What's the Shard's Penthouse Worth? Western Europe's Tallest Apartment

The top of the Shard was originally planned as ten ultra-luxury apartments above the Shangri-La Hotel. Renzo Piano designed glass apartments at 244 metres above London. None has ever been sold. They sit, unoccupied and unlived-in, at the highest residential elevation in Western Europe — a strange piece of vertical real estate suspended over the City of London, fully serviced and never furnished.

A 95-storey vision

The Shard — formally The Shard, London Bridge — was conceived in 2000 by the property developer Irvine Sellar and the architect Renzo Piano, who, by his own account, sketched the original concept on the back of a restaurant menu. The building rises 309.6 metres from London Bridge in 95 storeys, making it the tallest building in the European Union for most of its early life and still the tallest in the United Kingdom. It opened in July 2012, after a global financial crisis that nearly killed the project; it was rescued by an investment from the State of Qatar, which now holds approximately 95% of the building.

The Shard is a vertical mixed-use building. The lower 26 floors (floors 2-28) are office space let to professional firms and the News UK media group. Floors 31-33 are restaurants. Floors 34-52 house the Shangri-La Hotel, with 202 rooms across 18 floors. Floors 53-65 were designed as ten ultra-luxury private residential apartments. Floors 68-72 are the public viewing platforms — The View from The Shard — and floor 87, the official top, is a service plant level.

The unsold apartments

The ten residential apartments span floors 53 to 65, occupying around 5,000 square feet each across 13 floors of the tower's upper section. Renzo Piano's design called for full-height glass walls on all four orientations, double-height living spaces, private dining rooms, and what was described in early marketing material as the highest residential elevation in Western Europe.

The apartments were originally marketed to international buyers in 2012 with prices reportedly between £30 million and £50 million each. None sold. The reasons are subject to argument: the global luxury residential market shifted after 2012, the Russian and Middle Eastern buyers who would have been the natural market dispersed across other London developments, the apartments lacked the private servicing and amenities that buyers at this end of the market expect, and the upper-floor views, while spectacular, are also extremely cold in winter and bright in summer in ways that became apparent only on inspection.

The owners — Sellar and Qatar — have periodically revised the plans for floors 53-65. There have been suggestions that the apartments would be incorporated into the Shangri-La Hotel as ultra-luxury suites; that they would be repositioned as serviced apartments; that they would be marketed to a single corporate buyer for staff housing or executive use. As of 2026, none of these proposals has been implemented and the floors remain empty shell-and-core space.

Valuing what hasn't sold

Valuing apartments that have never been occupied or transacted is a particular kind of challenge. Comparable London ultra-luxury vertical apartments — the upper floors of One Hyde Park, the towers at One Blackfriars, the Centre Point penthouses, and the Bishops Avenue apartments — transact between £20 million and £140 million for the largest units. The Shard apartments would, in theory, command an exceptional premium for the elevation and the architecture; in practice, the location (south of the river, close to London Bridge station) and the lack of ground-level privacy of the type buyers at the top end expect have constrained what the market will pay.

A defensible academic range for the freehold of the ten unsold residential apartments, based on the most recent informal indications: £30 million to £50 million per apartment. The wide range reflects genuine uncertainty about a market that has, after 14 years, refused to clear at the asking price.

This is an indicative estimate, not a formal valuation.