WONG Kwan's name may not be familiar, but his recent property investments probably are. He is the little-known buyer of what was the most expensive private house in the world until last week: No. 23 Severn Road, for which he paid $540 million last November. Three weeks earlier, Wong had acquired another massively expensive property, the $375 million Skyhigh, perched on the highest point of The Peak. In less than a month, he had spent an unprecedented $915 million on two houses when just 10 years before he had to buy his first car on hire-purchase.
The Severn Road deal stunned the international property market. It had even more reason to reel last Monday when the Peak home of Hotung family patriach Eric Hotung, 6-10 Black's Link, was sold for $778.88 million in one of Hong Kong's biggest residential property deals. The three sales so close together spotlighted what has always been a secretive market and Wong's accessibility and easy-going nature helped fuel a flurry of international media interest. The New York Times noted that the $233 million paid for Bill Gates' 37,000-square-foot house on Lake Washington, with its 20-car garage and trampoline room, was less than half that paid by Wong. Currently, the most expensive house in America is the $372 million mock-French chateau purchased in 1990 by David Geffen, the music producer and Steven Spielberg's partner in DreamWorks SKG.
For that, he got a 15,000-square-foot bachelor pad with five bedrooms, a 15-metre bar, a pool, a waterfall, a 10-bedroom servants' house and 3.6 hectares of prime land in Beverly Hills.
For his $540 million, Wong got a 28,000-square-foot property with 10 bedrooms, less than one-third of a hectare of land and an inordinate amount of animal skin and marble. The house - rechristened Genesis not only for its Biblical definition 'creation of a new world', but because it can be translated into 'creation of a new century' using similar-sounding Cantonese words - was described by The New York Times as a Carrara bunker. The Italian marble is everywhere and accounted for a good proportion of the $116 million Heung spent on the interior design when the house was built in 1990 (he flew in workers from Italy to install it). The rest went on two-metre elephant tusk floor lamps, enormous chandeliers, jade sculptures, hand-painted trompe l'oeil walls, tiger-skin rugs complete with snarling heads, a gold baize billiard table and a 24-seat dining table. Wong describes it as 'a big contribution to good taste'.
The Genesis deal was struck when, on the strength of a rumour, Wong turned up on the doorstep of the house's owner, Singapore-based stock-trader extraordinaire Heung Chik-kau, took him out to dinner and made him an offer he couldn't refuse, putting down a $20 million cheque during dinner as a deposit. 'My first offer was $520 million; his counter-offer was $530 million. But I wanted everything. I wanted the culture, the taste, the furniture, carpets, even the knives and forks,' he said. Wong had learned about the house and its extraordinary interior during lunch with a friend and reckoned Heung had spent about $50 million on the contents. 'He said, 'For $10 million, I'll give you everything.' I thought it was a good buy ... I wasn't nervous, I've done lots of big deals.' But Wong has no plans to call Genesis or Skyhigh home. Genesis is a 'strategic investment' for which he claims to have already been offered $900 million. He believes the property is worth $1.1 billion and feels he will have no problem in obtaining it. 'There are only 187 houses on The Peak. More and more rich, successful entrepreneurs are coming to Hong Kong from China so there's going to be a huge demand for this type of high-end detached house.' His investment in Skyhigh will be realised far more quickly. The 20,000-square-foot house at 10 Pollock's Path, owned by Hongkong Bank, was considered too extravagant by chairman John Gray and was sold in 1991 for $85 million to Kazuo Wada, chairman of Yaohan International. Last October, after Yaohan hit financial trouble, he decided to sell the house. Wong was waiting with chequebook in hand. Today, the tastes of its two former occupants are visible in the empty house, an arresting combination of Japanese minimalism in the undulating sculpted ceilings and refined Englishness in the manicured topiary and lawns. Its most notable feature is the tiny dome-shaped conservatory, accessed via a precarious spiral staircase, which has the only 360 degree view of Hong Kong Island. Few will get to appreciate it, though: the bulldozers are scheduled to move in this summer.
Wong plans to tear down the mansion and build five 6,000-square-foot villas in its place. All five were pre-sold in March for $918 million, a profit to Wong of $468 million after an estimated $75 million in demolition and construction costs are deducted. Four were purchased on the day they went on the market for $180 million each ($30,000 per square foot); the last, slightly bigger than the others, went for $198 million, or $33,000 per square foot. Wong refuses to name the buyers ('a chairman of a public listed company, an entrepreneur, someone from a famous family'), apart from the proud owner of House A, the last to be sold, former chairman of the Regional Council, Cheung Yan-lung. The three-storey, four-bedroomed, glass-fronted houses - differentiated only by their swimming pools; round, square, rectangular, polygon and kidney-shaped - are scheduled for completion in December 1998.