great House, as it’s known, can sleep up to 30 people between its main digs, the Hillaby House, and two cottages. However, you’ll most likely spend a lot of time outdoors enjoying the alfresco perks. Chief among them is a beach bar with a pizza oven, a 33-foot motorboat, kayaks, and water toys.
As for any non-estate escapes, Red Savannah’s got you covered there, too. One of its newest itineraries will let you explore Marrakech just like Yves Saint Laurent, or you can opt for a litany of literary-themed activities in the brand’s In the Footsteps of the Great Detectives series.
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The 8 Best Watches of the U.S. Open, From Jannik Sinner’s Rolex to Serena Williams’s Audemars Piguet
From Federer’s Rolex Le Mans Daytona in Yellow Gold to Pegula’s De Bethune DB28XS Purple Rain, players past and present brought their A-game to the final Grand Slam of 2024.
Watches and tennis are a match made in heaven. It likely comes as no surprise that players past and present would have some major wrist game at the Grand Slams. Each year, the U.S. Open closes out the season with a bang, and everyone seems to pull out all the stops for the occasion. Fans have set a new record booking the infamous suites (which can cost up to $149,000), and luxury brands like Tiffany & Co. have firmly planted their presence on the grounds with pop-up activations. As a major sponsor, Rolex, of course, is omnipresent. Come August, Flushing Meadows is the place to see and be seen, and with the close ties between timepieces and tennis, the watch spotting never fails to disappoint on and off the court. Here are eight of the coolest watches we’ve seen at the 2024 U.S. Open.
Roger Federer in a Rolex Le Mans Daytona in Yellow Gold
Last year, Rolex dropped a watch that made major waves. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the beloved Daytona and the 100th anniversary of the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, the Crown unveiled a special edition model: the Cosmograph Daytona Celebrating 100 Years of Speed. Just shy of a year after its debut, Rolex announced it’d be discontinuing the model at Watches & Wonders 2024, while quietly replacing it with a yellow gold version. This illusive yellow-gold replacement has left much to the imagination, barring some texted contraband images we saw at Watches and Wonders in April, but now it’s plain as day. At the quarterfinal matches, Tennis legend and longtime Rolex collector Roger Federer was spotted wearing the coveted model.
Jessica Pegula in a De Bethune DB28XS Purple Rain
Number six ranked Jessica Pegula has held her own for the U.S.A in this year’s U.S. Open. The New York native has made it to the quarterfinals at Flushing Meadows for the second time in her career but is still yet to land a Grand Slam win. Off the court, it’s yet to be seen how deep Pegula’s watch collection goes, but one thing is for certain: She has a particular affinity for one brand, and it shows the young player has interesting taste in timepieces. Her brand of choice? De Bethune. Pegula has been spotted wearing various models from the brand, including the DB28xs Starry Seas. However, this year, she’s been rocking the DB28XS Purple Rain that debuted at Watches & Wonders earlier this spring.
Jannik Sinner in a Rolex Submariner Date
With major upsets for Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic early on in the tournament, this year’s U.S. Open is Jannik Sinner’s to win. The young Italian player is currently ranked number one in the world ahead of Djokovic, Alcaraz, and Alexander Zverevs. Luckily for Sinner, he has Rolex on his side. At last year’s U.S. Open, Coco Gauff won in women’s singles, proudly accepting her trophy with the discontinued Rolex ‘Red Grape’ on her wrist, so perhaps the luck will wear off on Jannik. Sinner has been a Rolex ambassador since 2020, and his current model of choice is a classic two-tone Submariner Date with a blue dial.
Andrey Rublev in a Bulgari Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Skeleton Ceramic
Russian tennis pro Andrey Rublev was knocked out of this year’s U.S. Open in the round of 16 by the Bulgarian player Grigor Dimitrov, who later went on to lose to American tennis star Frances Tiafoe in the quarterfinals. Despite the upset, Rublev came to the tournament with a major wrist flex. Back in 2021, Rublev became Bulgari’s first-ever tennis ambassador, and since then we’ve seen him sport a number of models from the Roman Maison. For this year’s Grand Slam at Flushing Meadows, he opted for a pretty unique iteration from one of Bulgari’s most beloved collections. In the past decade, the brand has become synonymous with its Octo Finissimo line thanks to models shattering a whopping nine world records. Withing the collection, Rublev chose a ceramic version with a skeletonized dial and a tourbillon.
Tommy Paul in a De Bethune DB28XS Starry Seas
Who knew that De Bethune’s unconventional designs would be so popular among tennis pros? American player Tommy Paul became an ambassador for the brand just last year, with the pair announcing their official partnership during the 2023 Wimbledon tournament. Paul got knocked out by number one ranked Sinner in the round of 16 at this year’s U.S. Open, but he did so in style, of course, rocking a model from De Bethune. The DB28XS Starry Seas appears to be one of his particular favorites, and for good reason. When the model debuted last spring, it marked the world’s first random guilloche pattern along with new sweet-spot sizing at 39 mm.
Naomi Osaka in a TAG Heuer Aquaracer Limited Edition Naomi Osaka
Like Alcaraz and Djokovic, the young Japanese tennis pro Naomi Osaka was upset in an early round at this year’s U.S. Open. Despite her run being short lived, she still had a chance to put her collaboratively designed timepiece on full display. The four-time Grand Slam winner has been a TAG Heuer ambassador since 2021. A year later, she partnered with the brand to co-design her own watch, resulting in the TAG Heuer Aquaracer Limited Edition Naomi Osaka. We know green dials have continued to be all the rage the past few years, and Osaka was early to catch on to the trend, which started gaining traction three years ago. For the customized Aquaracer bearing her name, she chose light green for the dial and a darker green for the rubber strap.
Donna Vekic in a F.P. Journe Elegante 40
Croatian tennis pro Donna Vekic may be a lesser known player on the circuit. Back in 2019, she notched her career-high singles ranking just cracking the top 20 in at number 19. That same year, she made it to the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open. While she wasn’t as successful at this year’s tournament, losing to the Chinese player Zheng Qinwen in the round of 16, she certainly took her defeat in style. We’ve yet to see the full breath of Vekic’s watch collection, or perhaps she’s simply devoted to one brand—but a killer brand at that. She’s been spotted on countless occasions on and off the court wearing every color of the F.P. Journe Elegante 40 under the rainbow. At Flushing Meadows this year, she opted for the gorgeous turquoise blue version.
Serena Williams in an Audemars Piguet Code 11.59 Blue Tourbillon
Like Federer, Serena Williams has been enjoying this year’s U.S. Open from the sidelines, cheering on the current players. It’s no secret Williams is a longtime ambassador and fan of Audemars Piguet, sporting countless models over the years from the tennis court to the red carpet and beyond. The former number one player and 23-time Grand Slam winner never ceases to keep us on our toes with which model from AP she’ll choose, sometimes opting for an ultra-sporty look and other times rocking a fully blinged out gem-set model. In the stands at Flushing Meadows, Williams chose the Code 11.59 Blue Tourbillon. The model came in 2022 featuring a fully blued-out design, from the ceramic mid-case to the hand-wound, open worked caliber 2948.
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Rolls-Royce Debuted the New Phantom Scintilla at Monterey Car Week. Here’s Everything We Know.
Limited to 10 examples, each car has an interior defined by “painting with thread,” and a rumored price of around $2.6 million.
Visitors to the fabled Louvre Museum in the heart of Paris might remember an exquisite marble sculpture standing proud at the top of the main Daru staircase. Named the Winged Victory of Samothrace, this eight-foot-tall headless goddess—with gossamer wings—dates to 190 B.C.
What has it got to do with Rolls-Royce’s new Phantom Scintilla Private Collection limousine, unveiled during this year’s Monterey Car Week? A lot, in fact. Rewind to 1910 and Rolls-Royce’s managing director at the time, Claude Johnson, who reportedly commissioned well-known sculptor Charles Sykes to create a hood ornament to define the new Rolls-Royce brand. Apparently, Johnson had seen the statue during a visit to the Louvre and fell in love with it.
While a change in direction saw Sykes create the Spirit of Ecstasy, inspired by Johnson’s former secretary, English actress and model Eleanor Thornton, the Louvre statue was always considered by Goodwood to be the original inspiration for its now iconic emblem.
So, when Rolls-Royce designers looked for a muse for a 10-car, Phantom-based Private Collection series to be called Scintilla—derived from the Latin word for “spark”—the marque went back to the Winged Victory of Samothrace statue and its Mediterranean roots.
You see that influence in the car’s Spirit of Ecstasy figurine which, for the first time, features a translucent white, marble-like ceramic coating. It also carries over in the car’s two-tone paintwork—Andalusian White for the upper body, and powdery Thracian Blue, inspired by the color of the Med, for the lower section. A subtle metallic flake in the paintwork is said to mimic the sparkle of sunlight off the water.
Yet as with most bespoke and special-edition Phantoms, it’s the interior where Rolls-Royce craftsmanship is truly exhibited. In this case, the theme is exquisite embroidery or, as the automaker calls it, “painting with thread.”
For Scintilla, the embroidery work involves over 850,000 individual stitches. And at night, illuminated perforations in the material give the doors a wave-like glow. In Phantom tradition, there’s a Starlight Headliner in the roof, but here, more than 1,500 fiber-optic illuminations twinkle in sequence to mimic silk billowing in a breeze.
The centerpiece of the interior is the Phantom’s dashboard gallery ahead of the front-seat passenger. Named “Celestial Pulse,” it comprises seven metal ribbons, each individually milled from solid aluminum and given the same finely grained ceramic finish as the Scintilla’s Spirit of Ecstasy.
Rolls-Royce will build only 10 examples of the Phantom Scintilla, which had its public debut at the Quail, a Motorsports Gathering on August 16. Of that already small number, three will come to North America and, like the other seven, have already been sold. While there’s no official word on pricing, the figure $3.8 million has been reported.
“With every collection, we aim to tell the story of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and provoke our clients’ imagination, letting them know our Bespoke designers’ artistry is greater than they can envision,” stated Martin Fritsches, president of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars for the Americas, when asked for a comment by Robb Report. “We can’t think of a better way to tell this story than through the history of our idol, the Spirit of Ecstasy.”
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10/09/2024
This Speedy 70-Foot Power Catamaran Is Designed to Cut Through Rough Waters
The 70-foot T-2000 Voyager can hit 60 mph in flat conditions, and then take waves up to 30 feet.
Back in April, Storm Kathleen slammed into the west coast of Ireland as a fearsome Force 10 gale, packing 112 kph winds and 15-foot waves. While locals sandbagged their homes and prepared for the worst, Frank Kowalski decided it was a swell day for a boat ride.
As owner of Safehaven Marine in County Cork, he’d just launched his brand-new, 70-foot T-2000 Voyager all-weather power catamaran. What Kathleen offered was a chance to put the new super-cat through its paces.
“We knew from scale-model tests that she should be able to tackle waves of more than 65 feet high,” Kowalski tells Robb Report. “But you never know until you’re out there. In the height of the storm, she just shrugged off the waves and weather and performed flawlessly.”
Evolved from Safehaven’s 75-foot XVS20 monohull launched in 2018, Kowalski used his expertise in building commercial, work-boat power catamarans to design the twin-hulled T-2000 Voyager to offer speed with stability.
“The stability in beam seas is what’s key here,” he says. “While we were out recently in a Force 8 with 40-plus knot winds and 12-foot seas, we were able to stop and leave the boat to drift while we retrieved a drone. It just took the waves on the beam with ease. In a monohull, it would have been rolling so badly you couldn’t have stood on the deck.”
Then there’s the sheer velocity that comes with twin, scalpel-thin hulls slicing through waves. With the T-2000’s pair of 1,550 hp MAN V12 diesels driving France Helices SD5 surface drives, the Safehaven can hit a top speed of 91 kph.
“It’s just the most amazing sight, standing on the stern, watching these huge roostertails behind,” Kowalski adds. “We’ve also incorporated retracting swim platforms so you can see the props spinning on the surface, plus valved exhausts that switch between silenced and straight-through. The noise from those V12s is sensational.”
While Safehaven has been building its Wildcat range of 40-, 53-, and 60-foot power cats for everything from oil-rig support, crew transfer, and even as a military cruiser for Britain’s Royal Navy, they were always pure, no-frills work boats. With this new T-2000, Kowalski is looking to appeal to private buyers searching for something a little different.
His hull No. 1 demonstrator boat has all-diamond-quilted marine leather, well-finished cabinetry, colored LED lighting, and below-deck accommodations for six in three cabins. Hull No. 2—already sold and due for completion in the next 18 months—will up the luxury factor.
“It’s going to a client in the Middle East who plans to use it for just himself and his wife,” says Kowalski. The client has specified a full-width owner’s suite with a central, king-size bed and oversized his-and-hers bathrooms and closets in each hull. “He also wants to go fast—very fast,” Kowalski continues. “So we’ll install twin 2,000 hp MAN V12s, again with surface drives, and a central hydrofoil to reduce drag. The plan is for it to hit a top speed in excess of 100 kph.”
The new T-2000 is also designed to go the distance. With the 10,977 kilogram tanks, it has a range of more than 1,000 nautical miles at 55.2 kph, and 1,700 nautical miles at 28 kph. Throttle back to 19 kph and range increases to 3,000-plus nautical miles.
Much of this is down to the yacht’s symmetrical, semi-wave-piercing hulls, made of a carbon-fibre-composite construction, with inverted lower bow sections and a double-chine arrangement that projects spray clear of the boat. The hydrofoil in mid position also means that, at speed in calmish seas, the T-2000 rides with half its hull length out of the water.
To eliminate waves slamming into the bridge deck windshield, Kowalski moved the pilothouse farther back. It also makes for a sleeker profile, giving the T-2000 the look of a single-hull sportsyacht.
As for creature comforts, the main, open-plan salon features an L-shaped Corian-topped galley, with a U-shaped dinette opposite. To enjoy the action, there are bucket-style, shock-absorbing seats for the captain and copilot, a wraparound sofa on the port side, and a single bucket seat to starboard.
The entire helm area gets flooded with light courtesy of the four-panel, angled windshield and quartet of fixed skylights above. To see the boat’s hydrofoil in action, the bridge has a glass panel in the floor that’s also designed for viewing marine life below at night. Most of the windows have half-inch-thick toughened panels to shrug off cascading water.
In finer weather than typically found on coastal Ireland, the T-2000 has a small flybridge with a helm station and sun-lounge area up top, plus a covered stern cockpit with sofas and table for alfresco dining.
This storm-tested, metallic-red demonstrator is available for around $5 million.
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10/09/2024
Six Senses Are Suddenly Everywhere. Inside the Luxury Resort’s Growing Global Empire
With 26 properties now open, another 43 to come, and the U.S. square in its sights, the rapidly growing wellness-focused resort and hotel brand is now asking the hard questions
If someone hit you in the head (hard) just before the pandemic, and you’re only waking up now, in the middle of 2024, you’ll have noticed some changes. For instance, the global proliferation of Six Senses hotels and resorts.
Once a relatively quiet group of wellness-focused Asian resorts for in-the-know Europeans, Six Senses is now in the midst of a breakneck opening spree with the U.S. square in its sights. Since 2019—when hotel giant IHG dropped $440 million in cash to acquire the operator’s then 16 hotels and resorts from private equity group Pegasus Capital Advisors—it’s grown to 26 urban hotels and destination resorts in 21 countries across four continents. (Its Vana resort in India is one of Robb Report‘s 50 best luxury hotels in the world).
Blink again and that number may have doubled. By 2026, Six Senses, now the flagship brand of IHG’s luxury and lifestyle portfolio, hopes to have a shingle hanging in London, Bangkok, Dubai, Lisbon, Napa, and Tel Aviv. There are currently 43 Six Senses in the pipeline, which will extend Six Senses footprint from the Carolinas to Victoria Falls. Many of those new properties will come packed with branded residences.
So is Six Senses trying to conquer the world via ayurvedic medicine, longevity spa treatments, and mindfulness exercises?
“It’s been a hell of a ride,” admits CEO Neil Jacobs. “But the answer is no, and we have a real point of view on that.”
More on that point of view momentarily, but it’s worth pausing to note that despite his protestations, Jacobs comes to Six Senses with 14 years of experience with a hotel group that is arguable much more overtly interested in turning planet Earth into one massive 5-star hotel lobby: namely, the Four Seasons. As senior vice president of operations for the Four Seasons’s Asia Pacific region, he witnessed the company expand from roughly two dozen hotels into the 130-ish-address, Bill Gates– and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal–owned leviathan of luxury it is today. The Four Seasons’s stated goal is 200 hotels. But Jacobs tells Robb Report it’s neither his or IHG’s intention to turn Six Senses into the Michael Kors of opulent wellness resorts.
“We think less is more,” he says of that aforementioned point of view. “Our competitors are all about growth. With Six Senses the conversation is very much the opposite of that. You’ve got to be really careful about what you do and where you go. I mean, we started with eight resorts in 2012. Then there were 11, and we got rid of two or three. Today, there are 26. So we’ve only opened 18 in nearly 12 years, really.”
Still, the Bangkok-based company is hurtling toward 60-plus properties, a number Jacobs says he is “comfortable” with. What happens beyond that is stickier.
“We have four projects in Italy. We could do another five, but why?” says Jacobs. “Instead, let’s move to another country and spread, rather than just inundate the brand in one country, even though there’s places to do it. It’s a continual argument internally. We have some great places coming to Italy, but we don’t have Venice. So then my team says, ‘If we have a Venice deal, are you going to say, ‘Don’t do it?’ Good question. But the answer is, ‘maybe.’”
Whether it’s Six Senses, the Four Seasons, or Auberge (another brand that has seen a similarly rapid expansion), the answer to the question “When does quantity extinguish the spark of quality?” is worth at least a billion. But it’s also a problem that highlights the welcome fact that, despite the current slump, “luxury” is winning; it may have already won.
From fashion to travel, a growing share of businesses have repositioned themselves to serve the high-end consumer, as growing global wealth supports superior margins realized through the relative simplicity of a luxury rebrand. The affordable family resort of yesterday becomes the aspirational seaside playpen of today. As long as demand for luxury everything is here, deep-pocketed hotel groups will grow to meet it.
At the same time, the success of “luxury” creates a clear existential dilemma: If luxury becomes the standard setting, it is by definition no longer an indulgence, no longer a luxury. And as luxury becomes more gray and undifferentiated, the vague, eye-of-the-beholder quality that was once its strength, is now its liability.
It’s a problem that Jacobs feels that Six Senses was uniquely designed to address.
“That sixth sense in our name, we see it as intuition,” he says. “It’s interesting because one of our initiatives for this year in wellness is spiritual wellness. In the past, we’ve done a lot of yoga, we’ve done a lot of meditation, but we haven’t done a lot of overtly spiritual programs. We think the time is right.”
Those programs serving up, non-religious, lightly-woo spirituality on a silver platter roll out later this year and offer a key differentiator for the brand’s fastest growing customer base: Americans.
“Back in 2012, it was predominately a European customer, I’d say 85 percent,” says Jacobs. “There was no business coming from the U.S. Today, the U.S. is our number market, even though we don’t have anything open in the U.S.”
It’s not for lack of trying. Six Senses planned to open in Manhattan along the High Line in a doomed Bjarke Ingles–designed tower that was crushed by a Gambino crime family construction bribery scandal and the subsequent bankruptcy of its developer. Six Senses has since found a new site on 23rd St. between Seventh and Eighth Aves. in Chelsea, but is at least three years out.
It’s having a better, if not altogether easier, time with the 236-acre farm in Hudson Valley in Upstate New York. The site of a failed “secret hotel” project, Six Senses snatched up the land for $20.2 million in 2022, making it some of the only real estate the brand owns (as with many brands, outside investors typically carry the deeds). Although it would be the first five-star flag in the region, the project has faced community opposition that could scuttle yet another attempt to create a footprint in the U.S.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Del LaMagna, whose property shares a border with the site, told the Hudson Valley Pilot. “[IHG] decided they wanted to be here, they started hiring good local people to figure it out, but this whole idea of exclusive resorts for rich people just doesn’t work up here.”
That’s a matter of opinion, but Six Senses plans for the U.S. extend far beyond the town of Clinton. Besides urban hotels in New York, L.A., and Miami, it will open a series of resorts, starting with a 500-acre estate on the edge of Napa and a multi-island project off the coast of South Carolina spanning Hilton Head, Daufuskie, and Bay Point. The gargantuan scale of those properties will eventually facilitate the festivals and retreats that the brand has been recently investing in.
“It’s a lot of yoga, a lot of spirituality, a lot of fun, a dance, a lot of movement,” he says. “Those kinds of festivals resonate with people.”
So if you’re just waking up, welcome to a world where Six Senses is everywhere all at once. But Jacobs hopes that by selecting “extraordinary properties” and by “demonstrating our values in a highly meaningful way” that the resorts will fit into the ecosystem like redwoods in a pine forest. Call it a sixth sense.
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10/09/2024
