Australia’s first Armani/Casa residence has landed at One Circular Quay, and it’s a whole floor of perfect harbour views.
There’s a lamp on a desk in a Sydney apartment that was never meant to leave Italy. In fact, the legendary fashion icon Giorgio Armani designed it in 1982 for his own Milan stores. Now it sits on level 53 of One Circular Quay, a collectors’ item no longer available anywhere in the world. The view from the desk is divine: Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Say no more.
Cove is Australia’s first private residence created in collaboration with a global design house. Lendlease and Armani/Casa have unveiled the sub-penthouse at One Circular Quay, and the result places Sydney on a very short list of cities: New York, Miami, London, Dubai, where the world’s great design houses have lent their name and their craft to someone’s home. “To introduce for the first time in Australia a property fully furnished in collaboration with Armani/Casa, in a single whole-floor residence at One Circular Quay, is a moment of real significance for Sydney,” said John Taylor, Head of Product & Design at Lendlease.
The numbers: 537 square metres. All of level 53. Private lift lobby, no shared corridors. The principal living and entertaining rooms frame an unbroken sweep of the harbour: Opera House left, Bridge right, water everywhere else. A suite with its own dressing room and spa anchors one end; bedrooms and a study sit at the other. A terrace lets you breathe the harbour air.
Armani/Casa brought its four touchstones, Art, Fashion, Nature and The Orient, to the palette Giorgio Armani made his own: that careful space between grey and beige he called “greige,” layered with sand, off-white, Canaletto Walnut and Satin Light Brass. Every finish is handmade in Italy by artisans using traditional techniques.
In the formal living room, a five-by-five-and-a-half-metre silk and wool rug carries the cannété stripe, a three-dimensional woven texture that has run through Giorgio Armani’s fashion collections since the beginning, flanked by timber lattice screens drawn from Japanese shoji and torii geometry. The Morfeo bed in the principal suite floats in softly curved Canaletto Walnut. And yes, that lamp is there too.
The buyer doesn’t get a turnkey apartment but an invitation into the world of Armani: a private stay at the Armani Hotel Milano, a personal design experience at the Corso Venezia flagship, a behind-the-scenes look at the craft behind everything surrounding them at their new home in Sydney.
Branded residences are one of the fastest-growing segments in global luxury real estate, forecast to rise 59% worldwide by 2029, according to Knight Frank. One Circular Quay is already more than 90% sold and completes later this year. The lamp is staying.
onecircularquay.com
