Philippe Starck in the Philippines
What do you get when you take a French designer and a British real estate guru and give them a piece of land in a booming residential pocket of Manila, the Philippines? A glassy, 56-story residential tower named after a waterfall. French designer Philippe Starck teamed up with the British developer John Hitchcox to build the fifth of six residential buildings to rise in the Hitchcox's massive, 250,000-square-foot Mandaluyong city project. Called the Acqua Private Residences, each building is named after an iconic waterfall from somewhere in the world: Niagara, Sutherland, Dettifoss, Livingstone, and the newest project, Acqua Iguazu. These luxury developments are among the first in Southeast Asia and have attracted both local buyers and foreign investors from elsewhere in Asia, the Middle East, the United States, and Europe. The development looks down on the Pasig river and is situated between Mandaluyong, a commercial city known for its shopping malls, and Makati, the business district of Manila.