We live in unapologetically narcissistic times, when image is everything and men are every bit as preening, vain and body- conscious as women. Actually, I never believed all that until I heard Nick Candy, one half of the fuel-injected property-developing partnership Candy & Candy, explaining his design team’s latest toy, an ingenious 360-degree mirror. At first glance it looks like an ordinary full-length mirror, but it is really a person-sized video screen with a time-delay function. If you stand with your back to it for a second and spin around again, you’ll meet a picture of your rear view in the mirror, head-on, so to speak. This way — at a substantial premium, mind — the eternal “Does my bum look big in this?” question can be answered by the derrière’s owner in the privacy of his own walk-in wardrobe. And they used to say cocaine was God’s way of telling you that you were making too much money.
The mirror is just one of the money-no-object treats offered by Nick (smooth and bullish) and Christian (taciturn, dry and introvert) Candy. If you have a few million to spare (preferably £20m, since you’re asking), the Candys will design a life for you. They will find you one of their “lateral living” luxury properties, fill the wardrobes with Savile Row, put crystal glasses in the cabinets, install your wife’s “fur fridge”, in which her collection of minks and silver foxes can be kept at the correct temperature, and provide all the walnut wood, Perspex furnishings and state-of-the-art HD gizmos in-between. “Nobody knows the habits and the lifestyles of the super-rich like we do,” says Nick, who claims he can pick up the phone to 20% of the world’s 200 wealthiest people, a Rolodex of 40 billionaires. “If you want an infinity pool floating on the back of your luxury yacht, we can do that for you too.” That is a dizzyingly luxurious idea they are already developing, by the way. “Our clients are rich but extremely short on time. We just try to make their lives easier, with less hassle.”
They are undeniably an impressive outfit, the Candy brothers. They work with the world’s richest investors, the scale of their ambition is Dubai-sized, their budgets are oligarchic and their confidence is Hollywood standard. And, both unmarried and still under the age of 34, they remain unencumbered by cynicism or self-doubt. They are freakishly close. As tax exiles who carefully divide their time between Monaco and London. They live together on a yacht when in the south of France; they holiday together (Portofino, St Tropez, Ibiza); and, back in London, although they live separately (Nick lives with his interior-designer girlfriend, Brigitta Spinocchia), they share an office, their desks only a few feet apart. They work together as tightly as two coats of paint. “I miss Christian when he is away,” Nick says. “He’s in Monaco at the moment, but I have already spoken to him 30 times this morning.” With little time for the party scene, they are classic examples of the cash-rich, time-poor elite they cater to, often working up to 18 hours a day.
At the moment, they are particularly excited about their four-tower, 88-apartment, Richard Rogers Partnership-designed One Hyde Park building at the former Bowater House, Knightsbridge. “This is our biggest project yet,” Nick says. “It will be the world’s best residential building. We have sourced the best of everything in the world and made it even better. There will be a spa, a squash court, a private wine-tasting facility, even.” The car parks and approach drives at One Hyde Park, it should be noted, will be equipped with underfloor heating, just so one’s Maybach tyres don’t get a nasty chill. “The idea that people prefer to live in grand listed buildings has all gone,” Nick says dismissively. “If you live in, say, Eaton Square, you can’t get underground parking, you can’t fit proper air conditioning. It’s like having a vintage Ferrari. It’s a beautiful thing, but it comes with a host of problems. A new Ferrari looks beautiful and runs like a dream.”
Making One Hyde Park the Ferrari Enzo of luxury residences has turned out to be a gargantuan undertaking. “We will be moving the Knightsbridge London Underground station, we will be moving Edinburgh Gate (one of the entrances to Hyde Park) completely and we will be rerouting the traffic system,” Nick says. They also have a full-time team of people working — get this — on “rights of light” issues, negotiating compensation for Knightsbridge neighbours who may be left with less natural light once the high-rise building has been built. “Most of them have now been resolved.” Who can make all this happen? The Candy men can.
And then there’s the demand. London, it seems, is not short of investors for the apartments (priced at up to £20m each). “We have more than 700 registered applicants, 300 to 400 of whom are very serious, and only 88 apartments for sale,” Nick says with a grin. Maybe they understand the needs of the new rich because they only recently became super-rich themselves. Modest, Surrey-reared sons of an advertising creative and a drama-school student, Nick (“failed accountant”) and Christian (former financier) bought their first flat in Earls Court a decade ago, with a £6,000 loan from their grandma. They did it up themselves (“We even laid the carpet”) and sold it on for a profit. Then they bought another one. And another, building their business model, accruing a contacts book and honing their taste, concepts and aesthetic ideals with each sale.
At what point did they start to make serious money? “When we made our first million on a single deal. We can all make money, but it is at that point you make a decision. Now you’ve got your first million, do you go out and buy a flash car and a new suit, or do you risk the whole lot again?” Nick asks. “I had a Peugeot 106, and I chose to keep it and carry on investing.”
And then some. The Candys decided to make epicurean materials, Croesus-standard finishes and luxury bespoke fixtures and fittings their trademark — and the world’s super-rich their quarry. Current projects include their £38m, casino-equipped yacht, Candyscape, and a Bombardier jet, which will sleep 11. Such “profile”, as Nick terms the Candys’ PR-driven persona, has garnered unwelcome attention, too — Candy & Candy is currently being investigated by the tax office. “Everyone has one (an investigation),” Nick says. “There are not many people in our industry who haven’t had one. I’m not bothered. It will be resolved in the next few months.”
The Candys are equally tight-lipped about their clientele. Kylie and Gwyneth Paltrow are said to have bought into the Candy-store lifestyle. (“We never make money off celebrities,” the brothers say. They aren’t rich enough, one presumes.) It is also rumoured that Boris Berezovsky, the original oligarch and former Kremlin insider, is a client, and that there are many other mega-wealthy, shady Russians investing. “We don’t talk about any of our clients,” Nick says firmly. “Discretion is everything in our business. But I can tell you that Russians are nowhere near our biggest clients. They are probably the fourth-biggest, behind our Middle Eastern customers, the Europeans and investors from the Far East.”
Perhaps aware that the Candy customer base has something of a reputation as a Russian-billionaire boys’ club — “It’s weird: the UK is the only place that feels vindictive about success,” says Nick. “Here people look at us and think, how can we f*** them?” — the brothers talk of “getting the right cultural mix of people” in the One Hyde Park building, drawing up a profile of each potential apartment-owner to create the correct ambience. A bit like running a nightclub, then? “Funnily enough, we’ve had one request to put a private nightclub in the basement,” he says. “Unfortunately, we had to turn him down.”
While some of their sky-high ideals may echo the scary objectivism of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, you can’t fault the Candys for their tireless tenacity and commitment. Together, they have concocted an image of grand statement and braggadocio. “We’ve been gifted with a very attractive, versatile and commercial surname,” they acknowledge. “Before we leave this planet, we want Candy & Candy to be a luxury-goods brand to rival the likes of Louis Vuitton.” Certainly, the boys’ Knightsbridge headquarters, right opposite Harrods, is impressive enough to house the next Gucci — think Tyrell Corporation rebranded by Tom Ford and you’ll start to get the idea. Inside is a slick, supersmart, wood-and-monochrome environment of electric doors that hiss open and shut on demand, liquid crystal, glass dividing walls that can be rendered transparent or opaque at the flick of a zapper and banks of employees beavering away on computers, designing sample interiors for sheikhs and oligarchs all over the world.
“The best way of describing us is as the McKinsey of the design world,” says Nick, sitting down in one of the smaller boardrooms. “When we take on a project, we charge a management fee. That’s it. Say you are going to spend £1m, our management fee will be £250,000. You sign one piece of paper. And we will work with you, not impose our tastes and signature look on you. What I don’t understand about other designers — well, I’m going to name a few, why not? — like Kelly Hoppen, for instance, that whole East-meets-West thing, a few twigs and a stone, it’s a one-look wonder. Someone like Tom Ford will have a new look every season. Why aren’t the interior designers like that? They should be. We are.”
