What does Christmas look like when you’ve got the funds and staff to make your wishes come true? Photo / 123rf
What does Christmas look like when you’ve got the funds and staff to make your wishes come true? How do you celebrate when you’ve got enough money to initiate a corporate takeover of Santa’s toy factory?
“My clients have, on average, four to six trees inside,” says Adele Gregson, founder of The Christmas Company, a home-dressing service based in Cheshire, northwest England, whose past clients have included the footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and Mo Salah, and TV presenters Paddy McGuinness and Jonathan Ross. “Yesterday we did a property which had a 20ft, a 16ft, a 15ft and three 9ft trees. That took a team of 18 of us working from 6am until 11pm.”
Discretion is vital for Gregson’s clients. About 40 per cent of them require non-disclosure agreements before work can begin, while most others ban phones during set-up.
Work on Christmas for the super-rich starts early. At a minimum, Gregson requires six weeks to pull together the elements required to transform a home into a winter wonderland but often, people start booking in early summer.
“High-net-worth individuals don’t want run-of-the-mill,” says Gregson. “They want something that no one else will have. It requires time and creativity to come up with a concept which is both unique and fits with the property and the person themselves.”
Things begin with a visit, when Gregson will meet the client and get a sense of their home; then it’s up to her to create a design. She operates a showroom where clients can tour some of the props and lighting options available to them. Once the concept is signed off, production can begin, including finding or building the Christmas decor of their dreams.
“It tends to be large scale,” says Gregson. “They’ll have a vision of giant LED reindeer in the garden with a sleigh and we make it real. Or it might be something personal – we had a designer who loved shoes so we created a huge stiletto for her lawn. Giant baubles with each family member’s name is something we’ve done, hand-painted and hand-finished.
“Imagine the things you might see in a department store or a shopping centre, but grander and more personalised,” she continues. “This year I’ve put a giant carousel on somebody’s lawn. A lot of people have been asking for these BearBrick teddy bears but life-size, each personalised for a member of the family.”
Christmas tree specialist Pines and Needles, which has decorated trees for Elton John, Madonna and members of the royal family, has had all sorts of encounters over the years. “One of the funniest was a customer who wanted a tree for every room, and they had a room full of parrots,” recalls Veronika Kusak, the company’s e-commerce director. “One of our guys was unnerved to be surrounded by birds the whole time he worked.”
Though the average customer might only require a 7ft tree, Kusak has experience selling up to 40ft trees, although 25ft is a popular option for those with a spiral staircase.
While the average customer can buy or rent decorations from Pines and Needles (red and gold are the perennial favourite colours, though a regal blue and gold comes a close second this year) along with their tree, the top-tier clients often have bespoke requirements. “We did the home of pop singer Duffy years ago and she asked for garlands of lights and flowers on all the railings up her staircase,” Kusak remembers. “My fingers still ache when I think about getting all those things attached.”
Another memorable one was a client who wanted a “pink Christmas” with a very specific shade in mind, at very short notice. “We have a lot of decorations in stock, so that was okay, but pink lights was a nightmare,” Kusak explains. “We had someone trawling every shopping centre in the country hunting for lights in the specific shade for two days.”
Floral artist Amie Bone was requested to create an igloo with a forest in a client’s hallway. “It took my team of 12 a whole day to install the 14 fully dressed Christmas trees and cover the floor in artificial snow,” Bone says. “It was worth it though, when we revealed it to the children; they loved it so much that they spent most of the festive period there.”
Those with the funds to really splash out might opt for a “live” element to their festive bonanza, says Liz Taylor from the Taylor Lynn Corporation, home dressers and party planners to stars including pop singer Gary Barlow, presenter Mary Portas and former footballer Gary Neville.
“Often, if they’ve got young children, the concept is building Santa’s Grotto or having a real person who plays the Elf on the Shelf singing Christmas carols,” says Taylor. “You can bring the live ingredients into it if you’re retained to entertain during the Christmas period, which often we are asked to do.
“Once we did a party set in Narnia. You walked through the wardrobe, through mink coats, and into Narnia. We created this magnificent Christmas concept with see-through tables filled with white twigs, white foliage and white flowers. It was simple but jaw-dropping,” she says.
Though her clients have the budget to make anything they can imagine come true
– prices start at £5000 (NZ$10,250) but she’s had clients paying up to £175,000 (NZ$358,900) for a Christmas installation in the past – “sometimes less is more”.
“People get excited and want everything, but what a designer brings is a curatorial eye. We’re doing one next week with magnificent blown-glass icicles set against a very luxurious, delicate tinsel backdrop: it’s simple, but with a lot of lights threaded through it, it will bring the whole hallway to life.”
One approach which can work in any home is to accessorise a pre-existing feature, Taylor explains. “We did a wonderful thing with a grand piano in somebody’s house, with trailing fresh and dried Christmas garlands dripping off, like it was breathing life into the room,” she recalls. “They placed candles into it and it became a nod to a tree without being so obvious. Other times we’ve dressed floor-to-ceiling chandeliers to turn those into huge glass trees.”
A keen eye for detail is vital when working with the super-rich, she says. “You can’t have trailing wires or big obvious outdoor generators in grounds which are sometimes acres and acres wide. When a client wanted an enormous glowing metallic robot in a tree in their garden, it was a challenge, but we made it work.”
For this year, the trends are “a lot of glass, a lot of light, a lot of delicate classy tinsel”. “A lot of animal skins and furs at the bottom of the trees. It’s a lot of tangible, tactile stuff. We haven’t done a lot of red bows and gold things this year.”
Gregson says she has installed a lot of decorations around the themes of “teddy bears and hot-air balloons, weirdly”. She has also seen a big resurgence of nutcrackers, having installed a pair of 17ft ones last week.
Money can buy a lot of things but perfect domestic harmony isn’t one of them, especially when it comes to decorating for Christmas.
“One thing we see a lot is that the husband and wife have different tastes,” admits Gregson. “Men tend to prefer either traditional stuff or wacky things, whereas women are usually a bit more design-led and modern: greys and clays. They end up having these annual arguments over how to decorate, which can be a nightmare for us.
“We’re already there and getting to work and he’s demanding, ‘I want this,’ and she’s saying, ‘I want that,’ and he says, ‘I’m paying for it,’ and she says, ‘I helped plan the design,’ so we’re piggy in the middle. The thing is that when these people want something, they really want it.”
Ultimately, though, the super-rich want the same thing everyone wants for Christmas: magic. And whether you’re hiring a luxury designer or merely raiding the local supermarket for decorations, anyone can achieve it, says Taylor.
“Magic is in the unexpected. If you look in a nook and see a Christmas elf hiding, or you look up into a tree and see an unexpected festive robin, that’s magic. The unpredictable, the way lights change the ambience; it’s about creating a story and a journey. If you can do that, you’ve captured Christmas magic in your decor.”
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