Amid the chat of Austerity Britain it was surreal, the other evening to attend a viewing of the apartments at One Hyde Park, the Candy brothers' Knightsbridge project.
On show was a four-bedroomed flat costing £33 million.
It's the biggest four-bedroomed flat in the development and includes four bathrooms, study, living room and kitchen and is finished to the most exacting of standards with marble and porcelain everywhere and remote control operating everything (the glass in the windows alone, overlooking Hyde Park weighs two tonnes).
In all, it covers 4,755 square feet — what most people would consider to be the size of a large house.
What I'd not appreciated until I saw it for myself is what the Candys have created.
The view from the back — over the trees, so close that you can almost touch them — is more Central Park than what we're used to with Hyde Park.
That's where the brothers have been clever: the sort of people who buy in One Hyde Park are just as likely to also have a place in Fifth Avenue.
In the first phase, they sold £767.9 million worth of apartments, says Nick. Then they stopped and now they've started selling again. In the past three weeks, Nick says that they have had commitments to three more, worth a combined £55 million.
He is confident of exchanging on a further three worth more than £100 million shortly. He now thinks they may sell all 86 by the year's end.
So far, only 10% of the 40-plus buyers have been from the UK.
Most are super-wealthy foreigners attracted by the wish to have a base in London which is equipped with state-of-the-art security and slap bang in the area where they want to shop and eat (Daniel Boulud's new London restaurant is next door in the Mandarin Oriental as will be Heston Blumenthal's London opening).
They've all paid 50% deposits and none has walked away despite the recession. Clearly the fall in the value of the pound has also helped.
That, I suppose is the point about One Hyde Park — it may seem out of kilter with the rest of the country but that's because the purchasers are neither austere, nor, for the most part, British.
