Imagine if Ikea made penthouse apartments.
It’s almost true. A company founded by two Swedish engineers is producing prefabricated living quarters that can be hoisted up by crane and attached to the tops of existing buildings.
The ready-made penthouses are shipped from a factory in Sweden with everything in place but the furniture–including stainless-steel appliances, working bathrooms, cupboards, wardrobes and wood floors. Several of the units are now being installed atop the historic Albert Court apartments, in South Kensington near Albert Hall.
Sotheby’s Holdings Inc.’s international real estate unit is marketing the Albert Court units, at prices ranging from about $3.9 million to $5.5 million.
That may sound like a lot to spend on anything “prefab,” but husband-and-wife engineers Annika and Hakan Olsson think sleek Scandinavian designs and one-day installation will overcome rich people’s objections to prefabrication. Eventually, the couple, which founded First Penthouse Ltd. here in 1992, envisions shipping their prefab penthouses to New York and Paris.
Here’s how it works: First Penthouse negotiates a deal with a landlord, in Britain called a “freeholder,” under which the company in effect buys (they call it lease) a building’s roof space. Then First Penthouse designs the units, in some cases to suit a buyer’s preferences if the unit is presold. Typically, First Penthouse pays a percentage of its profit on the sale to the freeholder.
A factory in Haassleholm, Sweden, produces the penthouses under close supervision by the Olssons. The factory, called Modulent, a unit of Swedish house manufacturer Hjaaltevadshus, also makes prefabricated outlets for McDonald’s Corp. The penthouses are then shipped in modules, and lifted by crane to a prepared landing spot on a London roof.
“By the time they crane it up, you could have the beer in the fridge,” says Annika Olsson, the company’s design chief.
The exteriors are finished to match the existing building–sometimes even in old tiles lifted from the roof. But the interiors usually feature modern white walls and wood floors. The Olssons have found the style they knew from Sweden has gone over well with international buyers put off by overstuffed English interiors.
The units’ updated plumbing is another selling point in a city plagued by antiquated pipes.
This is a good time to be selling London penthouses. Soaring property values and space shortage are spurring building owners to build up. Though spacious historic penthouses are in a class of their own, modern build-ons have become very popular.
“We have an awful lot of applications for roof extensions,” says Godfrey Woods, a planning officer for London’s Westminster City Council. Says Miles Kevin, associate partner at U.K. real-estate services company Knight Frank, “There are always people looking for penthouses because of the view, and they sell for a premium.”
Penthouse buyers might be a young professional couple working in the city, an older couple trading a big house for greater security in a penthouse, or well-paid international businesspeople seeking a base in London.
At Albert Court–where existing tenants include European royalty, corporate chiefs and a professional soccer player–two of the planned five penthouses have been sold for price tags in the $5 million range, says Sotheby’s property agent Charlie Smith.
Smith takes potential buyers up to the rooftop to look at the open space where their penthouse would land. He finds he has to manage expectations of what a prefab penthouse will look like: One recent viewer assumed temporary plywood construction huts on the roof were the penthouses themselves.
For landlords, the prefab units offer a powerful attraction: minimal construction disturbance in what are usually cramped high-rent neighborhoods. That, in fact, is how the Olssons spotted their niche. The couple had first-hand experience with the dust and disruption of traditional construction when they added another story to their Stockholm loft. In the late 1980s, they moved to London, and an idea clicked: Use prefab building methods developed indoors in Sweden to cope with bad weather to ease the hassle of constructing an urban penthouse. “We want to be able to put it in without anyone even noticing,” says Hakan Olsson, who oversees the business side.
So far, First Penthouse, with its staff of 20, seems to be way out front on the prefab concept. (A German maker of prefab houses, Huf Haus, has been making inroads in U.K. suburbs.) The Olssons have needed all the determination they could muster to make the venture work. After founding their company, they had to spend a year arranging the lease and financing for their first project, a penthouse project in the London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood that now numbers seven units. (Five units are up and have been sold.)
Pre-fab isn’t as simple as it sounds. The process is labor-intensive, starting with the search for the right building in the right neighborhood, closing the deal with the landlord and getting approval from strict city planning boards.
Projects never get this far: “Six months ago, we had to have 40 in the air to bring one down,” Hakan Olsson says. “Now we probably need 20. . . . People are starting to come to us.”
First Penthouse prepares the roof, extending and renewing pipes and chimneys. The units themselves have complicated design details built in before installation. Refrigerators, doorknobs, accommodations for chimneys and mansard roofs, access for water pipes and elevator shafts–all must be thought out completely before First Penthouse sends plans to the factory. “It will never be Ikea flat-pack,” says Annika Olsson, who handles the design process.
Getting the unit up onto the roof usually takes just one day, but the finishing touches have sometimes stretched to several weeks. First Penthouse is getting faster: The most recent Albert Court unit was ready four weeks after it was plopped onto the roof.
