Lifestyle by the hour
Nick Foulkes does his fractions Luxury is no longer just a business; it is a commodity to be parcelled up and sold in whatever way its suppliers deem most effective — there is entry-level luxury, airport luxury, ultra-luxury and, of course, fractional luxury. ‘Timeshare for rich people’, is a crude but reasonably expressive way of explaining the phenomenon of dividing expensive assets into small pieces so that they can be enjoyed by a large number of people who are not in a position to be able to, or do not want to, purchase said asset themselves.
However, the word ‘timeshare’, with its Pavlovian associations of crumbling blocks of flats on the Costas, full English breakfast pizzas and 24-hour sports bars, does not do justice to the aspirations of fractional owners. This may be luxury on the cheap but it is still more expensive than I will ever be likely to afford.
Fractional ownership of planes has helped boost the executive aircraft industry and such initiatives as the Latsis Group’s Privatair (Privatair.com) have brought the obvious benefits of private aviation to a wider market. However, with air travel it could be argued that buying time on an aeroplane is more of an amenity or a business tool than a luxury. Now the Latsis Group has come out with Privatsea.
What you buy with Privatsea (Privatsea.com) is membership of a club. It cost 18,000 euros to join and for that you get the privilege of choosing which of four tiers of membership you wish to buy: 150,000, 300,000, 600,000, or 1,200,000 euros. These euros are then converted into points which you can dispose of as you wish on a fleet of around 50 yachts everywhere from Alaska to Australia. Privatsea seems to be about insulating its members from the intrusion of the less pleasant aspects of reality, and the talk is of an alliterative ‘doorstep to deck’ service.
A trawl of the internet will reveal any number of similar schemes. ‘Become a member of Quintess (quintess.com) and you’ll be establishing an incredible new luxury lifestyle’ trumpets a site offering ‘an entire portfolio of true luxury homes’ While for the petrol-head, belonging to the écurie25 (ecurie25.co.uk) promises ‘intelligent supercar ownership’ while relieving its members of the burdens of outright ownership. ‘Depreciation, insurance, servicing and storage all cease to be of concern. In fact, the only problem our members face is the glorious dilemma of which car to drive next.’ My problem is that the proprietors of écurie25 or Privatsea could quite possibly prove to me that I would be better off joining one of these clubs or schemes than buying my own yacht or Ferrari; but I would still view myself as a pretend owner. I see luxury as a grail and, as any grail student knows, it is all about the quest and the journey. I perceive this sort of luxury lifestyle-by-the-hour concept as catering to the sort of people who want a lifestyle rather than a life.
I believe that appreciation of luxury is about more than — to use modern marketing argot — sourcing an affordable turnkey solution. There is a culture to luxury and in my opinion you are not going to get a rewarding appreciation of it by getting behind the wheel of your part-time Lamborghini for a few days a year or spending a fortnight beside the pool of your vacation club villa. I mentioned my thinking to Guy Salter, chairman of Walpole, the British luxury goods body. After scolding me for being such a purist, he explained that ‘with fractional ownership of a yacht, a car or wonderful villa you are getting a slice of the truly wealthy lifestyle; it is the same thing down the scale to the secretary who buys her first Vuitton handbag.... They have got to start somewhere.’ Indeed, it could be that frac tional ownership acts as voca tional training, teaching the newly wealthy how to be really rich. But I still believe that it risks fostering a bulimic appetite for luxury rather than a true enjoyment of it. Talking of handbags brings me to the reductio ad absurdum of the fractional ownership or club membership thing: a site called bagborroworsteal.com that rents handbags as if they were DVDs. It is an amusing post-modern conceit, but it risks devaluing the experience of the person who has bought into the idea of proper ownership.
Once again Salter thinks I am being a little po-faced. ‘A hundred years ago people used to rent their tiaras — I remember my grandmother telling me,’ says Salter. However, when pressed, he does admit that Grandma Salter was not a member of an Edwardian fractional-jewellery-ownership scheme herself: ‘As it happens she did own her own.’ The well-rehearsed snobberies of ownership aside, it seems that there’s a genuine value attached to having owned something outright rather than having enjoyed it for a short period of time and then given it back. The auction houses even have a name for it: it’s called ‘provenance’.
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