As London ground to a halt in April 2020, Marcus O’Brien was finalising the sale of 2-8a Rutland Gate: a palatial property made up of four townhouses knocked together, overlooking Hyde Park. It went for £210 million: the most expensive house ever sold in Britain. The buyer was Cheung Chung-kiu, a Hong Kong billionaire. He never moved in, and O’Brien moved on: hopping from his role as head of the Private Office at Beauchamp Estates, to UK Sotheby’s International Realty.
Part of a new cohort of movers and shakers including George Vernon, protégé of Oliver Bernard; Alice Freeman, a partner in the super prime lettings team at Knight Frank; and Daniel Daggers, star of the new Netflix show Buying London, O’Brien has been appointed head of the Family Office at the UK luxury agency: a new centre-point for the super-rich looking for advice on how to spend it. This marks the first of what is sure to be a slew of London outposts for a new, younger generation of gazillionaires coveting a world of monogrammed towels, at-home health spas, Saatchi-approved art and top-notch houses. ‘Seventy per cent of my sales are off market,’ O’Brien says. Of his clients’ financial status, he estimates ‘35 per cent’ are non doms.
