Thousands of rich Shanghai residents have turned China’s most cosmopolitan city into the luxury capital of a country that is expected to become the world’s largest market between 2012 and 2015.

Shanghai topped China’s luxury market in 2010-11 with 18% of overall sales, ahead of Beijing’s 16% and the eastern city of Hangzhou, with its 13% share.

Dubai resident Aideen O’Mara has officially launched the Urban Tails Pet Resort in the emirate, a “seven-star” hotel for pets, complete with air-conditioned rooms and an onsite gym.

Pet owners can now pay around US $105 per night to put up their pampered pets in a luxury hotel resort, which O’Mara said in an interview with SWNS online portal is the “pet equivalent of the Burj Al Arab”.

Hong Kong’s first Apple Store opened this week, to much fanfare.

Hundreds camped out in front of the new store overnight. Security guards made several hundred more wait outside the mall on a pedestrian bridge connecting the mall to Hong Kong’s ferry piers.

Chloe Green steps into the world’s biggest fashion store with surprising trepidation. She visits Topshop’s flagship Oxford Circus branch twice a week to rifle through the racks and check out the window displays, but today she scopes the store with a bit more trepidation.

The 20-year-old daughter of billionaire retailer Sir Philip Green – who, of course, owns the chain – is uncannily nervous.

Media billionaire Rupert Murdoch has finally sold Rosehearty, his historic estate in the swank Long Island, New York community of Oyster Bay.

The media mogul and his feisty wife, Wendi Deng first purchased the prime piece of waterfront property in 2003 and listed it back on the open market back in June 2007 with an asking price of $14,800,000. Over the last four and some odd years the price tag of the bucolic 4.6 estate has been taken off and put back on the market several times while the price tag tumbled to $9,995,000.

The Johnnie Walker House Combines Recycled Materials With Refined Shanghai Style to create a modern green design. In a joint effort with Singapore based agency Asylum, Agency Love developed the interiors out of a variety of materials and resources used in the whiskey making-process. The idea of developing an ‘Embassy for Whiskey’ and designing an experience more than the space played a major part in the design process and outcome. It was important to capture, grow, and nurture the whiskey culture within Shanghai’s elite.

Consumers are beginning to purchase big-ticket items through their mobile phones. A Blue Nile customer recently bought a diamond engagement ring that cost more than $300,000 through the company’s iPhone app.

The sales environment for German luxury car brand Mercedes-Benz has become “a bit more challenging” in China, as sales growth slowed over the summer, a senior company executive for the luxury auto brand said.

Luxury car sales have defied a marked slowdown in the growth rate of China’s overall auto market this year and have been soaring. Sales by Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz unit grew nearly 60% during the first half of this year. But sales growth slowed in July and August, said Klaus Maier, head of Mercedes-Benz in China, in an interview Friday. For the first eight months of the year, Mercedes-Benz sales in China totaled 123,590, up 41% from a year earlier, he said. The company didn’t release specific Mercedes-Benz sales-growth figures in China for July or August.

China’s rising band of rich is made up mostly of young, single males, according to a survey. The HSBC corporation and international research company Nielsen released their findings from a survey that attempts to dissect the makeup of the richest 10 percent of the population of eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The countries focused on were mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia.