IMAGINE that you have just paid £4 million for your apartment when your upstairs neighbour calls round to say that he wants to drill through your freshly painted ceiling to install his new kitchen. Would you be happy? Probably not.

This, however, is what happened recently in the Perry Street Building, a Richard-Meier block in New York, where celebrity buyers (including Calvin Klein, Martha Stewart and Nicole Kidman) purchased their flats as “shell and core”: unfinished space waiting to be tailored to their specifications.

For much of the 1990s shell-and-core apartments were also a staple of the London property market. Nowadays, however, if do-it-yourself is what you are after, you will have to look hard to find the raw material to experiment with. “We sold one shell recently, but it was a remarkable event. It’s now almost impossible to find a shell in London,” says Rupert des Forges, of the Belgravia estate agent Knight Frank. “

It can be difficult to get a mortgage on stripped-out flats because they’re not considered habitable, and there’s also a limited supply of buyers willing to wait a year for a property to be finished.”

One of the key reasons for the current scarcity is that the majority of buyers have never understood the building-site approach to sales. “People just can’t envisage what property shown in that state will look like finished. Most buyers, no matter how sophisticated, are buying a lifestyle,” says William Gething, of the property search company Property Vision. “Plus, if you view raw space, it always looks smaller than a property that’s been fitted out and furnished.”

Harry Handelsman, head of the developer Manhattan Loft Corporation, was one of the prime movers in the 1990s fashion for shell apartments when he popularised loft living in recession-torn London. “There was a lot of doom and gloom, a lot of repossessions, and we offered the exciting prospect of tailor-making your own space.”

Although Handelsman occasionally still sells shells, he does so only in very specific circumstances. “A couple of years ago we took this approach in a 14-unit church conversion in Notting Hill. There we felt the target audience was sufficiently creative and independent to want to work with a blank canvas. But this segment of the market has always been relatively small, and over the past decade the quality of design in mainstream development has also improved dramatically.”

At the top end of the market, niche developers are occasionally offering property in both its finished and unfinished state. Craig Rapp, head of Regime Development, recently presented two semi-detached houses in Hampstead, North London. One was kitted out by the interior designer Kelly Hoppen; the other, a concrete vacuum left entirely to the purchaser’s imagination. In this instance, the shell — offered at £3.5 million — sold quicker than its £4.25 million furnished neighbour. Candy & Candy, a developer known for its billionaire clientele, lavish finish and James Bond-style gadgetry, has found a similar enthusiasm for its 15-unit scheme in Manresa Road, Chelsea, where prices for shell apartments start at £4.75 million. “Manresa Road is now 50 per cent sold, ” says the company’s managing director, Philip Davis. “We can either work with purchasers to complete the property or they can bring in their own designers.”

But, as Rupert des Forges points out, Manresa Road is an unusual product being sold to an unusual clientele. “You can’t buy a space like it in SW7, SW1 or SW3, and these are also buyers with multiple homes who don’t have the same time urgency as the more mainstream market.” He believes that those with a creative urge but a more restricted budget may still be able to find what they are looking for if they are prepared to negotiate. “If you really want to get your hands on something to finish yourself, probably the best advice is to talk to a developer at the outset of a project — they may be willing to leave one unit unfinished.”

For those who cannot find that developer, however, it looks as if the shell apartment will remain a rare find in Britain.

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