There is no escaping the London traffic no matter how rich you are.
News that one super-rich customer had spent 100 million ($203 million) for an unfurnished duplex in a new hotel-cum-apartment block directly opposite Nick and Christian Candy's 1.2 billion One Hyde Park has elevated the notoriously choked intersection with Brompton Rd and Sloane St into perhaps the most valuable plot of land in the capital.
Due to open in March, the Bulgari Hotel and Residences boasts just eight apartments. So far seven have been sold with the most expensive reportedly commanding 7000 per sq ft and a penthouse still up for grabs for a reported 69 million.
It has yet to rival the 136 million said to have been paid by Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov to secure Britain's most expensive flat in the Candy brothers' development opposite but it left those that must make their living beneath their vaunting edifices perplexed as to the attraction.
"There's no way I'd live here," said Wayne Leedham, a London cabbie familiar with the half-hour wait to pass Knightsbridge's luxury residences - the Champagne bottleneck, as it could rightly become known.
