The importance of detail in luxury marketing.

The Benson is a luxury residential condominium on New York’s Upper East Side, one of the most prestigious addresses in the world. Designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects for global real estate firm Naftali Group, the project is a tribute to the architectural legacy of the area and features a limestone façade with setback terraces and intricate detailing – a sense of ‘romantic verticality on Madison Avenue’.

We produced a full set of over 30 exterior and interior marketing images for Naftali Group to support the marketing of the building and for use in print and digital collateral. Launched during the pandemic, the images had to work exceptionally hard in an unusually competitive market, to convey the distinctiveness of the apartments to a high net-worth audience.

We collaborated with the U.S.-based client team, holding interactive workshops to develop the most suitable compositions, lighting and angles. Based on our experience working in this market, we proposed a series of unique and compelling images, advocating for key views which proved to be the most successful in marketing the project. Naftali Group, a key player in New York’s residential real estate sector for over 30 years, had a clear vision for the brief and a keen eye for detail, particularly for the quality of materials and lighting, so we created images at the highest level of photorealism, and with a quality which translated seamlessly to the luxury residential market.

Externally our images showcase an Upper East Side aesthetic with elegant, robust, durable materials. We took beautiful additional photography at all times of the day to review alongside our composition studies and advise on which sorts of lighting would work best for each image – from clean morning light to the softer tones of the atmospheric, early evening ‘golden hour’.

To maximise their value, our team rendered the images to a resolution of 10,000 pixels, allowing for zooms, detailed crops and animations. Detailed vignettes were created to bring the apartments to life with more personal stories. We adopted a ‘stylist’ approach to interior room sets, using bespoke furniture modelling and drawing out the sensory and lifestyle qualities of details and textures.

The project achieved exceptional sales – despite the tough pandemic market – and became a poster child for the reinvigoration of the NY property market.