"How two men rewrote the rulebook on estate agency, not to mention property porn": Esquire magazine meets our Founders
“The Modern House, founded in 2005 by Albert Hill and Matt Gibberd, prides itself on a very different approach to most estate agents. You will never have seen its shops on the high street, because there aren’t any. Since the beginning, it has been online only. It specialises in properties it decides are architecturally arresting or allow living ‘in a modern way’.
“It used to be said the search for property was all about location, location, location. Hill and Gibberd wouldn’t agree with that. To them, contentment is most likely to be found in a beautiful, considered house that allows for open-plan living. And that means you might have to be flexible about where it is. The Modern House is predicated on the idea that many estate agents fundamentally do not understand design and lifestyle.
“At a time when the housing market is flatlining, especially in London, The Modern House is bucking the trend. In the past year, its clean, uncluttered website — closer to an interiors magazine than a property portal — has received almost 3m visits, an increase of 50 per cent on the previous 12 months. Its carefully curated Instagram feed, which features images from houses for sale alongside motivational quotes from modernist icons such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, now has over 90,000 followers. These include an above-average proportion of architects, artists and designers.
“Appearing on The Modern House can give a property a status usually only conferred by a RIBA architectural award. ‘There’s definitely a validation,’ Gibberd agrees. ‘And I don’t think there are other brands in estate agency that provide a positive image like that. They are coming to us for our ability just to reach into the cracks between things and access a very unique and powerful network of people.'”
Read the full article by Esquire.
If you have a beautiful home and are curious about its value, we’d love to hear from you.
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