It is 10am on a bright September morning and Mayfair is buzzing. Just off Berkeley Square, a salesman in the Bugatti garage has a diary full of appointments and can’t stay to chat. Instead, he gingerly drives the showroom’s solitary car, price £3.4mn, from its steel turntable out on to the road and parks it behind a delivery van, to the delight of onlookers wielding camera phones. Next door in the Bentley showroom, there is a four-month waiting list for the popular 4x4 Bentayga.
On the square’s north end in Phillips auction house, neatly dressed workmen dismantle the mise-en-scène of the previous evening’s David Hockney print sale, which sold all 78 lots, raising £3.3mn. The auctioneer’s Louisa Earl says that attendance has grown steadily since January, when auctions resumed in person following UK lockdowns. Many are locals, some newly arrived. “They will move in nearby and it will be all white walls and they’ll come here for things to decorate them with.”
After a quiet period during the depths of the pandemic, the world’s super-rich have been returning to city centres and have been buying homes.