Inside the Architecture of Modern Luxury: How the World's Best Homes Are Designed

The brief given to the architect of a significant private residence has changed profoundly in the past decade. Where once it centred on the language of historical styles — the Georgian townhouse, the Provençal mas, the Palladian villa — it now begins with something closer to a facilities programme: the home as a building that must simultaneously function as an office, a wellness centre, an entertainment venue, a hotel suite for guests, and a gallery for a significant art collection. The great houses being built and sold in 2025 are extraordinarily complex programmes, and the architects who execute them best are those who understand that luxury is no longer primarily an aesthetic category. It is an operational one.

Zaha Hadid Architects' residential practice — led by Patrik Schumacher since the founder's death in 2016 — has in recent years produced some of the most discussed luxury homes in the world: a private villa in the hills above Monaco that appears to pour down the hillside in a cascade of white concrete and floor-to-ceiling glass; a penthouse in central London whose flowing interior volumes are a direct translation of the ZHA gestural vocabulary into a domestic scale. The firm's residential commissions now routinely exceed £50 million in construction value before the fit-out, and the clients — typically technology entrepreneurs, family offices, and a small number of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth-affiliated individuals — seek something that could not be found in any existing building.

At the other end of the formal spectrum, the practice of Vincent Van Duysen — the Belgian architect favoured by Armani, Molteni, and a roster of northern European private clients — has defined an influential counter-position: radical restraint. Van Duysen's houses are exercises in material honesty and proportional precision: rough-sawn limestone, hand-cast concrete, untreated linen, antique oak. The luxury lies not in conspicuous display but in the quality of silence. His projects rarely appear in the property press because his clients — who include several individuals in the Forbes top 200 — specifically contract for privacy. The existence of some commissions only becomes known years later, when a catalogue is published or an exhibition acknowledges the work.