In a recent LPF Industry Leaders Interview, our Partner Chris Thorne sat down with Luxury Property Forum founder Priya Rawal to talk about how Imperium is reshaping technology in the super-prime residential sector.
Chris's career began in commercial controls at Honeywell, where a landmark luxury development exposed an industry-wide problem: building management and audio-visual technology were being designed in silos. He set out to solve it, and later became the fourth Partner at Imperium.
Bridging two worlds
What makes Imperium distinctive, Chris explains, is that we bring together two disciplines most firms keep separate, intelligent building infrastructure and experiential AV. Lighting, shading, HVAC, air quality, security, energy and entertainment are engineered as a single intelligent platform, not separate layers trying to talk to each other after the fact.
That integration is paired with a human-centric, wellness-led approach, circadian lighting, air-quality optimisation and acoustic design treated as fundamentals of modern luxury, and early, open collaboration with architects, designers and M&E consultants so technology enhances the architecture rather than being retrofitted into it.
Luxury is precision, simplicity born from complexity, technology that disappears and leaves only experience.
Chris Thorne, Partner, Imperium
“It just works”
For Chris, the most rewarding moment on any project is when a client simply says “it just works”, the quiet result of enormous complexity managed well. His ambition is for Imperium to become synonymous with intelligent luxury living, where intelligent buildings aren't a feature but a standard.
