Homes above the horizon.

Reinhard Mey described it perfectly in his song “Über den Wolken” (Above the Clouds): “Above the clouds, freedom must be boundless, all fears, all worries – they say – remain hidden below, and then what seems big and important to us would suddenly become insignificant and small,” he sings in his song. But the properties recently featured in the online magazine Luxury Defined by Christie’s International Real Estate are not quite that high up. Rather, they are about cliffside villas blessed with boundless views to deluxe duplexes that soar over cityscapes and high-altitude homes that offer upscale sanctuaries in the sky.

The magazine writes: “For millennia, civilizations have sought to transcend their earthly existence and connect with the divine by building lofty pyramids, temples, and turrets that reached for the heavens. Centuries later, there remains a kind of divinity around cloud-grazing penthouses and cliffside dwellings that command the same rarefied vantage point—those enviable abodes in exceptional locales with horizon-nudging perspectives.”

The 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa