Now, with the growth in people working from home, in a whole range of various business & creative areas, it has almost become mainstream but the supply of suitable properties to live and work from has not kept a pace with the demand. 10 years ago, we would get asked - about once a week for a live/work studio for rent or sale in ’shoreditch’ or ‘bermondsey’. Now, it is not unusual to receive 15-20 enquiries every week for flexible and appropriate live/work spaces both for sale and are wanted in all parts of London.

 ’Leigham Court Road, SW16 - a 2,500sq ft duplex live/work apartment - now in need of updating. Currently owned by a music teacher who has regularly entertained with music ensembles and up to 30 guests. £499,000′

The demand has become insatiable and more especially more significant during and coming out of the recession. On checking our data base, we currently have 86 people currently registered to try to find a live/work rental property in central, north and south west London of anything from 1,000sq ft - 2,000sq ft from £350 - £1,000 per week. We have 47 buyers registered looking for live/work units around Kings Cross & Camden from £400,000 - £800,000.

One would have thought that most of these people were ‘creatives’ looking for a space with a ‘vibe’. Far from it. We have accountants, dentists & fitness instructors along with the usual plethora of designers, musicians, artists etc. All styles, shapes and sizes of live/work properties are being asked for and even those prepared to do work to a property to bring it up to standard or create the space they need.    

So, if you have any kind of live/work property - in any condition - in any part of London - at any price level - for sale or rent, please do contact us urgently so that we can at least fulfill just some of the enquiries that are clogging up our data base of live/workers!

Robert has been resident in Cornwall for the past seven years, (where he is well known for his large ‘Bombus Bee’ sculpture at the Eden Project., and for his pyrotechnical fire sculptures on Bodmin Moor), amongst his more. permanent works.

He has exhibited widely and has work in public and private collections in England and America..

Robert work tends to follow groups of ideas in series’ in both 2D and 3D.

To quote Charles Jencks on Post Modernism. …… (contemporary) “artists want to know how to represent variety with integrity. One strategy is to choose the right style for the job. A case of serial revivalism.A further tactic is to provide heterogenous materials and shapes in a language which is fresh and enigmatic.“

Much of Roberts work can be treated either as single pieces or can be grouped together to form larger 2D or 3D progressions / installations.

Ideas come from a wide variety of sources, and include :- psychotherapeutic concepts ( the artist practised as a therapist for several years). The culture and climate of the time. Physical experiments with matter and things… everything from fire to paint to objects to past and present aesthetics and styles. People and other species, synthetic and natural worlds.All materials are potential sculpture , they are dealt with in an non-hierarchical way

For a long time now I have preferred to use materials that are not bland i.e. have some kind of history of weathering or use. One day about four years ago out in the studio I was looking into my childrens box of outgrown / discarded toys which happened to be stored in the same building and responded to the random collection of colours shapes and forms they made. I figured that if I could find a way of putting them together to constitute a larger form they would have great potential as larger scale sculpture.
Over the next while I experimented with two other construction methods (which both had their downsides) - before one day about a year ago in frustration I tried putting a screw through one toy and then many others. To my surprise most didn’t crack or shatter and the new series has been largely based around and developed from that fact.
Ideally the pieces will work on many levels. The toys themselves interest me in their own right as mini sculptures by unknown and uncredited artists. Mostly I use the toys abstractly as forms with which to build muscle bone or internal or external organs but all types of human pursuits can be referred to and represented through them - things loved or hated - things used and carried as tools etc etc. They provide interest in surface detail whilst making their contribution to the totalities. The toys also provide a moving history of fads and fashions as they pass through the media and our awareness temporarily significant and then forgotten.

Public reaction to the sculptures has been largely very positive (in some cases gleeful)- often children drag their parents to come and look at the pieces and then a whole sequence of recognition and recollection usually begins, naming the various toys and recalling the times and circumstances of their use. There is usually some fascination with the sculptures, the individual toys used and with the process of their acquisition and construction. Sometimes there is outright laughter. There is usually a whole process of going back and forth between looking at the sculptures as a totality and the individual parts from which they are made (which of course is my intention). Some people of course just say they are rubbish which of course is perfectly true! There is also often talk about consumerism waste and recycling, which whilst not being my central concern is also in my view positive when it occurs. Some find the sculptures beautiful/ curious/ scary/ weird/ emotional and etc. (which considering all they are really are , is bits of what is usually seen as trash) is great.

In a way the sculptures are also history pieces in the sense that you could date any one of them roughly speaking from the time that the last toy screwed on to the structure was produced

Arranged around an internally landscaped courtyard, the home’s volumes open to external areas creating a unified residence with a direct relationship from inside to out.

” We wanted to retain a sense of the history and grandeur of the old house’s sttanding whilst combining fabulous and fun design with top eco-credentials “.

The People’s Lomg. Henry VIII believed the hunting grounds of Richmond should be ’shared’ with the commoners:  not so Charles I, who in 1637, wailed teh leafy 2,500 acres to create a Royal hunting park. Never a monarch in touch with his people, the move was characteristically unpopular with his subjects, who insisted on exercising their prescribed right of way to gather ‘firewood’. Charles reluctantly erected six ladders at the walls - the ‘Ladderstiles’, which permitted the locals to roam in the Park. After centuries of suspicion over countinuing rights, locals allowed the ladderstiles to be removed in favour of gates, but the last to go was at Coombe gate, known today as Ladderstile Gate.

At some time in between, when a manor house was built on the Ladderstile approach, Queen Victoria granted its owner a more comfortable entry point via an equestrian gate with its own key (*by licence to the Royal Park), use of which remains an exclusive feature of the house today.

In an effort to create an environmentally friendly residence, green roofs with hydroponic vertical gardens clad the living room, while heat exchanges that utilize the constant ground temperature provide all energy required.

FOR DETAILS OF THIS FORTHCOMING PROPERTY, PLEASE CONTACT US ON info@uniquepropertycompany.co.uk

Anyway, for this month, our 1st choice of Property to Die For. Marcio Kogan’s Panama House is a residence designed for art. Located in São Paulo, Brazil, the house makes a powerful but subdued statement in its low, open, elongated elegance — a hallmark of Kogan’s architecture.

All levels of the three-storey house — including the bedrooms, office, gardens and patio — are used to display the owner’s substantial collection of predominantly modern Brazilian art and sculpture. The site of Panamá house is located in one of the garden neighborhoods, just some blocks from Paulista, the financial center of the city of São Paulo.

The box form is Kogan’s favourite motif - occurs time and again but in carefully nuanced combinations: precisely planed concrete boxes within boxes and timber slatted boxes that open outwards towards a slimlined lap pool, perhaos with no dorrs to mark inside our outside. 

The elegant economy to Kogan’s use of columes translates to a very real sense of freedom. The result is airy, light-washed spaces that seem barely tethered to the ground, an apt escapist image perhaps for Sao Paulo’s congested megapolis 

The sliding vertical wood lathes that form the brise soleils for each room’s facade, are also an important part of establishing the prevailing openness. The brise soleils also provide comfort and privacy, and enable the control of the artworks’ exposure to direct sun. Most beautifully, they also create the soft play of light that matches the overall linear shapes — created by creases in window treatments, the floor boards, the rows of pillows on long sofas, the stone work outside — continuing the elongated language of the entire building.

The interior plan is organized into 3 floors and a sub-solo. Upon entering the lot, a tree-covered patio leads the guest to the door. A social hall distributes part of the program of the house: a library, vertical circulation, the utility rooms and the living room. From within the library you can see, in front of the exterior stone wall, a Maria Martins sculpture, reposing over a reflecting pool. The living room has large spans that open, in their entirety, to the garden, building a spatial continuity between interior and exterior. In the garden, the pool, mirrors the stones of the wall.

All in all, our of our top 10 houses in the world!

The reason for the title of this article, is because for the first time in about 16 years of being involved in marketing property in London, here at Unique, we are all rather bemused and somewhat confused about the absolutely vast variance in opinions on what any property is now worth. Since the end of 2007, we have of course encountered the most dramatic global financial downturn in most living memory with virtually no business arena uneffected. In the London property market, we have all experienced incredible movement, both in values and also demand. For the 2nd half of 2008 and into Spring 2009, it appeared that buyers had left the planet, any aspect of confidence had disappeared completely and unless there was a ‘distress sale’, the property market appeared to have come to a shuddering halt.

Lofty Values

Since the summer of 2009, there has been the most remarkable turn around in virtually every area of the London Property Market. At the moment, we are recording more new enquiries from buyers on a weekly basis than at the height of the market in mid 2007! Furthermore, in the case of several very recent sales, we have recorded prices in excess of values quoted in 2007.

But at the same time, there is still a significant gulf in the opinions with value of a property from buyers and sellers. We just had a case of a sale of a small 1 Bedroom Artist Studio House in Belsize Park where opinion was signficantly divided. It was on the marekt at £725,000. The price we valued this property at was about £100,000 in excess of what the vendor had thought it was probably worth in the current market conditons and after the intial 4 weeks of marketing, it appeared that the vendor might have been correct. We had two offers of £600,000 and £625,000. But within another week. we received several more offers with the end result of having to go to sealed bids and eventually agreeing a sale at the full asking price.

Combine the current level of demand with the fact that the availability of properties to buy is at it’s lowest level for many many years now, the confusion as to potential value continues. We are amazed at some values being quoted by estate agents. We recently valued an interesting contemporary house in Hampstead. The vendor was in receipt of 4 valuations from various estate agents that varied from £1.8m - £2.75m! Despite the range of valuations, the vendor actually thought their house was probably worth in excess of £3.5m. For what it’s worth, our valuation was £3m based on as much recent comparable evidence as possible. But how on earth did professional estate agents provide valuations up to nearly 35%+ apart?

Of course, valuing a property for sale, as an estate agent, is underpinned by a wave of hidden agendas. It is very usual for the valuers at many agents to have a specific target of new instructions they msut obtain each week and by having such a target, it is not unknown for the valuer to go in and hugely overvalue the property in the hope that they can win the instruction and then spend the next few weeks, badgering the vendor to reduce the price! Not a practice that goes on at UNIQUE. You can be assured of that!

Still, despite being in this business for 16 years now, nothing should surprise us anymore and from our perspective, just carry on trying to locate London’s more unique and unconventional properties for our every burgeoning data base of buyers.

us: Good morning. How can we help you?
yorkshire: I am searching for a large loft:
us: excellent. have you just started looking or have you been searching for a while?
yorkshire: bloody ages. All the lofts I am seeing are crap and fall apart as soon as you lay a finger on them
us: OK. Where have you been searching so far
yorkshire: all over the sodding country. Everyone I speak to pretend to build solid lofts but they are all a bunch of liars. I saw a couple of lofts in Hull recently but they were crap I tell you - crap crap crap. I would not have put a rabid dog in any of them let alone my prize possessions.
us: so you are want to buy a loft for someone in your family.
yorkshire: the’re the only family i have. They always come home without fail and I am dead proud of them
us: If you ahve been looking at lofts all over the country, why do you want to try looking in London? Are they moving to London?
yorkshire: They will go where ever I tell them to go you know, but they always come back as I said.
us: what kind of loft are you looking for?
yorkshire: don’t need to be nowt posh ya know - but i needs to be as large a possible that they can find easily and get in and out of quick
us: how much are you looking to spend?
yorkshire: i dunno really. would 400 get me somit good - one of those designer type lofts - you know - the ones in the magazines. I would luv to stick it to George from The Plough (a pub, we assumed!). He has a bloody rotten loft, leaks everwhere and smells really bad. He never cleans it - a bit like himself (huge hearty laughing goes on for a minute or so.
us: I can assure that what ever we may have to show you, they certainly won’t smell - but perhaps of freshly made bread.
yorkshire: So that’s your trick for getting me to part with more of me hard earned readies. (loud chuckle again)
us: well we have a couple we could show you. When do you plan to be in London and will you be bringing the member of your family who you want to buy it for?
yorkshire: what do you mean? They don’t need to sodding see it. They are not going to be there that much. I am entering them for competitions all over the place all the time. No time to get too comfortable. They will just ‘av wot I give ‘em. Wot a daft question sonny! No wonder you southerners all drive round in those german cars. You ask daft questions and charge twice the price of the rest of the country. Anyway, back to business. Can you send me some pictures of wot you got sonny. I am not going to come all the way down ‘t’ smoke for not-in.
us: Everything we have is shown on our website. Pictures, Floor plans, location maps, HIP reports etc.
yorkshire: Now you are really pissing me off laddie! What the ***k to you mean - Floor Plans’. Do you put ******g kitchens & bog in ‘em or somit? I just need a loft - not a bloody hotel!
us: I think I must have mis-understood you. Apologies. Have you looked at our website yet?
yorkshire: No, not yet. I just chucked in ‘lofts’ into google and up came your name and number to I called you - in the old fashion way - by telephone. I don’t believe in all this email bollocks - i like to hear the man I am speaking to. You learn alot about who you speak to just by the way their voice is - difficult with you though coz all southerners sound the same you know - different bloody language up ‘ere. Anyways, I am at me son’s house. He’s got the computer so let me take a look at your website. Give us a few minutes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..(about 10 minutes later)

yorkshire: You laddie are ‘avin a ******g laff! I don’t want one of those soft southern bastard posh loft properties you daft git. I WANT A PIGEON LOFT - A LOFT FOR PIGEONS!!

Do you sell those? I might as well be phoning ******g Afghanistan. A  P I G E O N   L O F T. You know, those flying ******s that s**t on your head when you look up. Ya daft beggar. I should have reversed the charges!

us: We sell many very unusual and unique properties, but I am afraid that this time, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Probably best I do not add you to our mailing list for new lofts - unless of course you have £400,000 available.

yorkshire: I don’t know who is the bigger chump but it’s been a laff laddie. Bye - bye.

Pigeon Racing Tips"Custom" Loft - Not sure Manhattan Loft quality!

"Custon Loft" - not quite to Manhattan Loft standards!

The Traditional Loft

The fashion all really started about 15 years ago when Sapcote, a small commercial development company, stumbled across a couple of old Victorian School buildings on Amies Street in Battersea. At the time, the school itself had been vacant for many, many years and was starting to crumble away. The local council was selling the site and the only other interested party at the time were Barratt Homes! Their visionary idea was to potentially knock down these two magnificent building and build a bunch of homogonised modern terraces and try to blend in with the Victorian Terraces surrounding the site on all four sides. Thank god that never happened.

When Sapcote acquired the site (now called The Village), they were really not sure which way to go with it. Having been involed in Commercial developments, they initally throught that creating large Studio style offices would be possible, but this was also at the time that the loft market had really start to become established in London, but almost exclusively over in the East of London and Docklands.

So having got agreement with the local planning department, they offered the entire site, broken down into large ’shell spaces’ with Residential or Live/Work use. For this part of London, it was a completely radical idea and in fairness, the uptake was extremely slow for the first 8/12 months with a couple of brave photographers stepping into the breach and buying a couple of the shell spaces to create live/work studios.

It was not until (Viscount) David Linley decided to buy the entire top floor of one of the buildings that the development really took off and within a few months of Linley buying, the entire development was sold out. The smallest units were around 1,200sq ft, with many at between 1800 - 2,500sq ft and several at 3,500 - 4,000sq ft +.

Shells were relatively normal in East London and the furthest west that shell spaces had gone was previous Kings Cross at York Central. But old Victorian schools were absolutely ideal for creating massive loft apartments. At the time Sapcote missed a trick in so much as they sold vast open spaces at about £100 per sq ft, but many of the buyers then created anything up to a further 50% in floor area with mezzanine levels, for relatively small cost. They certainly did not make this mistake again when the bought another old school site on Burns Road, just off Battersea Park Road. Before they released those spaces, they installed Mezzanine levels into most of the shells and divided up each floor into smaller units.

Prior to the Village, there had been one other school conversion in Battersea called The Lanterns which was 2 buildings, but just broken up into huge Loft style houses. After these 1st three conversions, the fashion for covnerted Victorian Schools spread like wild fire to 4 or 5 other buildings in Battersea and then across most parts of London. But these first few conversions provided what are still, some of London’s most spectacular Loft apartments - vast spaces with huge volume and incredible light. Sadly, the more that developers jumped on the band wagon, the smaller and smaller and more bland the conversions became.

One interest aspect about these kinds of properties that unlike conventional flats, were the smaller they are, the bigger the £’s per sq ft, in the last few years, people have realised the true rarity of the availabilty of the exceptionally large open-plan living spaces that these lofts provide that the larger they are, the more expensive they are in £’s per sq ft. About 3 years ago, we sold two lofts in The Village, located next to each other, to one buyer, who has consequently knocked them through to create an apartment in the region of 6,000+ sq ft. There cannot be many apartments in the whole of London with a 6,000sq ft floor plate!

We have just agreed the sale of one of the larger lofts in The Village which was on the market for £3.25m. It was previously owned by a well known photographer for about 10+ years but the next owners created a fabulous home, shipping in materials from Italy and all over Europe. We have just been instructed on a very striking top floor loft, again in the Village for £1.2m and will also have a couple of very individual lofts in The Old Chesterton Building on Battersea Park Road coming up at £580,000 and £825,000.

As the need for more modern schools keeps on growing then we are sure that many more of these wonderful buildings will come to the Residential market. We just hope that the developers avoid breaking them up into rabbit hutches and respect the very nature of the open-plan and large lateral spaces that these buildings can provide for more individual homes.

These apartments can provide the very best of Loft living and continue to find new fans every year. They may not be ideal for large families or for those that cannot get their heads around the concept of open plan living, but they continue to evolve and keep on providing buyers with highly original and striking homes.

Simon Harris, our managing director, has been responsible for selling properties in every single London Borough and most postcodes, selling a loft apartment in 1994 in Peckham for £85,000 to an astonishing contemporary house in Central London for £23.5m. “When I started marketing these kinds of properties in 1994, I called the company ‘Cityscope’ in line with what at the time, was a very urban market - rather scraggy factory conversions in East London, a few rather basic artist studios on Gunter Grove near Fulham and some converted stables in Mortlake”.

LIMEHOUSE CUT in POPLAR

David Chipperfield designed penthouse

But immediately, we are urgently needing more interesting properties in all areas of London - at all price levels - for a daily growing band (nearly an army) of buyers. We would be delighted to discuss any aspect of your property plans and of course, a no obligation valuation.

Authentic Loft space in Bermondsey

New to Market. Penthouse overlooking Islington Green

£1.6m Loft in Kings Cross, sold in May 2009

There is a general feeling from these new enquiries that people feel in many cases, prices have probably gone as low as they are likely to go - from those willing to sell and whilst there still be some downward movement in some areas of the UK, well located, interesting, quality properties are bottomed out.
This may or may not be the case and we are certainly not going to attempt to predict anything, but all we know is that we agreed sales on 13 properties during May 2009 (we agreed sales on 8 properties in May 2008 and 17 in May 2007) but only 6 in March 2009 and 8 in April 2009.
In some cases, we even had to go to sealed bids, but only on the basis of being in receipt of several offers and in those cases, below the asking prices. There were several properties that had been on the market for 4-5 months, a few of which had been reduced in price during that time and interested parties revisiting them several months after initial viewing the property - and finally making an offer.

£895k converted Tram building in N7 - sold in May 2009

This activity has also been partly driven by a severe lack of new properties coming to the market - again at all price levels. Add the revitalised demand the the real lack of new (interesting) housing stock and whilst we are by no means back to any kind of a rising market, supply and demand are not even remotely closely related and the appearence is that of a bullish market. In this case, the bulls are the buyers (we have several cases that can only be described as mild stalking - from several buyers calling our Valuer, Simon, 2-3 times a day to ask about forthcoming valuations and potential offerings!).
In fairness, it is an excellent time to buy as well as sell. If the seller is realistic about the potential sale price, then without any shadow of a doubt, a sale can be arranged relatively quickly or at the very least, enquiries and viewings are hugely up on 3 months ago. As an example, we posted the details of an interesting Live/Work duplex loft in E2 at £330,000 yesterday, and within 24 hours, we received 9 email enquiries - and we have not even had a chance to email the details out to our registered buyers. At the same time, we emailed 16 existing registered buyers with pre-view details of a Penthouse coming on the market in Islington at £1.625m and received 10 replies of interest to view the property as soon as possible. Of course, these enquiries may not result in any sale, but it confirms the renewed level of interest shown over the last 6+ weeks.

E2 Duplex Live/Work Loft just on market for £330k

Lending and reasonable mortgages are still a huge problem for many and we know of many 100’s of potential buyers who would dearly love to buy something now but are still finding it extremely difficult to source reasonable lending.

The result of this increased activity can only be endorsed by the fact that several of our staff have changed their holiday plans for this summer - one of them changing their cycling holiday in the Lake District to 10 days in Vancouver and another from a holiday cottage in Lille to 2 weeks in Corsica! A reliable endorsement of a stonger market? Perhaps not, but increased holiday plans from colleagues who can only be described as wall flowers when it comes to buying their round at our end of weekly get together, then perhaps the signs are encouraging.

Corsica - Bonifacio

False Creek, Vancouver

One of the best aspects of what we do here at Unique is the hugely varied experiences we encounter on a daily basis.

A day in the life of our valuer, Simon Harris can include (as of a day last week) seeing a nearly completed converted Nuclear Bunker in North London, a Loft in Chiswick, an Artist Studio House in Holland Park, a Penthouse in Islington and a river-front warehouse conversion in Limehouse.

So look out for these ‘diary stories’. An insight outside of conventional Estate Agency that is rarely seen.

Camden Loft - coming soon