Debora Szpilman Illustrates Knight Frank’s Residence Report 2026/27
Debora Szpilman returns to illustrate Knight Frank’s annual Residence Report, bringing wit, character and a distinctly human perspective to the global luxury property market.
For the second consecutive year, illustrator Debora Szpilman has collaborated with Knight Frank on The Residence Report, its annual global study of luxury residential development.
Following her illustrations for the Knight Frank Residence Report 2025/26, Debora returns for the new 2026/27 edition, creating the cover and a series of illustrations that run throughout the publication. The report itself formally credits Debora for illustration, alongside design and direction by Quiddity Media.
Illustrating the changing world of luxury property
This year’s Knight Frank Residence Report 2026/27 looks at a luxury residential market moving well beyond the traditional idea of the expensive city apartment.
Knight Frank's research covers nearly 1,800 live and pipeline branded residence schemes from more than 200 brands across 90 countries. The sector is expanding into coastal, island, mountain and resort locations, while hotel groups are increasingly joined by fashion, automotive and lifestyle brands.
Debora’s illustrations give that large and sometimes abstract subject a human scale.
Her cover transforms a luxury residential building into a collection of balconies populated by residents: watering plants, exercising, drinking, reading, socialising and simply watching the world go by. Knight Frank describes the image as capturing the sector’s growing focus on liveability, while reflecting the energy, expanding geography and increasing diversity of the branded residence market.
Rather than illustrating property through pristine architectural renders, Debora illustrates what happens inside it.
From global mobility to wellness and food
That idea continues throughout the report.
For the data and mobility sections, travellers, suitcases, aircraft and measuring tapes turn statistics about international wealth and movement into miniature visual narratives. International flight volumes are forecast to reach 13.2 million in 2026, while increasingly mobile ultra-high-net-worth buyers are maintaining homes across several locations.
Elsewhere, Debora moves easily between themes of hospitality, community, food and wellbeing. A giant telescope introduces the report’s Trends section; groups gather around plants for its discussion of the changing definition of luxury; a figure relaxes inside a cocktail glass beside the feature on private members’ clubs; and an improbable balancing act of plates accompanies the report's examination of food and drink.
The illustrations work because they don't attempt to compete with the report's photography, architecture or financial data. They provide something different: observation, humour and people.
It is an approach particularly suited to a report whose central argument is increasingly about experience rather than specification. Knight Frank describes a market in which familiar luxury amenities are becoming easier to reproduce and value is instead shifting towards place, provenance, judgement, privacy and human connection. The report later concludes that the things commanding the greatest value may increasingly be those that money cannot instantly manufacture: time, trust, memory, belonging and a genuine sense of place.
Debora's character-led drawing feels particularly at home within that conversation.
A second year with Knight Frank
The new commission follows Debora’s work for The Residence Report 2025/26, when she was commissioned to create five spot illustrations, chapter openers and the cover. That edition explored a luxury property market increasingly shaped by wellness, community and changing ideas of how affluent buyers want to live.
For 2026/27, those ideas have accelerated.
More than half of branded residence schemes are now located outside major cities, compared with fewer than four in ten in 2016. Non-hotel brands are taking a larger share of the market, while wellness is moving from an added amenity towards what the report calls infrastructure.
Against all that data, Debora keeps returning to people.
The result is editorial illustration doing what it does particularly well: taking a complex subject and making it immediately readable without simplifying it into a diagram. Property becomes behaviour. Global mobility becomes a person with a suitcase. Wellness becomes a gathering. Hospitality becomes food, conversation and social interaction.
It gives Knight Frank's global research a parallel visual narrative — serious in purpose, but never overly serious in delivery.
Explore the complete Debora Szpilman portfolio at Dutch Uncle, including her work across editorial, hospitality, fashion, food and wine, advertising and international brand commissions.
Further reading
Read Knight Frank’s Residence Report 2026/27, revisit Debora’s illustrations for the 2025/26 Residence Report, or explore Knight Frank’s research into the Global Branded Residence Survey 2026 and the changing idea of scarcity in luxury residential development
