It has taken John Caudwell 14 years, the blessing of the Vatican and some of the rarest craftsmanship in Europe to reach this moment: the unveiling of the first finished home at 1 Mayfair, a residence of almost €100 million that the billionaire believes comes as close to perfection as anyone has dared.

During a private tour with Monaco Life’s Editor-in-Chief Cassandra Tanti, Caudwell, a long-time Monaco resident, spoke about the extraordinary lengths he has gone to realise his vision, from commissioning specialist artisans across Europe to creating a level of privacy, security and personal service normally associated with the world’s finest hotels.

His €2.4 billion development on the edge of Hyde Park, London, rises where a multi-storey car park once stood and goes five levels underground. It holds 24 principal residences priced from about €42 million, and the penthouse is expected to exceed €235 million.

“I’d already billed 1 Mayfair in my mind as the world’s most prestigious apartment block. I think I’ve created that in reality as well,” said Caudwell. “Fourteen years of development has gone into this, and it’s been a daily passion to achieve as near to perfection as is possible to achieve in quality, services and facilities.

“Whether people will say it’s the world’s most prestigious, I don’t know. I think the owners will, because they will have multiple homes all over the world and I believe they will think this is absolutely extraordinary.”

Permission from the Vatican

The journey begins in the rotunda, the first to be built in Mayfair since 1772, where plain stone walls give way to columns of curving scagliola. The technique was invented centuries ago as a cheap substitute for marble, and it now costs far more than the stone it imitates. The marble floor, modelled on Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, needed the approval of the City of Rome, and the hand-painted ceiling, based on the Map of the Heavens in the Vatican, needed the Vatican’s own.

Caudwell recalled watching in fascination as craftsmen spent thousands of hours painstakingly creating the scagliola, transforming a centuries-old technique into something extraordinary. “It looks like the most beautiful marble you’ve ever seen in your life,” he said.

The rotunda opens onto a sequence of residents-only rooms modelled on the great palaces of Europe. The ballroom-sized Grand Reception Room, with its double-height ceiling and six-metre arched windows onto the garden, revives the private palaces that once lined Park Lane.

The Crystal Gallery, panelled in rock crystal glass, recalls the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the library is being stocked with more than 1,000 books by the Mayfair bookseller Heywood Hill.

Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich and a Maharani

The show apartment, a 606-square-metre lateral residence on the fourth floor overlooking Audley Square, was dressed by the New York designer Jamie Drake, and each room tells a story drawn from the guests of The Dorchester nearby.

A 14-metre gallery leads in beneath an octagonal coffered ceiling inspired by the great dining room at Chatsworth House, and the reception rooms are laid with chevron oak parquet by Weldon, which holds the Royal Warrant for the floors of the royal palaces.

The drawing room is washed in the violets and mauves of Elizabeth Taylor, who made The Dorchester her home away from home for 30 years, beneath a gold-mirrored ceiling installation shaped like an avant-garde brooch.

In the dining room, a light installation pays homage to the Van Cleef & Arpels diamond necklaces of Sita Devi, the Maharani of Baroda, and the crimson chairs are a nod to the ‘Cherry Mousse’ lipstick she was never without.

The principal bedroom recalls Marlene Dietrich, who wore her pearls while staying at the hotel, with pearl-shaped lamps, moiré-covered walls and its own ‘midnight kitchen’ for late-night drinks.

Beyond the bedroom, one dressing room is lined in high-gloss burr walnut and embossed leather, the other in rippled sycamore with silk-stitched panels, and the drawers in both are wired to the alarm system.

The first bathroom is an Art Deco sanctuary of vein-matched Statuario marble and crystal lighting, finished with inlaid marquetry by the Italian artisans Provasi, while the second is built around a freestanding sculptural marble bath.

“It’s just so sexy,” Caudwell said, admiringly. “This is why I’m so excited, because this was my vision in terms of quality. But it’s one thing having the vision, and it’s another getting the skilled craftsmen that can actually create that vision to the right quality,”

Much of the beauty is in what goes unnoticed. Coffered ceilings, which most developers avoid because of the ductwork they demand, run through the reception rooms. Ventilation hidden in the cornicing lets air drift in without a breath of noise or draught, keeping every room at a library-quiet 35 decibels, and the doors close with seals so tight that no sound passes through.

Standing in a bathroom adorned with intricately carved marble, polished brass and exquisite joinery rarely seen in modern homes, I asked Caudwell what luxury means to a billionaire who can afford almost anything.

“Luxury has to be beautiful. You’ve got to feel utterly spoiled, as though you’re in an environment that’s almost impossible to create,” he said. “But it has to be functional as well. I don’t think it’s luxury when people design things that are not very functional.”

The Dorchester next door

For an international buyer weighing a London base, the arrangement with The Dorchester may matter as much as the marble. Dorchester Collection will manage 1 Mayfair, and Caudwell chose the hotel because it was both the most prestigious and the nearest.

“I think we add prestige to The Dorchester, and The Dorchester adds prestige to us. It’s one of those partnerships that’s win-win for everybody,” says Caudwell.

Residents will have a 24-hour in-residence menu created by The Dorchester’s culinary director, Martyn Nail, from caviar and oysters to beef Wellington, and the kitchen will perfect a family’s own recipes on request. Butlers overseen by the hotel’s director of butlers, Sean Davoren, will pack for the next destination and unpack on return, a seamstress will embroider linen, and housekeepers keep a manual for every precious object, cleaning the most fragile with artists’ brushes.

The concierge can send luggage ahead to the airport, provision a private jet, charter a helicopter or a yacht and arrange close protection, and residents have priority reservations across The Dorchester’s restaurants, among them the three-Michelin-star Alain Ducasse.

“All the normal Dorchester services in the building are part of the service charge. When the owners arrive, the porter will bring the bags up and look after them, and valet park the car if they want. But they can have extra services if they want. They can have their apartment opened before they arrive, flowers put out, fresh food brought in, meals delivered from The Dorchester. I don’t think there’s anything anybody could want more than what we’ve got as a potential package,” he said.

Every residence has its own private lift, bedroom suites open by fingerprint, and security is overseen by The Dorchester’s team, which is used to protecting royalty and heads of state.

“Some people are very worried about security, others not so much, but we wanted everybody to feel very confident that when they have an apartment in our building, they feel as safe as it is possible to feel,” revealed Caudwell.

Below ground, the spa has a 20-metre pool beneath a double-height glass ceiling and a gym with a full-size boxing ring.

A building for good human beings

Caudwell has signed The Giving Pledge, committing at least 70% of his wealth to charity in life and in death, and even among the silk and marble his thoughts kept returning to who might live there.

“I would love it if this building was full of billionaires who have joined the Giving Pledge. Of course, that’s not a criterion. I’m commercial, I want the apartments to sell, but I do want them to sell to good human beings, and one of the marks of a good human being is joining the Giving Pledge,” he said.

“Just imagine if I could say, ‘1 Mayfair is full of Giving Pledge billionaires that are going to help change the world’. That would actually be a much bigger achievement than what I’ve achieved in the building itself.”

Billionaires from every continent

Sales began in early November with the unveiling of this, the first dressed apartment. Caudwell said nearly every enquiry has come from multi-billionaires, from Brazil and Mexico to the Middle East, and he planned to be there when the first prospective buyers walked through.

“The unveiling of the first dressed residence allows buyers to experience the true magnificence of 1 Mayfair, which offers trophy homes unprecedented in scale and grandeur,” said the billionaire businessman, philanthropist and founder of Caudwell.

A statue in Audley Square?

Monaco Life readers may recall the statue of Caudwell at the entrance to Le Provençal, his €350 million conversion of the former Cap d’Antibes hotel, which we toured in June. Audley Square is about to gain statues of its own: Caudwell is installing figures from the 16th century, in flamboyant hats and full regalia, which he expects to be in place by around Christmas.

Asked whether one of him might join them, he admitted the idea had crossed his mind. He pictures a marble figure of himself seated on the wall of the square with a set of plans, while one of those 16th-century characters leans over to point at them.

“It would bring the 16th century and the 21st century together, just like I did here with this development,” smiled Caudwell. “I just think it’d be really cool.”

For now, his mark is subtler. There is a small bust of him in the entrance courtyard, a brass ‘C’ set into the balustrades and his initials in the grand reception room.

Caudwell’s ambition is to create some of the finest residences ever developed, true legacy projects of outstanding architectural and design quality that will stand the test of time.

After 14 years of painstaking work, the unveiling of the first finished residence offers the clearest indication yet of how close he has come to achieving that vision.

1 Mayfair is due for completion in 2027.

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Main photo source: Caudwell