Ask your friends where they spend their days and they’ll say the same thing…
“I live between New York and Milan.” “I’m between Dubai, Geneva, and London.” “We have a little place in Palm Springs, so it’s mostly between there, LA, and Sun Valley in the winter.”
If this all sounds familiar, maybe you’re a Betweener, too.
You didn’t set out to be a Betweener – the people and families whose lives exist between multiple properties, none of which they pack for – did you? Nobody really does. The idea of living in more than one place has obvious appeal, but that’s not new. What is, though, is the shuttling between a range of properties, so that being in a state of perpetual motion becomes the norm. It used to be a pre-war six on the Upper East Side and a farmhouse in Bridgehampton; a mews house in Chelsea and a brick cottage in Gloucestershire. But in recent years especially, two homes have become three, four, or sometimes six. And Between is as much part of one’s identity as being a New Yorker or an expat, a husband or a wife, a CEO or a founder.
Destinations compete for residents now with promises of the good life and more post-tax money in their pocket. The same brand of jeans is hanging in all the closets, the personal trainer commutes between London and Ibiza, the branded residence in Miami is stocked with the same Sancerre as the Monaco apartment.
And then there are the even smaller talismans. A great chopped salad has traditionally been hard to find in Europe. The good one at Sharan Pasricha’s Estelle Manor in Oxfordshire has appealingly similar vibes to the McCarthy at the Polo Lounge in LA. It’s probably coincidence, but it’s no bad thing: The target audience for those quarter-inch cubes is a very particular kind of guest, the sort who splits their year between three continents and even more members’ clubs (Estelle has one of those, too) and expects the specific things they love to already be waiting, wherever they land.
“If you can, why choose one place,” says Sloane (who requested that her name be changed for privacy), who lives between a brownstone in New York, the house in the Hamptons, and London, specifically Chelsea, with her husband and their nearly four-year-old son Jack, who just started nursery there. “It opens up your eyes. I feel like I’ve grown so much as a person.”
Owning the properties was never the hard part, but the Betweener life is becoming more prevalent for a mix of reasons: business, people, culture, community, schools, restaurants – and yes, tax, though how much weight that carries depends on who you ask.
“Tax opens the door,” says Derren Joseph, managing partner at HTJ Tax who holds eight residences and passports, “but lifestyle seals it. If it were just about tax, then find your nearest island and do nothing. You want the theater, great restaurants, great members’ clubs.”
Stuart McNeill, founder of Knightsbridge Circle – a concierge service that limits itself to working with only 100 families, most of which are almost perpetually mobile – watched Italy shift from punishingly high taxes to a flat-tax regime and saw the results in real time: wealthy residents arriving in Milan while keeping their roots in London.
“What the UK has realized,” he says, “and will even more, is what happens when you drive wealthy people out.” One boutique private bank client recently left Mayfair for a life split between Abu Dhabi and Switzerland. “You still have 90 days a year in the UK,” McNeill notes. “Come for the social events and the winter markets. Save all that money.”
McNeill often acts as a buying agent, too, introducing clients to real-estate professionals on the ground and hosting member events where one client might quietly offer their Mustique villa to another over a cocktail – commission-free, and entirely in-house. His team handles everything from flying in Bob Marley’s son for a dinner party in Palm Beach to sending 100 Christmas hampers to friends across every hometown on the roster.
“It’s 60 percent tax, 30 percent weather, 10 percent lifestyle,” says Jason Squatriglia, founder and CEO of Your Favorite Travel Agent, who accidentally became an expert on the subject in February 2020, when he bought his own bolt-hole in Palm Beach. “I thought it was my private oasis away from my husband [a Broadway producer],” he jokes, “and then they shut Broadway.”
Then there’s the part nobody really says out loud: it doesn’t hurt that owning homes in several places signals to people that you’ve made it. “‘She’s renting in the Hamptons’ means she must have fallen on hard times,” says Squatriglia.
Not everyone prioritizes the tax question. “Neither are tax havens,” says Sloane of New York and London. “We didn’t make this decision for tax reasons.” They did a stint in Florida, spurred on by Covid (many of their New York friends had already gone) but it didn’t stick. “We were in Boca Raton,” she says. “It’s older. It’s getting younger in West Palm Beach but there wasn’t enough culture for us, and we didn’t want to raise our child there.” London, where Sloane hadn’t been based for 15 years, became the answer. For now, at least. “We agreed we’d trial it,” she says.
A seed- and early-stage investor in startups, predominantly in wellness and women’s health, she found the city’s professional energy immediately useful. Since moving in September, she and her husband have joined four members’ clubs (Annabel’s, 5 Hertford Street, the Roof Gardens, and the Pembroke, which opens this fall). “We did have our existing friends,” she says, “but we wanted to expand our circle professionally and personally. We go out three or four times a week – really exciting events, loads of different things going on.”
For those already living the Betweener life, none of this will come as a surprise. You build a roster, and then you build a bigger one as needed.
And it can get busy: house manager (at least one per property, and ideally one who migrates between them, closing the Hamptons at the end of summer, opening Palm Beach), chef, personal trainer, Norland nanny, traveling tutor, stylist, a wellness team for IV drips on arrival, and a concierge operation. Sloane’s version is more stripped back: a house manager who looks after the Hamptons and the New York brownstone, where he checks on their home and a few others in the area. “Say, for example, a burst pipe causes a flood,” she offers. “In a brownstone, you can’t just call the building manager.”
“I have a lot of clients who take their chef, trainer, and hair stylist with them – even if they don’t have their own plane, they’re chartering one to go back and forth,” says Squatriglia. Post-Covid, this is a much more common occurrence.”
Hope Dowlen, co-founder of 48 London (a bespoke concierge service grown out of Harrods personal shopping) manages this orchestration for clients across London, the Riviera, the Caribbean, Switzerland, and more. And new local specialists are offered, as hard-earned insider knowledge is passed between very few. “Did you know skincare guru Melanie Grant is opening in London,” runs a typical message to a client. “She has a cult following in LA – do you want to give her a go?”
“Your staff,” says Squatriglia, who has watched the dynamic play out across dozens of clients, “turns into your family.” And maybe no one earns that trust quicker than a preferred stylist – once found, they are usually kept long-term and often become part of the traveling team, working with the housekeeper to ensure consistency. “We have people to organize the wardrobe and photograph every item,” says Dowlen. “Here’s what is in the St Barts house; here’s the catalog. This is almost like a full-time job.” McNeill’s clients, he notes, “used to travel with 15 suitcases and now they’re hand luggage only,” due to having duplicated wardrobes and lives.
But while you may own five or six homes, the lifestyle requires additional travel to places without home ownership (also, Instagram requires variety). So, the classic hotel suite has its place in that rotation, too: not a home, but a pied-à-terre of sorts. Sloane’s travel before heading to the Hamptons for five weeks this summer was a dreamy line-up of Copenhagen, Paris, five days in Lake Garda, then the South of France at the beginning of September for a wedding. None of them homes. “It’s so much easier to get to Europe from here [London] – that’s a huge plus,” she says. “We travel at least once a month. You just can’t do that from New York.”
“My home in New York is The Lowell,” says Stuart Procter, CEO of The Beaumont in London – an easy declaration from someone who maintains more than one address himself, splitting his time between London and Sotogrande, Spain. He has built a following of guests who feel the same way about his own hotel – people who are effectively living there in suites across repeat visits. His team has been together a long time (“200+ years between us”) and is a key part of making guests feel at home.
The explosion of ‘branded resis’ as they’re known to Betweeners – a purchased home within a hotel brand such as Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Ritz-Carlton, or Raffles – plays right into this lifestyle shift. Not just part of your home portfolio, they provide insider access to whichever chosen hotel world you buy into.
Moving children between lives can be complicated, even if the school year is rooted in one place. Sheyi Martins-Allen has been tutoring children from high-net-worth families for 13 years, traveling with some of them in summer – her first job abroad was an entire season in Greece as one of 20 household staff, while she spent last summer in Antibes.
“There’s a different energy,” she says, “because I actually know more than them.” What families want is someone with a process who can take control of the situation. “When you deputize too much with your children, that’s when I’ve seen problems,” she says. But most parents are simply after the best possible results for their children’s upcoming exams.
For Sloane, the school decision will be the one to anchor everything else. “With a young child, we’re going to have to commit when he starts school.” Jack’s nursery in London – populated by French, Italians, South Africans, Australians, Americans – tells its own story about the Betweener world.
Summer is when tutoring is at its peak, and when tutoring isn’t happening, Betweeners’ kids tend to end up at the same camps across Maine and Switzerland – friends rave about the summer camp at Rosenberg, the boarding school in St Gallen, where two-week stints somehow fit diplomacy, activism, robotics, and engineering into the schedule. Other parents meet each other at Purple Dragon, a private family members’ club with locations in London, New York, and the Bahamas – and you may enjoy potato printing here with your kids as much as Victoria Beckham did with Harper.
Verbier has become winter’s version of the same arrangement. “Over the past few years we’ve seen a noticeable shift,” says Fi Ellis, CEO of Verbier Exclusive, which tailors high-end stays in the area. “People are spending significant parts of the winter in Verbier, treating it as a second home.” The growth of Verbier International School has helped, letting families base themselves in the mountains and get in a couple of reds right after the bell rings.
For all the ease that money buys, the Betweener lifestyle “can create a lot more complexity,” says Squatriglia. Anyone who has tried to coordinate four properties, three time zones, and several WhatsApp threads popping off knows exactly what he means. What comes up often in these conversations is the sense (or possibly even the fear) that this carefully orchestrated existence is one glitch away from not working.
Do you ever fully know where the light switches are in five homes (which must be all run by one central command station in the ether)? Do tiny details like having your favorite coffee mug ever feel truly seamless? Can that sense of ease and familiarity be replicated as easily as your wardrobe is duplicated across New York, Milan, Aspen, and Mustique?
If you’ve got one of the people interviewed for this story behind you, and a global network of fellow Betweeners on every continent who’ve already figured it out – the answer is yes.
