Three windows onto the street

When the owners asked us to sell their apartment in Holland Park, they had one request: as little disruption as possible. They had lived on the raised ground floor of the villa since 1979, and they did not want a stream of strangers walking through their home.

We began by deciding what the apartment was really offering. Its rooms are the tallest in the building, and the drawing room has three windows onto the street, each almost four metres high, with their original folding shutters. On a sunny afternoon the light falls across the floor in three long bands. That, we thought, was what a buyer would remember.

So we photographed it on a clear afternoon in May, with the shutters half open, and wrote the particulars around the drawing room rather than the floor area. We did not advertise it. Instead we sent the details to eleven buyers we already knew were looking for a period apartment in Holland Park, with a single date for viewing.

Three of them came. The second, a couple returning to London after many years abroad, stayed for over an hour, mostly in the drawing room. They made an offer the same evening, and after a short negotiation it was accepted. The sale completed in June 2026, seven weeks after the photographs were taken.

The apartment is a reminder of something we see often. The buyers for the best period homes usually already exist; they are waiting for the right house to appear. A good sale is less about reaching as many people as possible than about reaching the right ones, quietly and at the right moment.