A prestigious project, working with the technical development team to introduce the idea of a hyper-luxury smart home – bespoke tailored for high net-worth global clients. The Candy team were very clear about the audience for these properties, the wealthiest people on the planet, with multiple residencies around the globe.
Overview
Candy had developed the site, creating a stunning set of apartments, working with beautiful materials and craftspeople to bring a series of highly individual apartments to life in this unique location. The scope of the build was extremely precise, every detail, surface and finish has been sourced from the best of the best.
Candy wanted OHP to have an edge over anything else that was available at the time – not just in the UK or Europe, but around the world. This meant embracing innovative technology into the heart of the homes – a system that was able to do many tasks at the touch of a button.
To further compliment the architecture, design and technology, there was to be an onsite restaurant, catering for the needs of all residents. After careful consideration, the Candy team selected Madarin Oriental to provide these services.
How did we help?
In short we distilled all of the technology and the services, experiences and ambitions down into a simple proposition – a demonstration of what would make OHP special.
This was a complex build – amazing architecture, interior design, technologies and art in many forms/genres. To compliment that, a world class restaurant would be included and cutting-edge technology would run throughout the entire site.
This was a lot to take in and the marketing team were keen to demonstrate everything the site had to offer. Our challenge was to showcase the properties and the technology/services in a way that could be quickly and easily understood, without any technical knowledge.
Our solution
We focused on keeping things simple. The technology can control a vast array of services and functions, the lists were very long and some of the tasks very complicated and precise. Everything came from one source point, the address of the property itself is One Hyde Park and it felt right to really lean into this and make the most of it – One! One place to live, one solution for all of these features and so on…
The ‘one‘ theme was then developed to share a day in the life of a resident at OHP, showcasing many aspects of what living in OHP would bring.
Researching what these people do and don’t do, understanding their preferences and lifestyles was very important. If we got the balance wrong, we’d lose trust and most certainly any interest the customers had in finding out more.
We arrived at a set of services that not only told a compelling story but also created realistic building blocks for the technical roll-out and services across the entire site. Producing ‘One day’ as a landscape, leather bound, table book. A beautiful piece of print that added a level of physical substance to technology that we all struggle to ‘see’.
Our table books had to have presence. Commanding attention. We looked at several materials before deciding upon a series of unique leather covers. We then sourced individual leathers and embossed them, creating books that looked like nothing else.
When placed on a table people would immediately enquire about what the book was, ‘Can I have a look?’ This was exactly what we wanted. The books quickly became coveted items that the residents would repeatedly look through, showing friends and imagining what life would be like when OHP was finished.
High tech product, low tech presentation
The technology involved is very impressive, shouldn’t we create some kind of on-screen presentation, a virtual walk through? Perhaps something augmented or VR? As humans we are led by our visual sense, this is where we see our truth.
Using a tech to communicate a set of highly technical solutions just felt wrong, bloated and over complicated. We’d lose people, they’d not believe what they were seeing and forgot too many of the important details. The real beauty of this communication was to keep things simple. Less would be more.
Whilst we could create a strong on-screen experience, it would lack the tactile elements of a real-world property – textures and smells – sensory elements that connect, creating a special feeling. We also spoke with the sales team at C&C to find out how this document would be presented, we learned that they wanted to deliver this ‘in-person’, first hand. This confirmed the importance of having a physical object that told the OHP story.
The table book is a powerful device, that allowed us to tell a simple story about these complex and luxurious developments. Having something physical that tells the story felt more human, more relatable and more valuable. We could quickly establish important factors such as the attention to detail and bespoke nature of the solution through the physical materials we used.
The digital space offers us some excellent ways to communicate, but a physical object has gravitas that an on-screen experience simply cannot match. Even when it’s not being used, the physicality of it cannot be ignored. For this reason we hand-bound 10 copies of a ‘One day’. Each copy was bespoke to an apartment/customer within the development, each book individual – leather bound, each in a different leather, tailored to what we knew about the owners lifestyle. No detail was overlooked, for example, the paper we used was a warm white (the closest match we could find to the wall finishes within the properties), but when viewed in the light, it has a subtle pearl like lustre to it.
Telling the OHP story?
The books featured the type of daily activities that demonstrated the combined services of the Candy, OHP, AMX and Madarin Oriental. It was a rich mixture of travel, food, drink, experience and entertainment that the purchasers would relate to.
The specifics of the content were developed from working with the technical teams and suppliers – by understanding what they delivered and how the OHP experience was going to be different from anywhere else, we could tell a simple and compelling story.
Sourcing the right imagery and creating icons for each service, things that were intuitive to those found within smart phone os. We worked with that familiarity, those kinds of expectations and ease of use, establishing the OHP proposition extremely quickly.
The result
Every apartment within OHP sold, with 9 of the 10 selling to the people who had the personal ‘One day’ presentation. This document also informed and shaped the direction of many of the operational activities and subsequent expansion of these within the development from Candy, AMX and Mandarin Oriental.
This is just one example of the work we, the Busy as AB team, produce. The research, analysis, thinking and development that sits behind what you might see as a client or customer. Our work always centres upon the same statement, “Is it human?”
All our work seeks to create rich, human connections between people and products or services. If you’d like to know more about what we do, contact us.
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