THE private island REPORT
“No man is an island,” wrote poet John Donne in 1624, but fast forward 400 years, add in a global pandemic, and it seems that plenty of men (and women) would like the chance to at least own one. In Q1 2021, superyacht sales totalled more than £1 billion and the private island market was equally hot, as ultra-high-net-worth individuals strived to secure their own isolated idyll.
Edward de Mallet Morgan, a partner of Knight Frank’s Super-Prime Global Residential division, believes there are a number of factors driving the surge in interest. “During the course of the pandemic some people have made a huge amount of money, and this is coupled with the fact that remote working has been properly tried and tested,” he says. “It has proven that people don’t need to be in the office or even the same country as the businesses they own or are shareholders in. The old normal doesn’t exist anymore, and it may never come back.”
A lot of interest has been centred around the
