Matthew Steeples reports on the sale of a rare 1992 Range Rover convertible created for the alleged sex pest playboy Prince Jefri of Brunei and comments on this shamed royal’s similarities to the Range Rover driving alleged sex pest formerly known as Prince Andrew
Both alleged sex pest Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and alleged sex pest Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei have owned rather large and rather gaudy houses that curiously shared the same name, Sunninghill.
The first, Sunninghill Park, situated on the edge Windsor Great Park in Berkshire, England was sold by Queen Elizabeth II’s now disgraced second son in 2007 for a totally overinflated price to a Kazakh billionaire. It was mockingly nicknamed ‘South York’ and ‘Tesco Towers’ and ended up flattened. The second, plainer-without-the-‘Park’ Sunninghill, in Glen Head, Long Island, New York, escaped the wrecking ball, but sold most recently for just £5.5 million ($7.5 million) in 2024 against the £8.7 million ($11.8 million) the renegade Brunei royal had most definitely overpaid for it back in 2006. The 28-acre estate has thankfully been long stripped of the sickening ‘sex statues’ that Prince Jefri ended up in an expensive court case in regard to.
The former Sunninghill, Long Island, USA residence of Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei and the since demolished Sunninghill Park, Berkshire, UK residence of the now former Duke of York and the now former Duchess of York, the money motivated proven liar Sarah Ferguson. Both homes became tainted by their associations with ostentation and grubby excess.Sunninghill, Glenhead, NY – which is just 26 miles from Manhattan – came to public attention in a 2010 court case Prince Jefri brought against former advisers when he unsuccessfully asked a judge to bar a jury from seeing photographs of pornographic statutes of himself and his former personal assistant and former fiancée, Micha Raines. Prince Jefri ultimately lost the case and had to pay out £16.5 million ($21 million) in damages.The Sultan of Brunei, Hassanl Bolkiah, with his since estranged spendaholic brother Prince Jefri.Whilst driving a green Range Rover, the then still Prince Andrew nearly ran over a dog on the Long Walk in Windsor in April 2024. ‘The Sun’ observed: “Andrew took the kerfuffle in good humour and laughed as the dog’s mortified owner sprinted to retrieve it.”On another occasion in December 2021, a woman “of no fixed abode… sprinted up to the [then still] Duke of York’s Range Rover” and “thumped on the window.”The ex-Prince Jefri of Brunei 1992 Land Rover Range Rover Chamois by Vantagefield to be offered for sale by auction by RM Sotheby’s on 23rd January 2026.
Equally, also connecting this pair of dastardly degenerates is that both have owned multiple Land Rover Range Rovers over many decades. Whilst the rotten royal formerly known as Prince Andrew’s Range Rovers have only been adapted with discrete security features such as covert police lighting, Prince Jefri and also his brother the Sultan of Brunei’s examples are on another level in terms of opulence.
Going to auction on 23rd January at the RM Sotheby’s Arizona 206 sale is a 1992 Range Rover described as a “Chamois convertible.” It was coachbuilt by Vantagefield of London – a firm that subsequently went out of business due to non-paying Kuwaitis during the Gulf War not coughing up for similarly ostentatious conversions – and is presented in black with “sumptuous” white leather. It comes with a fully lined, power-operated soft-top and a black removable hardtop also.
Of this fancy 4×4 that was supposedly delivered new to the Brunei royal family at their residence in Beverly Hills, California, RM Sotheby’s remark:
“Designed with hunting in mind, they could be fitted with hydraulic mechanisms to lift the seats above the roofline for unparalleled views of the quarry… An excellent choice for Range Rover enthusiasts seeking a unique variation of a timeless classic, this fascinating, rare convertible will surely stand out wherever it goes, be it cruising beaches or chasing quarry.”
It has 41,406-miles on the clock, but comes without any imagery of Prince Jefri ‘in-action’ in pursuit of “quarry” on the streets of Los Angeles. Offered this coming January without reserve and a guide of £74,000 to £111,000 ($100,000 to $150,000), the vehicle was last sold alongside a second similar example, a 1995 P38-A Range Rover 4.0 SE convertible coupé by German firm Styling Garage in September 1999 to a Southern Californian owner. The latter example was auctioned by RM Sotheby’s in the summer of 2025 and achieved a hammer price of £85,500 ($115,500).
The 1995 Land Rover Range Rover 4.0 SE Convertible coupé by Styling GarageThe “sexually charged” 1994 Range Rover LSE limousine by Townley Cross Country Vehicles. It was sold with a ‘Brucie bonus’ in the form of an invitation to the Cartier ‘Style at Lux’ Concours D’Elegance at the 2020 Goodwood Festival of Speed and innocently described as being perfect for simply “taking your extended family out to lunch” in.
On a flashier scale and also used by Mike Tyson in its later existence, The Steeple Times featured another of Prince Jefri’s Range Rovers in November 2019 when it was auctioned by H&H Classics in the UK. The 1994 Range Rover Classic LSE had been stretched by 40” and had its roof raised by 8” by Townley Cross Country Vehicles; it featured a lavish interior in oxblood Connolly hide, full electric centre division with glass panel; three rear seats (two electrically operated); full air conditioning; stereo/CD player and two remote control 8″ television monitors with a VHS recorder. The lavish limousine reportedly had cost £165,000 ($223,000) new or the equivalent of £351,000 ($474,000) today; it sold for just £33,200 ($45,000).
Unlike with the late Queen Elizabeth II’s former Range Rovers, those owned by alleged sex pest princes most definitely are not in the top league of car porn. A 2006 Land Rover Range Rover 4.2 Supercharged Vogue SE owned by the late monarch hammered down at the Iconic Auctioneers sale at Silverstone in August 2025 for an astonishing £175,500 ($237,000); an example without royal heritage is currently worth around £10,000 ($13,500).
Tiny, overpriced studio ‘flatlet’ lacking room to even swing a cat in somewhat ‘shady’ building opposite Harrods in Knightsbridge unsurprisingly remains on sale for the not so tiny sum of £250,000 after 3 years on the market reports Matthew Steeples
Prison cell-like 109 square foot ‘flatlet’ in Brompton Road, Knightsbridge for sale for staggering £250,000; national minimum allowable size for a flat since 2011 is 398 square foot.
Brompton Road is one of London’s most polluted roads; the Brompton Oratory, one of the highway’s main landmarks, was used as a ‘dead letter drop box’ by Soviet spies during the Cold War.
Nearby now defunct Brompton Road London Underground station became the control centre for the 26th(London) Anti-Aircraft Brigade during the Second World War.
Ritzy department store Harrods, directly opposite, stands on a 5 acre site and was sold to the Qatar Investment Authority for £1.5 billion by alleged abuser of 200 women Mohamed Al-Fayed in 2010.
Listed initially at £275,000 in December 2022 but now slashed to a still stupendous £250,000 after failing to get flogged, Grow Portfolio estate agents are hawking a minute and clearly overpriced 109 square foot studio flat in Brompton Road, Knightsbridge as a “fantastic base” and “excellent opportunity”. If the ask price were to be achieved, the vendor would earn themselves a very punchy return of £2,294 per square foot; the median average price for this part of London, SW3 has been a significantly lower £1,610 per square foot during 2025.
Offered on a lease of approximately 169 years and having a service charge of “approximately’ £1,000 per annum to include the assistance of a 24-hour concierge, a buyer will garner themselves a single room measuring 6 feet by 11’9” feet with a small adjoining shower room also. The 70 square foot room itself has tiled flooring, a window, a cupboard housing a microwave and cooking hob and a minute fold-down table also. There’s frankly nowt much else to say about it further than in November, the Evening Standard lauded its décor for being a “clinical white” achromatic scheme.
A floor plan shows the very limited scope of the accommodation offered. Tax dodging tennis legend Boris Becker produced a son after a ‘bonk’ in a broom cupboard at the Metropolitan Hotel; given his size now, he might struggle with such activity in this space today.It’s rare that a property can be entirely shown with just a single photo; in this case, it most definitely can.In this watercolour by Cyril Farey (1888 – 1954), which Manning Fine Art describe as “capturing Princes Court at its prime”, the golden era of a building is shown. The art dealers observe: “[This] is not merely an architectural drawing it is expressing a lifestyle that only an apartment in Princes Court can provide. As such the fashionable and modern apartment block is surrounded by a Mediterranean blue sky and Hyde Park peaks out from the sides as an Eden of lush green. The smart street is punctuated by smart, friendly, yellow awnings whilst classic, stylish cars and iconic London buses pass by.” The same cannot sadly be said of the setting today given this part of Brompton Road has become better known for housing hookers, Rolex robberies and chronic pollution.
Designed to “resemble an ocean liner” by architect George Valentine Myer (1883 – 1959) between 1934 and 1935, the building in which the studio flat is to be found, Princes Court at 88 Brompton Road, SW3 1ES, was originally named Knight’s Court. This large steel-framed block of 94 flats with 9 retail premises on the ground and first floors directly opposite Harrods began life as “a popular and exclusive place to live”, but in recent years has become more commonly used for Airbnbs and by ‘ladies (and gents) of a certain profession of the night’.
Of the apartment complex, a past resident complained to The Steeple Times: “I did not live there long as I could not even open the windows in the summer due to the pollution and traffic noise from supercars revving in the summer on the Brompton Road. The ‘bedroom banging activity’ from my clearly-a-hooker neighbour did not help me sleep at night either.”
No-longer-so-ritzy Princes Court previously hit the headlines in 2012 when an 84 square foot studio flat went on sale for £89,950, in 2021 when a 128 square foot offering sold for £325,000 and in 2022 when an 88 square foot studio – in spite of lacking even a lavatory and without any kind kitchen – was auctioned with a guide price of £175,000. A two bedroomed flat extending to 877 square feet on the ninth floor of the building is currently being touted by Harrods Estates at a guide price of £1.3 million.
Given the spoof website supporting the homeless charity Shelter that is the National Institute of Feline Orbital Studies (NIFOS) calculates that 78.54 square foot is required to swing an ‘average’ cat and that it would cost £158,180 to “buy enough space to swing a cat in SW3”, the 109 square foot flat offered by Grow Portfolio has not only not enough room to swing a cat, but would not even adhere to the government’s technical housing standards if it were a new build property. The minimum today required to meet regulations is 398 square foot, meaning that this poxy pad falls 72% short of that sum; these regulations do not apply to buildings constructed prior to 2011.
Fair warning to whoever purchases this ‘flatlet’ suitable only for someone seriously slim: In February 1988, an actual broom cupboard measuring 5’6” feet by 11 feet “with not even a cooker” in Princes Court sold for £36,500 (the equivalent of £102,500 today) during what Pete May termed an “obscene property boom” in his 2012 book Rent Boy. The self-professed “punk-turned-journalist who spent 20 years falling off the property ladder’ added: “Even I wouldn’t live in that. Yet it was recommended as a purchase for ‘those who like eating out’.”
Within months of the cupboard sale, the economy tanked and studio flats, given their limited appeal, were the very first properties to see their values plummet. In 2025, with Rachel Reeves ‘Queen of Thieves’ having her grubby mitts on the nation’s tiller, this is probably not the time to be shelling out £250,000 for what the “honest estate agent” and Brothel in Pimlico author Roy Brooks would have likely marketed as a ‘broom cupboard in a brothel building in Knightsbridge’. At this time, perhaps, ‘buyer best beware’ would better be borrowed.
Curious facts about Brompton Road
The area of ‘Brompton’ dates to the 15th century and originates from the name ‘Brokendon’ – meaning “a place near a brook”.
The road itself starts at Knightsbridge Underground station and ends at the crossroad intersection known as ‘Brompton Cross’ where Fulham Road begins. It is thought to have ‘officially’ first been designated as ‘Brompton Road’ in 1863 on land originally owned by the Moreaus, a wealthy French Huguenot family.
Brompton Road is one of London’s most polluted highways due to heavy traffic, especially from diesel vehicles. In 2013, the London Assembly claimed pedestrians were being “showered in dangerous airborne particles” on this road identified as having NO2 levels massively exceeding World Health Organization guidelines.
Between 1906 and 1934, passengers on the Piccadilly London Underground line were able to alight at Brompton Road tube station. It was closed due to being surprisingly little used, but served as the command centre of the 26th (London) Anti-Aircraft Brigade during the Second World War. During this period, the tunnels, subways and lift-shafts were adapted to provide bomb-proof accommodation and in 2014, the site was sold to Dmytro Firtash, a billionaire Ukrainian businessman for £53 million. His plans to convert the 28,000 square foot site into residential accommodation have still not come to fruition.
The best-known retail landmark on Brompton Road is Harrods department store. It stands on a site that covers an astounding 5 acres in total and includes 1.1 million square feet of retailing space.
Famous customers of the store, which first opened in its present form in 1894, have included Agatha Christie, Beatrix Potter, Oscar Wilde and Asma al-Assad, the wife of the former President of Syria. She used an alias to shop there in order to get around European Union sanctions that froze the assets of her and her husband.
In 1898, Harrods debuted Britain’s first ‘moving staircase’ (or what we now term an ‘escalator’). At the top, “nervous” customers were offered brandy to revive them from the “ordeal” of their ride, The Drapers’ Record reported at the time.
Harrods was bombed by the IRA in 1983 and 1993. The first attack killed 6 people and the second injured 4.
The store was bought by the now late alleged serial sex offender Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1985. The ‘Phony Pharaoh’, as the Egyptian was nicknamed, is said to have abused at least 200 women on the premises during his ownership. He sold the business to the Qatar Investment Authority for an astounding £1.5 billion in 2010 and died in 2023 without ever having been brought to justice.
In 2022, Apple opened a store on the road in what was once the Brompton Arcade. It is staffed by over 200 employees, or as the tech giant prefers to call them – team members.
Another major landmark, and a building like Harrods complete with a dome, is the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This Catholic parish church is better known as the Brompton Oratory and also referenced as the London Oratory.
Consecrated in 1884, the church was where ‘Master of Suspense’ Sir Alfred Hitchcock married Alma Reville in 1933 and it is said to have inspired Nick Cave to write the song Brompton Oratory in 1997.
During the Cold War, this ornately decorated church was used as a ‘dead letter drop’ (or ‘DLD’ to those in the know) by Soviet agents in Britain. Spies would visit the church and place documents and microfilm behind one of the pillars for later collection by their compatriots; the location suited given the building’s proximity to the Russian embassy and as Harrods was a suitable rabbit warren for losing a tail if they thought they were being followed.
Standing behind the Brompton Oratory and accessed from Brompton Road is Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. ‘HTB Brompton’, as it is now generally referenced, stands on a site of 3.5 acres and is now one of the primary sites for the teaching of the Alpha course programme that focuses on “the evangelization of the nations, the revitalization of the church and the transformation of society.’
Further photographs of the £250,000 Princes Court flatlet
The kitchen facilities would not exactly excite Gordon Ramsay.The shower room is modern and clean; there’s not much further to say further than that.Both the shower room and ‘studio’ room have windows; a ‘Brucie bonus’ for sure.A view of the ‘studio’ towards the door; most prison cells are bigger than the space offered here.If you bought the studio offered and needed to host a visitor, you could do so in the lobby of Princes Court. It’s got seating and space aplenty in comparison to the ‘flatlet’ itself.Princes Court (here partly shrouded in scaffolding) is literally opposite Harrods, undoubtedly one of the most famous department stores in the world.The rear of Princes Court with Harrods department store behind and the store’s former depository, now apartments also, to the right.
A previously not-seen-in-public Jeffrey Epstein 1990s address book – last sold for £400 in December 2020 on eBay – is about to be offered for sale at auction; it is estimated to fetch as much as £800,000 and one is left asking: “Will someone really pay so much to keep this out of the public eye?”
An American auction house in Chesapeake City, Maryland that has previously hammered down macabre items including one of the monstrous maniac Adolf Hitler’s watches for £881,000 ($1.1 million, €1 million or درهم4 million) and his personal Führerbunker telephone handset for £160,000 ($200,000, €186,000 or درهم735,000) is about to attempt sell one of the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous address books later this month.
Curiously found on a Manhattan sidewalk in the late 1990s and last sold in December 2020 on eBay for just £400 ($500, €465 or درهم,1,800), the price sought for the diary concerned is yet to be revealed. Bill Panagopulos, owner of selling representatives Alexander Historical Auctions, did, however, tell The Daily Beast:
“There are no comparables for the sale of this kind of relic, but based on my experience, if I pressed to offer a price, I would think it be £80,000 to £160,000 ($100,000 to $200,000, €93,000 to €186,000 or درهم367,000 to درهم735,000), and up.”
Going further in comments to The Times, Panagopulos added of the address book:
“This criminal relic undoubtedly still has many stories to tell those who want to do the digging. Jeffrey Epstein was the epitome of evil and this book should be forever kept as evidence of his awful crimes.”
“It could fetch as little as £40,000 ($50,000, €47,000 or درهم184,000) or as much as £801,000 ($1 million, €930,000 or درهم3.7 million).”
“Why? There is so much confidential information, so much potential for new revelations within the book, that I believe there may be someone out there who will buy it simply to make it ‘disappear.’”
The 1990s Jeffrey Epstein address book offered and an example page (with redactions). Imagery of other pages of the 64-page document is being kept hidden only to those prepared to travel to Chesapeake City, Maryland to view it at the premises of Alexander Historical Auctions in an attempt to increase the item’s value.How the address book came to end up on a New York sidewalk in the late 1990s is one question that remains unanswered; whether someone will be prepared to spend £800,000 to get it and keep it out of the public domain is another.The Jeffrey Epstein 1990s address book was last sold on eBay for just £400 and thus one is left wondering if it really is going to attract the punchy sums mentioned by Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Historical Auctions.Alexander Historical Auctions previously hammered down one of Adolf Hitler’s reversible watches for the staggering sum of £881,000 ($1.1 million, €1 million or درهم4 million). There are still, clearly, some very warped fans of this monstrous maniac in existence.They also achieved a price of £160,000 ($200,000, €186,000 or درهم735,000) for Adolf Hitler’s personal Führerbunker telephone handset. The purchaser, most definitely, wasn’t planning on using that for E.T. to phone home.
The address book – which was last sold on eBay for just £400 ($500, €465 or درهم,1,800) in December 2020 to a “graduate student living on a farm in Vermont” – is believed to date to 1997 and is thus a far earlier record than the much mentioned 2004 ‘Epstein Little Black Book’ that was used during the federal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. It features a “handwritten annotation,” according to a July 2021 report by Business Insider’s Angela Wang, that is dated 1st October 1997.
The item offered was found in the “mid-1990s” [surely late 1990s, we’d counter] on a pavement on New York’s Fifth Avenue by a musician named Denise Ondayko . She is said to have “picked it up out of curiosity,” according to The Sun, and “put the book in storage.” It was supposedly not until 2020 that she realised that the item “may have links to Epstein.”
In her article, Wang detailed much more about the book’s provenance than is described in the current listingon the Alexander Historical Auctions website. She observed:
“If legitimate, the 1997 book purchased on eBay would provide a window into Epstein’s social circle at least seven years before the era captured by the 2004 book. Its format was remarkably similar to the 2004 book, with detailed entries for long-known Epstein associates, as well as many names never publicly connected to Epstein before.”
“The address book’s unconventional provenance prompted skepticism — but Insider found initial interviews with both the Vermont man and the eBay seller to be credible. The seller [Ondayko], a self-described ‘enigmatic rock chick’ living in Manhattan’s East Village, had found it on Fifth Avenue in the 1990s and kept it as a souvenir, intrigued by the famous names listed inside. She rediscovered the book while cleaning out her storage unit [in 2020], and after realising it belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, sold it on eBay after a friend suggested it could be worth some money.”
“Insider took extensive steps to verify the authenticity of the book, beginning with outreach to those listed inside. We extracted the text from a scanned copy of the book and organized its entries into a searchable database; a comparison with Epstein’s previously known little black book found that the 1990s address book contained 221 unique names and 128 that appeared in both books.”
“In total, Insider reached out to four dozen prominent individuals who had never previously been tied to Epstein. More than a dozen told Insider on the record that they had crossed paths with Epstein in the 1990s.”
“To rule out the possibility that the address book was a forgery, Insider hired a forensic document examiner to investigate the book, driving to retrieve the book in Vermont, where we filmed an interview with its most recent owner for a forthcoming mini-documentary. The document examiner concluded that the book dated to the mid-to-late 1990s and had not been altered.”
“‘I’m confident that the book is circa 1995 to 2000,’ the document examiner told Insider. His investigation involved studying both the book’s physical characteristics, which included a distinctive binding strip manufactured in the 1990s, as well as its contents, including entries that contained a Palm Beach area code that was retired in 1996.”
“In addition to seeking the opinion of a forensic examiner, Insider spoke to sources who could corroborate accounts of the book’s discovery. A longtime friend of the eBay seller told Insider that she recalls looking through the book in her Manhattan apartment in the 1990s.”
“While the book bears no inscription definitively identifying it as belonging to Epstein, it does contain an extraordinarily detailed directory of more than 80 phone numbers associated with the sprawling estates in Manhattan, West Palm Beach, New Mexico, and Ohio that Epstein owned in the early 1990s. It includes numbers for more than a dozen vehicles, a horse stable, a bunkhouse, dedicated lines for internet modems, and phone and beeper numbers for many known Epstein staff members.”
“Notably missing are his Paris apartment, purchased in 2002, and his private island, Little Saint James, acquired in 1998 — both of which appear in Epstein’s later address book. The Rolodex, however, does contain an entry for Diane Cummin – misspelled as ‘Diane Cummings’ – then-wife of financier Arch Cummin, who owned Little Saint James prior to its sale to Epstein. The book also lists detailed entries for Epstein’s relatives, whose addresses matched residences listed in public records searches.”
“The history of this criminal relic is fascinating… The 64pp. page book measures 4.5 x 5.25 in. and is Gestetner-bound in black plastic. The entries are printed reproductions, likely reduced in size to accommodate this rather small binding. There are 386 printed entries with two additional entries penned in a childlike hand on the last page, very similar to Epstein’s hand but the sample is too small for us to warrant this as fact. They vary in length from only a few lines to over 10-15 lines or more each, and each of these entries may have several more names included within.”
“Additionally, 94 names bear black, hand-applied checkmarks, and five have been highlighted in yellow. All five names, including that of Donald Trump, are well-recognised financial and industrial figures. The significance of the checked and highlighted names is unknown.”
“The details included in the vast majority of the entries are most extensive: Epstein not only includes the name, address and telephone number of his contact, but in most cases also adds other residential addresses and numbers, contact information for family members, secretaries, immediate employees, and associates of the individual, cell phone and pager numbers, and in at least one instance, a contact’s girlfriend’s number. There is also a good deal of information hinting at Epstein’s sordid past.”
“Of the 1,731 names contained in the two volumes together, 221 appear in our earlier [1990s] book but do not appear in the circa 2004 book.”
“The book may be examined by appointment at our offices upon two days’ notice. No copies nor photographs are permitted.”
Bidding opens on 15th May and ends on the 15th June and on 16th June, the top two bidders will be “offered an opportunity to make a final offer.”
EXCLUSIVE –As £668,000 is sliced off the price of Ghislaine Maxwell and Scott Borgerson’s former home (and an ‘open house’ is arranged at ‘Maxwell House’), here is a perfect outing for those that want to take a gander at such features as their sick ‘party shower’ this May
Ghislaine Maxwell, if truth be known, ain’t going anywhere. Confined to the clink for 20 years and likely facing action over her non-payment of around £3 million in legal bills owed to date, the mucky madam (and/or her ex-husband Scott Borgerson) has decided to cut the price of her former home in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.
True crime fans will no doubt flock to the couple’s creepy crib that day and for them, most definitely, the highlight will be the chance to take a gander at a ‘party shower’ installed there. Of this bizarre ‘extra,’ in July 2019, a “pal” and neighbour told The Sun on Sunday: “The house did have one unusual feature – a huge shower. It had Wi-Fi so they could control it from their phones, a steam unit, the whole nine yards. It was like a party shower. You can imagine what they got up to in there.”
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.
One of the 5.3 bathrooms at 301 Summer Street features a shower the size of a studio flat. It is quite the contrast to the bathroom at Miss Maxwell’s former Kinnerton Street home where Virginia Roberts Giuffre claims she was forced into sexual relations with the Duke of York in 2001 – a room which we were able to prove she talked nonsense about when she claimed the bathtub “too small for any activity whatsoever” when we exclusively published photographs of it in January 2022. Of this bathroom, in July 2019, a “pal” and neighbour told ‘The Sun on Sunday’: “The house did have one unusual feature – a huge shower. It had Wi-Fi so they could control it from their phones, a steam unit, the whole nine yards. It was like a party shower. You can imagine what they got up to in there.” It has not been confirmed as to whether Prince Andrew ever got to try this particularly opulent shower area out.That the sitting room of Ghislaine Maxwell and Scott Borgerson’s one-time ‘together home’ has a gun above the fireplace is somewhat creepy given the former wife Rebecca Borgerson’s allegations that her former husband was “verbally and physically abusive” to her. The furnishings in the room, equally, are somewhat curious – the ‘prison orange’ sofa is especially apt given where Ghislaine Maxwell now finds herself.The Cape Ann seaside home that was bought by Scott Borgerson and Ghislaine Maxwell in June 2015 through Tidewood LLC, a limited liability company, stands above a rocky outcrop looking out to sea. It has a plaque on it that reads: “The Phippen Smith House, 1660. House originally at 9 Elm Street in Salem, deconstructed here in 1917 and reconstructed on its current site in 1930.”Incarcerated sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell with her since dead ex-lover and associate Jeffrey Epstein (left). The latter died by apparent ‘suicide’ on 10th August 2019 in prison awaiting trial whilst the latter took up with submarine pilot Scott Borgerson, supposedly married him in 2016, but curiously did not tell her very own siblings of this union until after her 2020 arrest. They are now divorced, but they most likely still have matters still to resolve.
Then & Now – How Maxwell and Borgerson changed ‘The Phippen-Smith House’ – Images from the June 2016 listing and images from the February 2022 listing
Then and now – The entrance elevation of 301 Summer Street from its driveway in 2016 (left) and in the 2022 listing imagery. The building does not look especially well kept or maintained in either image.Then and now – Supposedly vegan Ghislaine Maxwell and her beefy now ex-husband Scott Borgerson relocated the house’s kitchen into a space that the previous owners had used as a sitting and dining area and moved a window to accommodate a very large Sub Zero Wolf type oven. Their menacing choice of black and white tiling most certainly wouldn’t appear to more ‘homely’ cooks such as condescending cakebaker Dame Mary Berry DBE, cocaine crackpot The Honourable Nigella Lawson and “let’s be havin’ ya” yeller Delia Smith CH CBE.Then and now – The original kitchen may have been somewhat like that seen in the home of Hyacinth Bucket’s in the 1990s BBC series ‘Keeping Up Appearances,’ but the Borgerson-Maxwell version can only be surmised as having a “clinically cold look.”Then and now – A dining room with somewhat strange wallpaper in 2016 has been redecorated in a style that looks more like an office where Ricky Gervais might feel at home. The painting on the right-hand wall perhaps might have some kind of connection with Ghislaine Maxwell’s charity Oceana and her supposed number one passion (other than sex trafficking minors), the oceans.Then and now – Surprisingly, Maxwell and Borgerson did actually brighten up the hallway and staircase area of the home with a fresh white look. Again, however, one is left asking what strange extra-curricular activities the oars on the walls might have been used for.Then and now – Mr and Mrs Borgerson plainly liked the ‘vomit green’ colour in this room and made few changes here.Then and now – The previously traditionally styled master bedroom, however, got a full-on makeover and extension and sliding doors that’d look more suited to a residence in the oligarch hideout that is One Hyde Park.Then and now – What Americans call a ‘deck’ and what Brits might term a ‘terrace’ was subjected to a complete B&Q style makeover by Mr and Mrs Borgerson. The garden beyond now looks like a totally neglected wilderness. Mate of royals and TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh MBE most certainly would be less than impressed.Then and now – Maxwell and Borgerson tore off the traditionally appropriate colonial-style detailing at the rear of 301 Summer Street and plonked on what looks like a portacabin. Good taste and respect for architectural heritage and this couple most definitely are not in unity.
The Names, Dates & Numbers – Ghislaine Maxwell and Scott Borgerson and ‘The Phippen-Smith House’, 301 Summer Street, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Cape Ann, Essex County, Massachusetts, MA 01944, United States of America
9th May 2023 – Price of 301 Summer Street, Manchester-by-the-Sea reduced to £4.70 million ($5.85 million, €5.35 million or درهم21.48 million), Mansion Global reported.
Of this, the property publication remarked: “Mr Borgerson, a tech entrepreneur, couldn’t be reached for comment.” They also claimed: “Though the pair lived together at the home for a ‘brief time’ before Ms Maxwell’s arrest in 2020, she has no ownership stake in the home.”
The listing remains with Ryan Clunan and Tracy Campion of Campion & Company Fine Homes Real Estate and an ‘open house’ on 21st May has been arranged between 1pm and 3pm; a perfect outing for those wishing to take an eyeball at Mr Borgerson and Miss Maxwell’s ‘party shower.’
Late 2022 to early 2023 – Scott Borgerson and Ghislaine Maxwell complete their divorce. How their assets were split is unknown, but it is believed that Mr Borgerson walked away with a substantial stash of anything that remains from money made during their ‘secret’ (until Maxwell’s 2020 arrest) union.
Given that Maxwell remains a wicked woman incapable of accepting that taking at least £16.4 million ($20 million, €18.6 million or درهم73.5 million) from the since croaked paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was a totally unacceptable thing to do, goodness knows what became of the clearly vast funds likely hidden away by her possibly in the Channel Islands, Lichtenstein, Panama and elsewhere.
26th March 2022 – A beady-eyed reader supplies The Steeple Times with the current listing brochure for 301 Summer Street complete with up-to-date imagery of the house. It shows how Borgerson and Maxwell well and truly have made an utter mess of what was a previously charming residence.
March 2022 – The real estate website Realtor.com suggests the house to currently be worth a significantly lower sum and estimates its value at just £2.45 million ($3.235 million, €2.945 million or درهم11.88 million).
February 2022 – 301 Summer Street, Manchester-by-the-Sea is listed for sale for £5.368 million ($7.295 million, €6.443 million or درهم26.791 million) by Campion And Company. The firm, however, do not include a public listing of the property on its site and they do not include any current photographs of the house.
29th December 2021 – Ghislaine Maxwell – who has variously shown her decided deviancy by faking photos and using pseudonyms including ‘Jennifer Ellmax,’ ‘Jen Marshall,’ ‘Janet Marshall,’ ‘Mrs Scott Borgerson’ and just plain old ‘G’ – is found guilty on five out of six of the charges she had faced. Her husband was not present for the verdict and left his wife to face being sent down alone and with just her brothers and sisters to support the by now convicted child sex trafficker.
29th November 2021 – Ghislaine Maxwell goes on trial at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Her husband did not attend on a single day of that trial.
2nd July 2020 – Ghislaine Maxwell is arrested at Tuckedaway.
In the weeks after her arrest, as she unsurprisingly unsuccessfully sought bail, Maxwell claimed via her lawyers that the “majority of her assets” had been transferred into a “trust controlled by her husband and another unnamed party.”
In documents submitted to the courts, they put her their worth at £17.1 million ($22.5 million, €20.5 million or درهم82.6 million) and suggested: “For Ms Maxwell to flee, she would have to abandon her spouse. She will not isk destroying the lives and financial well-being of those she holds most dear to live as a fugitive during a worldwide pandemic.”
Going further, they added: “In fact, every action Ms Maxwell has taken from the time of Epstein’s arrest up to the time of the first bail hearing was designed to protect her spouse… from harassment, economic harm, and physical danger. If Ms. Maxwell were to violate her bail conditions, which she has no intention of doing… she would be leaving her spouse…with virtually nothing.”
In a letter to Judge Alison J. Nathan, Mr Borgerson added: “The person described in the criminal charges is not the person we know. I have never witnessed anything close to inappropriate with Ghislaine. Quite to the contrary, the Ghislaine I know is a wonderful and loving person… I believe that Ghislaine had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes.”
13th December 2019 – Ghislaine Maxwell purchases Tuckedaway, 338 East Washington Road, Bradford, New Hampshire, NH 03221 for £787,953 ($1,070,750, €945,752 or درهم3.93 million) via Jennifer Johnson and Margaret Weathers of Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty. The house had been listed at a price of £879,000 ($1.195 million, €1.055 million or درهم4.389 million) in March that year and sold previously for £773,000 ($1.050 million, €927,000 million or درهم3.856 million) on 15th December 2017.
Mid-late 2019 – Maxwell is said to have “fallen foul” of locals and left Manchester-by-the-Sea. An alleged sighting of her in Los Angeles followed in August 2019 when she was snapped at an In-N-Out Burger restaurant in Los Angeles, California. The photographs were proven to be fake as advertising on hoardings in the background had never been at that location. Her associate Leah Saffian, whose dog appeared in one of the images, has never explained her role in this skulduggery.
10th August 2019 – Jeffrey Epstein dies by supposed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York. He had previously supposedly attempted suicide on 23rd July 2019 whilst sharing a cell with alleged quadruple killer cop Nicholas Tartaglione.
6th July 2019 – Jeffrey Epstein is arrested after his private jet lands at Teterboro Airport, New Jersey.
15th June 2019 – The Cash & Rocket Rally ends in Monte Carlo. Miss Maxwell was clearly especially keen to avoid being photographed. She was subsequently not seen again in public until her trial commenced on 29th November 2021.
13th June 2019 – The mucky madam sets off from London on the car rally in an Alfa Romeo with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s wife Annette (known as ‘Nettie’ to her chums). They travel first to Paris and then go via Geneva to Monte Carlo.
12th June 2019 – Maxwell and Borgerson are named in court documents concerning a case between Tidewood LLC and John Appel, Katherine Rive and Curtis Hollingsworth regarding a property dispute concerning their shorefront access. In due course, on 11th March 2020, judgment was found in favour of the plaintiff.
During this particular London visit, Miss Maxwell met with her six living siblings Anne, Kevin, Isabel, Christine, Philip and Ian to remember her late pension pot plundering father on 10th June 2019 on what would have been his 96th birthday. She also supposedly went to Buckingham Palace for tea with the man who subsequently paid £12 million ($15.8 million, €14.4 million or درهم58.2 million) to a woman he supposedly never met (but emailed Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-lover about), Prince Andrew.
30th June 2016 – The Phippen-Smith House is sold to Tidewood LLC, a limited liability company controlled by Ghislaine Maxwell’s “secret husband,” for £1.802 million ($2.450 million, €2.164 million or درهم8.998 million). The couple are said to have spent £1.8 million ($2.5 million, €2.2 million or درهم9.2 million) on renovations in the years since that included the installation of many security cameras. During the purchase process, Maxwell is said to have used the pseudonym ‘Jennifer Ellmax.’
April 2016 – Ghislaine Maxwell sells her Upper East Side, New York townhouse for £11 million ($15 million, €13.2 million or درهم55.1 million) and “disappeared.” She had originally bought that property in 2015 for £12.4 million ($16.9 million, €14.9 million or درهم62.1 million).
Date unknown in 2016 – Scott Borgerson marries Ghislaine Maxwell. She eventually revealed she was married to her until then “secret husband” in court in December 2020 to the surprise of the world and her own brothers and sisters even.
20th June 2015 – Rebecca Borgerson files for divorce from her then husband. She cited “irreconcilable differences.” The couple had married in 2001 and had two children together.
15th June 2014 – Scott Borgerson is charged with the assault and domestic battery of his then wife Rebecca Borgerson.
2014 – Ghislaine Maxwell meets her future husband at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland whilst married to his then first wife.
Burgh Island in South Devon, where Agatha Christie wrote several novels and The Beatles stayed also, goes on sale for the staggering sum of £15 million
Described as “the best hotel west of The Ritz” by its current owner Giles Fuchs, a favourite South Devon bolthole of Agatha Christie has just come up for sale for £15 million. It was here that the ‘Queen of Crime’ had her own writer’s retreat and where also that she was inspired to pen both And Then There Were None and Evil Under The Sun.
Burgh Island is situated just 820-feet from the mainland and is approachable by foot at low tide and accessible by a sea tractor at high tide; it also has a helipad for those wishing to make a grand entrance. Though 3 hours from London Paddington by train, those that have visited in the past – amongst them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Sir Winston Churchill and J. M. W. Turner even – supposedly returned again and again captivated, like Christie, by its seclusion and beauty.
The 21-acre island – which has gone through several name changes itself and was once known as St Michael’s Island – was the inspiration for Christie’s fictional ‘Soldier Island’ in a novel titled Ten Little Niggers when it was first published in 1939. The 272-page book was subsequently retitled Ten Little Indians and then And Then There Were None because of concerns about offending – even prior to the arrival of ‘wokery’ and ‘cancel culture’ – the American market.
The strategy worked as to this day, the novel became both the best-selling crime and the best-selling mystery novel of all-time. Critics enthuse of what is a brilliantly warped yet rationally believable psychological thriller that follows the story of eight people invited to an isolated private island to meet their ultimate demise alongside their two caretaker hosts at a house party from hell. Unsurprisingly, since Christie produced a version for the stage in 1943, there have been more adaptations for that medium as well as for film, radio and television adaptations than of any of her other works.
A clear work of genius in both plot and the financial returns it generated for its author, And Then There Were None was actually structured around an 1869 minstrel song titled Ten Little Niggers by the British songwriter Frank Green. The rhyme – as published for these politically correct times where even future editions of Roald Dahl’s book will no longer feature the adjective ‘fat’ – reads:
Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.
Nine little Soldier Boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight.
Eight little Soldier Boys travelling in Devon; One said he’d stay there and then there were seven.
Seven little Soldier Boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in halves and then there were six.
Six little Soldier Boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.
Five little Soldier Boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four.
Four little Soldier Boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.
Three little Soldier Boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two.
Two little Soldier Boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one.
One little Soldier Boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.
Whilst today’s visitors to the “comprehensively refurbished,” Grade II listed, 25-bedroom Burgh Island Hotel certainly are unlikely to face the unhappy endings of Christie’s ten unfortunates, they are able to enjoy “fine dining” at its two restaurants, and cocktails in its Palm Court bar. One can quite easily imagine Hercule Poirot sleuthing in or at the island’s 14th century pub, The Pilchard Inn. In addition, there is what is called the ‘Mermaid Pool’ – a naturally enclosed body of seawater where guests can swim or if, in the unlikely event they’d take a break from Dubai, perhaps ‘Wagatha Christie’ Coleen Rooney could witness Rebekah Vardy ‘Davy Jones-ing’ her mobile telephone for a second time even.
Of this “iconic landmark” – which a company ultimately controlled by Mr Fuchs paid around £5 million for in 2018 – selling agents Knight Frank enthused in their marketing material:
“The private island setting is virtually unique in the UK and the hotel, which has been fully restored, is one of the finest examples of working Art Deco architecture in Europe.”
“Burgh Island is a natural micro-environment, with wildlife to observe and cliff walks around the circumference. The sandy tidal beach on the eastern (mainland-facing) side is washed by the tide twice daily and so is always clean.”
Whilst the realty firm lauds total sales of in excess of £6 million for the year ending 2022, Agatha Christie actually best surmises why Mr Fuchs is seek to sell: “The best of an island is once you get there – you can’t go any farther… You’ve come to the end of things.” This week PlymouthLive revealed his company, Office Space in Town Limited (OSiT), “has debts of £130 million and is paying nearly £7 million in interests on its loans each year… [It] has borrowed huge sums and is relying on London property prices to remain stable in order to avoid breaching covenant terms which would mean loans having to be immediately repaid and potentially leading to the business going bust.”
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.
Pictured Top – The island, hotel and The Pilchard Inn (top left); David Suchet as Poirot filmed ‘Evil Under The Sun’ there in 2001 (bottom left) and the island’s most famous visitor, Dame Agatha Christie DBE (right).
The island is being marketed by Knight Frank at a staggering price of £15 million after being sold last in 2018 for £5 million and prior for £2 million in 2001. The hotel includes 25 en-suite guest bedrooms and suites as well as the Ballroom Restaurant (64 covers), the Nettlefold Restaurant (72 covers), the Palm Court bar and lounge (42 covers) and The Pilchard Inn (35 internal and 114 external covers). There is also a billiards room, sauna and treatment room, a staff house with 9 bedrooms, a car park on the mainland with 18 spaces and a helipad. The property is offered on a freehold basis.Dame Agatha Christie DBE (1890 – 1976) remains to this day the world’s best-selling crime author. She penned 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play, ‘The Mousetrap.’ Over a billion copies of her works in the English language and a billion in translation have been sold; most notable are ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ ‘Death on the Nile,’ ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ and ‘The A. B. C. Murders.’‘And Then There Were None’ began life as ‘Ten Little Niggers’ and via being ‘Ten Little Indians’ gained its present title to suit the American market. Christie claimed it was the most difficult of her books to write, but it is also one of her most popular – over 100 million copies have been sold and the work stands as the sixth best-selling title (any language, including reference works) of all-time.‘Evil Under The Sun’ (1931) – which features an investigation into the murder of a flirtatious but not liked woman who is murdered whilst on holiday in Devon –remains one of Christie’s most popular works. It has been adapted multiple times and became a feature film in 1982 with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. In 2001, David Suchet played the detective in a version with alterations including the addition of the characters of Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon – none of whom appear in the original novel. A PC game version of the story has even been made and in 1999, John Moffat played Poirot for a BBC Radio 4 adaptation. Here, the cast are seen getting into Burgh Island’s famous sea-tractor during filming.Roguish antiques dealer Lovejoy (Ian McShane) and his eccentric sidekick Tinker (Dudley Sutton) brought a new era of drama to Burgh Island when they filmed an episode there titled ‘Somewhere – Over the Rainbow?’ It was first shown in October 1994 and featured them going there to save Tinker’s financially strapped sister and her wheelchair-bound husband (presented as owners of the hotel) from losing it to a greedy property developer. The key to the story is finding a treasure trove hidden there by a notorious smuggler centuries earlier.Self-made multi-millionaire Giles Fuchs is the current owner of Burgh Island. He began his career as an estate agent, claims to have invested more than £1 million renovating the hotel to turn into something that looks “pretty spectacular.” He doubled the number of staff on site, brought in Mark Mosimann, son of King Charles III’s favourite chef, Anton Mosimann, and also bought accommodation on the mainland for some of the hotel’s workers to live in. In July 2020, he described the hotel as “like a house party” and the island as “beautiful” in comments to ‘Great British Life’ magazine.
The ‘Famous Face’ Guest List – Burgh Island, Bigbury-on-Sea, South Devon, TQ7 4BG, United Kingdom (Formerly Known As St Michael’s Island, Borough Island And Bur Island)
Dancer and singer Josephine Baker.
Musicians The Beatles – The band stayed there before playing a concert in nearby Plymouth.
World speed record holder Malcolm Campbell.
Agatha Christie – The prolific author is described as having made the island “her second home” and wrote And Then There Were None (1939) and Evil Under The Sun (1941) there. A beach hut was built for her to use as a “writer’s retreat.”
Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill – The politician supposedly met with President Dwight Eisenhower there prior to D-Day.
Flamboyant actor, playwright and singer Noël Coward – He supposedly booked in for three days, but stayed for three weeks and clearly very much enjoyed A Room With A View.
Shipping heiress, socialite and muse Nancy Cunard.
Odeon cinema chain founder Oscar Deutsche – The businessman travelled to the island with his wife and companion, World War One fighter ace Sol Joseph, in the latter’s Ford V8 Pilot just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Actor and singer-songwriter George Formby – He is said to have been viewed as “the cheeky northern chappie who proudly picknicked on Bigbury Beach” during his visit who “guests didn’t know what to make of.”
Aviator Amy Johnson.
Actress Gertrude Lawrence.
Designer of the Spitfire R. J. Mitchell.
Last Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten of Burma.
Artist J. M. W. Turner – The painter was “cast ashore during rough weather and ‘with a pencil, clambered nearly to the summit of the island’ to sketch its wilderness.”
Renegade royals The Duke and Duchess of Windsor – Said to have travelled to the islands on “frequent occasions” with their aide-de-camp Major Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe.
In 1926, Christie disappeared from her home in Berkshire for 11 days. Mayhem and a manhunt worthy of her murder mystery books followed. Surprisingly, she didn’t choose to head to Burgh Island, but maybe that would have made her too easy to find given her love of the place. The reason for her decision to ‘vanish’ remains hotly contested today and this indeed will likely forever remain in the realms of the debate over who Jack the Ripper was – a case forever unsolved.
The Dates, Developments & Numbers – Burgh Island’s History
May 2023 – Placed for sale for £15 million ($18.8 million, €17.2 million or درهم69 million) through agents Matthew Smith and Henry Jackson of Knight Frank.
Commenting of the sale, Giles Fuchs told Plymouth Live: “Ownership of the Burgh Island Hotel has provided me with a wonderful journey and given me the true privilege of restoring and enhancing one of the most treasured tourist assets in the UK over the past few years. What we have achieved is an immense source of pride for all of us who have been involved and, in our work, we have always tried to ensure that the hotel’s 1920s spirit remains just as vibrant in the 2020s.”
Speaking to The Caterer, Matthew Smith of Knight Frank added: “It is rare for a hotel of such character and heritage to come to the open market.
“In recent years the buildings have received considerable investment and operates as a thriving business which generated in excess of £6 million ($7.5 million, €6.9 million or درهم27.6 million) turnover in its most recent financial year.”
“This is a unique opportunity to acquire a truly iconic hotel that benefits from a number of value-add opportunities to further develop the trading performance, and will no doubt appeal to a global investor audience.”
February 2023 – Plymouth Live reported on rumours about the hotel being for sale for £9 million ($11.3 million, €10.3 million or درهم41.4 million) after an advertisement appeared on Knight Frank’s website for a “mystery property” matching the description of it. Responding at the time, Henry Jackson of Knight Frank stated: “Burgh Island is not on the market. I don’t know where these rumours come from. At the time, the PR firm representing the hotel, Sapience Communications, added: “We have nothing additional to add.”
December 2022 – Planning permission granted for 12 additional guest bedrooms and suites and 13 staff bedrooms by South Hams District Council. Approval was also granted for extension of two of the restaurants and a spa facility.
This redevelopment, BBC News recently reported, will cost £7 million to £10 million ($8.8 million to $12.5 million, €8 million to €11.5 million or درهم32.2 million to درهم45.9 million) and of it, Mr Fuchs observed:
“I’m not the man for that job because once you start that, you need to do the whole thing. It’s also a substantial amount of cash and I don’t want to find [it], thanks very much.”
“We’ve got a big business in London and I could divert funds but the hotel was always about a love story; it was saving something that had been around for years that our family fell in love with.
“To divert more funds doesn’t make any sense to us. We want to buy more buildings in London.”
“She’s a demanding mistress and I ended up getting more and more involved at the expense of my life and other businesses, [but] I’m really pleased we’ve turned it around.”
Autumn 2021 – Burgh Island Limited accounts valued the business at £9.5 million ($11.9 million, €10.9 million or درهم43.7 million). At the time, profits of £296,000 ($370,000, €339,000 or درهم1.4 million) were listed down from £336,000 ($420,000, €385,000 or درهم1.5 million) in 2020.
The company was reported as employing 63 people with a wage bill of £1.6 million ($2 million, €1.8 million or درهم7.4 million). It paid dividends of £2 million ($2.5 million, €2.3 million or درهم9.2 million).
Mid 2018 – Sold by then owners Deborah Clark and Tony Orchard to Office Space in Town Ltd (OSiT), a company ultimately controlled by a London based businessman named Giles Fuchs and his sister Nichola, for a sum of £5 million ($6.3 million, €X million or درهم23 million).
January 2018 – Valued by estate agents Savills at £8.64 million ($10.81 million, €9.90 million or درهم39.69 million).
2012 – Singer-songwriter Ben Howard named his EP after the island.
2003 – The then owners closed the public footpaths on the island; this move was reversed in 2006 other than the routes closest to the hotel.
2002 – Used as a location for the television adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under The Sun.
2001 – Sold for £2 million ($2.5 million, €2.3 million or درهم9.2 million).
2001 – Used as the location of a television adaptation of Evil Under The Sun starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot.
2001 and 2008 – Used as the location for ITV’s GMTV show Inch-loss Island.
1994 – Used as the location for an episode of the BBC series Lovejoy titled ‘Somewhere – Over the Rainbow?’
1987 – Used as a location in the BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: Nemesis.
1986 – Sold to a couple named Tony and Beatrice Porter, who “faithfully restored it to its former Art Deco glory.”
1965 – Used as a location for the film Catch Me If You Can.
1950s – Renovated, but instead of being used as a hotel became self-catering accommodation.
1939 – 1945 – Used by the RAF as a recovery centre for wounded RAF personnel. During this period, the top two floors of the main building suffered damaged after a direct hit by a bomb.
1927 – Sold to the filmmaker Archibald Nettlefold. He constructed a more substantial 25-room hotel in the Art Deco style in 1929 and after it became popular in the 1930s, added improvements and extensions in 1932 including ‘The Captain’s Cabin’ – it had been taken from HMS Ganges, a warship built in 1821.
1890s – Purchased by the music hall star George H. Chirgwin. He built a prefabricated wooden house to use for weekend parties.
14th century – The Pilchard Inn, the ‘local’ hostelry, is constructed circa 1336. It is believed to have begun life as guest lodgings for a monastery that possibly stood on the site of the current hotel.
Iron Age to Sub-Roman period – First settlers, tin traders, believed to have arrived.
More Images Of Burgh Island…
The approach to Burgh Island at low tide.Many people approach on foot; there are also a number of footpaths for visitors to enjoy once they get to the island.For guests of the hotel, there is a sea tractor they can travel on. Those that have experienced this wonderful contraption have commented on how much they have enjoyed the journey back and forth to and from the mainland.The gates to the hotel are suitably reflective of the Art Deco style of the property.The building is striking and one can certainly see what attracted the likes of Agatha Christie to it and the island.The Palm Court features a restored circular skylight. It is stunning and this is certainly a place where one can imagine such people as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Nancy Cunard sipping martinis there of an evening whilst looking out to sea.One of two restaurants in the main hotel. The Nettlefold offers menus that are said to reflect the “uniquely wild island location.”The second, The Grand Ballroom, is a fine dining restaurant that is lauded as serving “award-winning food” in a setting that is styled around the “grandeur of a bygone era.”The guest rooms, such as ‘The Christie Room,’ have primarily been named after the famous faces who’ve stayed at the hotel in times past.The current owner has fully refurbished the property and furnished it with in-fitting Art Deco items.One of 25 bedrooms and suites at The Burgh Island Hotel; the majority enjoy superb views out to sea and to the South Devon countryside also.Another bedroom, this one with a private balcony.The Artist’s Studio is situated above The Pilchard Inn. It is a dog friendly room and just a few yards walk from the main Burgh Island Hotel building.Agatha’s Beach House has been described as “one of the sexiest hotel rooms in the UK” and is undoubtedly the ultimate place to stay on Burgh Island. It was built specifically for Agatha Christie in the 1930s and was where she penned both of her Burgh Island novels. It has a sitting room, outdoor hot tub, sun decks right onto the sea and includes a king sized bed, a double sofa bed and two single beds.The building from another angle.The sitting room of Agatha’s Beach House has the benefit of the most wonderful of aspects.It also has a woodburning stove.The Pilchard Inn was supposedly built in the 14th century as a lodging house for visitors to the monastery that is believed to have been on the island at that time. It is one of the oldest pubs in Devon.The bar.A traditional space perfect for drinks by the fire.Many of the rooms and suites at the Burgh Island Hotel, such as the Noël Coward suite, allow guests to experience the drama of the sea beyond.The ‘Mermaid Pool’ is a natural seawater pool in a “rugged” setting.Another view of this extremely unusual place to swim. Burgh Island is partly powered by solar panels.South Hams Council approved plans for additional rooms and additional staff accommodation at the Burgh Island Hotel in December 2022.The 21-acre island is just across the water from Bigbury-on-Sea.From a distance, one can genuinely see what attracted the great and the good to Burgh Island.
As Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Paedo Islands’ sell for a knockdown price of £48 million against a £95 million asking price, we ask: “Who’d want to go and stay in the ‘luxury resort’ planned there?”
In March 2022, The Steeple Times asked: “Who on earth would want to live in a place where such hellish abuse occurred?” of the islands owned by the croaked paedophile Ponzi schemer Jeffrey Epstein.
Purchased in recent days by billionaire Stephen Deckoff via an investment vehicle named SD Investments LLC for a combined total of just £47.7 million, the plan for the islands where countless young girls and likely countless young boys also too were so horrifically abused is to turn it into a “state-of-the-art, five-star, world-class luxury 25-room resort” supposedly.
Though clearly sold at a clear knockdown price, the figure achieved for Little St James and Great St James was “the highest-priced trade in the history of the U.S. Virgin Islands.” Though “a significant portion of the sale proceeds” will be “paid to the government of the Virgin Islands per a settlement between the government and Epstein’s estate” according to a report this morning in The Washington Post, some of the proceeds will no doubt end up in the hands of the Ponzi scheming monster’s brother, Mark Epstein – whose bizarre nickname is ‘Puggy.’
Mr Deckoff himself has had an illustrious career and is listed by Forbes as having a “real time net worth” of £2.4 billion. He co-founded Black Diamond Capital Management in 1995 and is a resident of the U.S. Virgin Islands. He “also owns multi-million dollar properties in Colorado and New York City, and a Beverly Hills mansion previously owned by the Latsis shipping family.”
This morning on Twitter, I asked: “When billionaire Steven Deckoff completes the transformation of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Paedo Islands’ into a ‘luxury resort’ would you be tempted to visit?” By 11:30am, just 8.7% of respondents answered: “Yes; great re-use.” Mr Deckoff may thus find himself struggle to attract paying guests.
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.
Pictured Top (left to right) – Jeffrey Epstein with one of his ‘victims’, the main compound currently on Little Saint James and its new owner, Stephen Deckoff.
This morning on Twitter, Matthew Steeples asked: “When billionaire Steven Deckoff completes the transformation of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Paedo Islands’ into a “luxury resort” would you be tempted to visit?” By 11:30am on Thursday 4th May 2023, the very clear majority of responses were: “No; inappropriate.”
The Names & Numbers – ‘The Jameses’ (Great Saint James and Little Saint James islands), United States Virgin Islands (USVI)
May 2023 – Sold to billionaire Stephen Deckoff via an investment vehicle, SD Investments LLC for a combined total of just £47.7 million ($60 million, €54.3 million or درهم220.4 million), a sum 50% lower than the initial asking price.
March 2022 – Listed for sale through Bespoke Real Estate for £94.5 million ($125 million, €113.8 million or درهم459.1 million) with “subdivision capabilities.” Listed as “two exceptional private Caribbean islands with 230 acres, 6 beaches and 5.8 miles of coastline.”
Media reports have previously estimated the islands to be worth a combined sum of £181.8 million ($240 million, €218.4 million or درهم881.4 million), a figure 92% higher than the current listing price and 178% higher than the July 2019 valuation.
10th August 2019 – Jeffrey Epstein dies by supposed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York. He had previously supposedly attempted suicide on 23rd July 2019 whilst sharing a cell with alleged quadruple killer cop Nicholas Tartaglione.
July 2019 – Forbes reports Little St. James to have been valued at £48.4 million ($63.9 million, €58.2 million or درهم234.7 million) and Great St. James at £17 million ($22.5 million, €20.5 million or درهم82.6 million) – or a total sum of £65.5 million ($86.4 million, €78.7 million or درهم317.3 million) – in documents filed by Epstein’s legal team when he applied for bail.
6th July 2019 – Jeffrey Epstein is arrested after his private jet lands at Teterboro Airport, New Jersey.
January 2016 – Epstein purchases the 161.3-acre Great St. James for a total sum of £17 million ($22.5 million, €20.5 million or درهم82.6 million) through various shell companies and with the help of Dubai businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem as a “beneficial owner” as the then owner, a Danish politician named Christian Kjær, had been “begged” not to sell to the paedophile due to rumours about his “sexual preferences.”
According to the BBC, Epstein “had drawn up plans to develop the 161-acre island by building homes, an amphitheatre, as well as an underwater office and pool.”
2007 onwards – According to the Independent, “Epstein began a massive programme of building and remodelling that drew suspicion from local officials. His main compound nearly doubled in size, sprouting into a plush mansion with an outside terrace connecting the master bedroom and the swimming pool, along with a desalination system.”
“Satellite photos show a sprawling network of terraces, cottages, beach houses, swimming pools, docks, utility buildings, a helipad, a tennis court, slipways, some kind of enclosed lake or lagoon, and various huts of unknown purpose, all connected by palm-lined roads where golf buggies ferried guests from place to place (a journey across the island reportedly took about five minutes).”
1998 – Epstein purchases the 7.16-acre Little St. James for £6.02 million ($7.95 million, €7.24 million or درهم29.20 million) through a shell company named L. S. J. LLC. It had been marketed for sale for £8 million ($10.5 million, €9.6 million or درهم38.6 million) on behalf of a venture capitalist named Arch Cummin.
Some of the ‘Famous Faces’ who’ve visited the ‘Paedo Islands’
Royal rotter Prince Andrew. Alleged to have flown to the islands on 4 occasions and is alleged to have had sexual relations with the then underaged in the territory Virginia Roberts there.
Now croaked paedophile and cocaine addict Jean-Luc Brunel. Known to have supplied three 12-year-old sisters to Epstein and visited him in jail at least 70 times during his 2008 incarceration. Known to have visited the ‘Paedo Islands’ on multiple occasions.
Temperamental supermodel Naomi Campbell.
Prone to tell porky pies politician President Bill Clinton was reportedly a visitor according to Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Hillary Clinton’s husband has denied this however.
Magician David Copperfield – who reportedly proposed to supermodel Claudia Schiffer there.
Socialite Clementine ‘Clemmie’ Hambro. Known to have visited in 1999.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Known to have visited in March 2006.
American-Canadian theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. Known to have been amongst a group of 21 physicists invited to Little St. James for a meeting about gravity. Of Epstein, the scientist later remarked: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people… I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”
Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Known to have visited the islands on many occasions from when Epstein purchased them until his death in 2019.
Billionaire businessman and L Brands founder Leslie Wexner. Known to have visited in 1998 “with several Victoria’s Secret models in tow.”
Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Temple’
The gruesome paedophile Jeffrey Epstein built a structure described by many as a “temple” between 2009 and 2013. It is unclear what the structure was actually used for, but it certainly sent conspiracy theorists crazy.
The building was said to have “acoustic walls” and a “door to prevent people from leaving” complete with a “medieval era lock.” Its base was painted with broad, vivid horizontal stripes and for a time it featured a gold dome atop.
Statues including one of the trident-wielding Poseidon, the Greek God of the sea, and birds “perched” on its corners and aside was a terrace with a labyrinth motif.
Insider suggested “it strongly resembles a temple, though of which sort remains elusive.”
The gold dome supposedly “flew off” during the “deadly 2017 hurricane season.”
Epstein’s bizarre ‘temple’ will hopefully now be razed to the ground.Epstein, pictured here with a woman he no doubt abused, had a ten-person shower installed in his main compound and made it his primary base from 2017 onwards.The sexual deviant liked to take his many, many victims on hikes across his islands. Goodness knows what he did to them during these misadventures.Fellow paedophiles Ghislaine Maxwell and Jean-Luc Brunel in the very same space where their host was primarily photographed.Bizarrely the since supposed died by ‘suicide’ Jean-Luc Brunel was pictured in the same space wearing a baseball cap with the caption ‘Israel Army.’Other visitors to the islands included the since himself disgraced CEO of Barclays Jes Staley and his beady-eyed wife Debbie.Prince Andrew, whose feckless wife happily took loans and assistance from Jeffrey Epstein, was a regular on Little Saint James.Stephen Hawking was amongst a group to visit in March 2006 for a conference about gravity.This image shows the evil ‘head of the municipality’ in a dressing gown on Little St. James with one of his victims. It is telling in that both look like they know that something truly appalling has happened.Clearly Ghislaine Maxwell liked the covered porch just as much as her ‘boss’ turned lover. Pictured here with fellow paedophile Jean-Luc Brunel munching on some nosh, the deviant daughter of the pension pot plunderer sits at the very desk where her evil cohort controlled his wicked operation.That infamous terrace in marketing material created by Bespoke Real Estate. Note that some of the original furniture has been replaced.The Ponzi scheming associate of Robert Maxwell reveled in luring young girls to his islands as once there, they could not escape him and his abusing cohorts.
Further images of Great Saint James and Little Saint James
Matthew Steeples takes a look at a £36 million Kensington mansion formerly owned by disgraced business tycoons Alan Bond and Lord Black; its former chatelaine was known for stating “I have an extravagance that know no bounds”
Sir Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames once described the buccaneering businessman and media tycoon Lord Black of Crossharbour as “London’s biggest bore unhung” whilst his wife, Lady Black – better known as the author and journalist Barbara Amiel – was suggested to be just a “rich bitch” by Sarah Sands in a “case for the defence” article in the Independent in October 2006.
“Poster boy for the 80s” turned fraudster and jailbird Alan Bond (1938 – 2015) was an English-Australian businessman equally Marmite-like in being liked or loathed and now a Kensington mansion owned for a time by both subsequently disgraced businessmen is once again for sale.
14 Cottesmore Gardens, formerly known as 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens, was purchased by Alan Bond’s Satellite Group for £7 million in the 1980s and sold by administrators of that business to Conrad Black and his wife for the knockdown sum of just £3.5 million in 1992.
Plain old Mr and Mrs Black (as they then were) lavished further millions – some of which came from the company Hollinger International, Inc., which ultimately resulted in their downfall – on the double fronted 19th century mansion and used it for entertaining on a lavish scale. Guests, including the likes of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, Joan Collins, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Goldsmith, James Hanson, Arnold Weinstock, Jacob Rothschild, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair, were said to flock to the parties they gave there, but in 2005 these gatherings of upto 400 people at a time came to an almighty end.
Forced to sell at a bargain basement price of just £13.1 million on an ask of £17.5 million as the Canadian born billionaire faced jail time in America, Lord and Lady Black’s tenure was over and the residence saw its “arriviste torch” passed to Juan and Adriana Villalonga, a couple described as “a Mexican telecom czar and his beauty-queen wife.” Of what came next, The Globe And Mail’s Paul Waldie pointedly penned in February 2007: “[They] quickly erased many of the features that the Blacks prized.”
Once again for sale as of April 2023, the value of 14 Cottesmore Gardens has again been deemed to have substantially risen. Knight Frank offer the 12,310 square foot, five-storey residence at a punchy price of £36 million and laud it as “imposing” and “presented in good order throughout.” They add that a “pre-planning consultation” has found that further accommodation could be added that would take the internal space to more than 15,000 square feet; business barons with deep pockets only need apply.
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.
Pictured Top – 54-foot wide 14 Cottesmore Gardens is described by selling agents Knight Frank as “offering lateral living so often requested but so hard to find in central London.” They neglect to mention that with its hedges cut back to the minimum, the place actually looks extremely forlorn.
Flamboyant Lord and Lady Black dressed as Cardinal Richelieu and Marie Antoinette for a party at Kensington Palace in 2000. For a time, the couple employed 17 butlers (if Tom Bower is to be believed) and had two private jets and homes – aside from the 19th Cottesmore Gardens mansion – in New York, Palm Beach and Toronto. “Guests packed into their parties at Cottesmore Gardens,” Bower remarked in his 2006 book the couple, adding: “Amiel was a big spender… Under the control of senior butler Andrew Lightwood, second butler Peter Wilson and a succession of third butlers, Amiel’s life in Kensington had become what her constantly changing staff called ‘bizarre.’ Each recruit was taken by Lightwood on an introductory tour of the house, ending on the roof. ‘Make sure the landing lights are on at all times,’ instructed Lightwood solemnly, ‘because Madame takes off from here on her broomstick looking for cats. She needs the lights to guide her return.’ His face would crack into a smile. ‘Most important, take care that she never sees you. She hates seeing any of us.’ Amiel’s eccentricity demanded that her staff hid whenever she approached, diving into cupboards if necessary, and never entered her quarters when she was present. Every day, all the bed linen was changed and subjected to ‘the penny test.’ A coin was dropped onto the sheets. If it failed to bounce they were not drawn sufficiently tight. Every cushion was arranged to a precise pre-ordained position, and each towel placed exactly as Amiel had predetermined. ‘Andrew!’ she screamed down the telephone on one memorable occasion, ‘the towels are in the wrong place!’ Lightwood, as Amiel knew, was in New York, but he was expected to telephone the staff in the house in London to rectify the error. ‘You f**king pillock!’ she yelled at another member of staff for reading her ‘Daily Mail’ before it was delivered to her.”Barbara Amiel Black (or ‘Lady Black’ as she prefers to be known) in her drawing room at Cottesmore Gardens (pictured). Of her, Sarah Sands on Lord and Lady Black in the ‘Independent’ in October 2006 opined: “Conrad and Barbara in their monstrous, glamorous way, knew how to throw parties. The talk was of geo-politics and hemlines. Nowadays, we scorn their extravagance and doubt the source of their wealth with prune-faced hindsight. Meanwhile, everyone is sucking up to Russians…. Barbara would disingenuously begin her midnight calls to me by saying in her low, breathy voice: ‘I hope I am not disturbing you.’ She would then offer little glimpses of her own home life. I remember her mentioning that Conrad Black was upstairs playing with his fleet of toy gun ships in the bath… I remember her examining an exhibition of doll’s houses at the Chelsea Flower Show and sighing how restful it would be to live in this cosy little home. How she envied people in small houses. The burden of wealth was one of her more dangerous fantasies. At one of her Gatsby-style parties in Kensington, she flinched at the elaborate canapés on offer: ‘Really, all I want is a sausage,’ she said, piteously. Then, she ran a hand down her inconceivably expensive dress and whispered: ‘I hate these parties, I am so shy.’ Later, I was invited to her boudoir, where she lay on cushion surrounded by her women friends. She was Kensington’s Cleopatra, surrounded by maidens such as the designer and Forte daughter Olga Polizzi, the political thinker Tessa Keswick and the writer Miriam Gross.”The very same drawing room at 14 Cottesmore Gardens today. The décor is now somewhat more modern and less ‘classical country house-ified.’ It’s certainly more Soho Farmhouse than Alberto Pinto in style; it is currently a space that the former Meghan Markle would feel more at home than say, perhaps, the likes of Lord and Lady Black’s chum Ghislaine Maxwell and her fellow noxious nonce Ponzi scheming paedophile boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein. Mr Pinto was responsible, it should be noted, for the designs of most of Epstein’s residences.The front elevation of 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens during the era it was owned by Lord and Lady Black.Multiple entries for Lord and Lady Black during the time they owned 14 Cottesmore Gardens appeared in the ‘Little Black Book’ address book often attributed as being that of the friends and associates of Jeffrey Epstein, but that featured more of the contacts of Ghislaine Maxwell in fact. In October 2020, Barbara Amiel took revenge on the pension pot plunderer’s padeophile sex trafficker daughter by featuring her in her “score-settling” memoir ‘Friends & Enemies: A Life in Vogue, Prison, & Park Avenue.” Maxwell had “dumped” Lady Black when Lord Black was being investigated for fraud. She wrote of their last meeting: “We were friends – so putting on my ‘So good to see you’ face, I headed for her. She bolted. Turned that sharp tight little turn when you really want to get away. And that was it.” Of the clear lover of plastic surgery Lady Black, in October 2020, Sarah Sands remarked in ‘The Mail on Sunday’: “She had a bohemian, almost masculine, view of opportunistic sex. She describes, for instance, accompanying an early love in his white Triumph sports car ‘in which once or twice I had performed fellatio to the fascination of passing truck drivers, all for fun.’”After getting out of the clink in 2012, Lord and Lady Black decided to go back on the ‘razzle-dazzle’ and posed for photographers before heading back to London to party with friends. In May 2019, the rambunctious peer arrogantly announced he’d be returning to the House of Lords after President Donald Trump pardoned and praised him. Commenting, of this pardon, Lord Black declared: “I’m not bitter… Officially in the United States, I’ve never been charged and I won in the end. It was a war and there are casualties in wars. I lost the time, I lost a lot of money, but as you can see my standards of living isn’t bad… The truth is, these, last 15 years, I haven’t been as interested in British politics as I was before – in the Thatcher years. It could be quite interesting again, in fact it is as of right now – it’s very interesting… It’s my good fortune that at a time when it is feasible, it happens – by happy coincidence – that it is a time of great fermentation in British public affairs.” Surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to have turned up on occasions since.The previous owner of 14 Cottesmore Gardens, Alan Bond (1938 – 2015), will forever be remembered as “Australia’s most notorious corporate criminal.” Born in Hammersmith, London, Bond’s first crime occurred when he was charged with theft aged 14 in Fremantle in Australia and whilst he is remembered for bankrolling the successful challenge for the 1983 America’s Cup, it is for causing the then biggest corporate collapse in Australian history that he will be go down in history. Former Miss Mexico Adriana Abascal López-Cisneros (at the time Adriana Villalonga) bought the house in 2005. She divorced the Spanish businessman Juan Villalonga in 2009 and married the French businessman Emmanuel Schreder in Ibiza in June 2013. In August 2014, the magazine ‘Quién’ featured the model and television presenter on its cover and at that time she described her new husband as “the love of my life.”Madrid born Juan Villalonga became the joint owner of 14 Cottesmore Gardens with his then wife Adriana Abascal – the couple were married between 2000 and 2009 – in 2005. He is listed on Companies House as being a director of the now dissolved Medikidz Foundation at the address between August 2009 and November 2013. Married since 2011 to a photographer named Vanessa Von Zitewitz, Mr Villalonga was a partner at McKinsey & Company in the 1980s, CEO for Credit Suisse First Boston and Bankers Trust in Spain in the early 1990s and CEO of Telefónica from 1996 to 2000. He was named as one of the best performing chief executive officers in the world by ‘Harvard Business Review’ in 2010 and is also linked to addresses in Monaco.
The Names & Numbers – 14 Cottesmore Gardens (formerly known as ’12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens’), Kensington, London, W8 5PR, United Kingdom
April 2023 – Offered for sale for £36 million ($44.4 million, €40.9 million or درهم163.2 million) through Knight Frank. Valued on Homipi at an upper sum of £28.558 million ($35.250 million, €32.440 million or درهم129.456 million).
2009 – Mr and Mrs Villalonga divorce and subsequently Adriana Abascal married Emmanuel Schreder, a French businessman, in Ibiza in June 2013.
2005 – Sold by Lord and Lady Black for £13.1 million ($16.2 million, €14.9 million or درهم59.4 million) to Spanish businessman Juan Villalonga Navarro and Mexican model, Miss Mexico winner and television presenter Adriana Abascal López-Cisneros Villalonga.
October 2004 – Placed for sale for £17.5 million ($21.6 million, €19.9 million or درهم79.3 million) according to NZ Herald.
January 2004 – Valued at £14 million ($17.3 million, €15.9 million or درهم63.5 million) according to The Globe And Mail. At the time, the “mansion” in “the upscale Kensington neighbourhood” was described as having “10 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms and a swimming pool.”
Featured also in The Guardian in an article by Chris Tryhorn. Quoting Lord Black, he shared: “At a certain price, anything is for sale. [It has] been shown to people in the not-too-distant-past.”
Going further, Tryhorn added: “Artwork from the 18th and 19th centuries lines the walls, and there is plenty of storage space for the extensive wardrobe and shoe collection of Lord Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, who famously declared once that her ‘extravagence knows no bounds.’ … It was originally two homes and one of the two original front doors is now a ‘deliveries’ entrance. He has used it in the past to host dinners with butler and maid service that was part-paid by Hollinger.”
Also in 2004, in a profile in The Spectator, Peter Oborne wrote:
“Every year the Blacks threw two parties, one at Christmas and one summer event, at their double-fronted 11-bedroom mansion in Cottesmore Gardens. Everybody who mattered at the time went: Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Goldsmith, James Hanson, Arnold Weinstock, Jacob Rothschild, royalty, the playwright Tom Stoppard.”
“Some of these, injudiciously as it turned out, agreed to join the main Hollinger board. The luckier ones – Peter Carrington, Robert Salisbury – got away with being made directors of TheTelegraph. As the Tories faded out, Labour ministers started to arrive, the indefatigable Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett and other ministers eager to ingratiate themselves with the Tory press. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were assiduous in attendance. In London, the Nineties belonged to the Blacks. They were London’s most glamorous power couple.”
“There had been a time when both Blacks had kept their feet on the ground. This ceased to be the case. One evening Barbara Black rang Charles Moore panic-stricken from her Kensington home. There had been a last-minute drop-out from one of the famous Black dinner parties. ‘I’m short of a woman,’ she told Moore. Moore surveyed the newsroom. His gaze alighted on the journalist Eleanor Mills, by chance the stepdaughter of the Cabinet minister Tessa Jowell.”
“An hour later, hastily groomed, made-up and brushed, Mills was sipping pre-dinner drinks in Cottesmore Gardens. Then disaster struck. A male guest, Max Fisher, dropped out. Mills was approached by Conrad Black. ‘Finish your drink and skedaddle,’ he told her. Barbara Black then told her to go to the kitchen and out through the servants’ door, where the driver would pick her up and take her home.”
2001 – Conrad Black is elevated to a life peerage in the United Kingdom at the suggestion of Tony Blair. He sat on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords until 2007 as The Right Honourable The Lord Black of Crossharbour KCSG, but took a “leave of absence” between 2012 and 2019.
28th May 1996 – The Royal Borough of Kensington And Chelsea ordered that 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens “shall be known and described” simply instead as 14 Cottesmore Gardens.
Mid 1990s – The Blacks set about renovating 12 and 14 Cottesmore Gardens with the help of J. E. Evans Associates. Of the work in October 2006, The Sunday Times shared a segment of Tom Bower’s 2006 hatchet job Conrad and Lady Black that read: “Amiel vowed to create a palace that would attract celebrity worshipers of a power couple. Part of the first floor was to be removed to create a huge ground floor reception area.”
1992 – 12 and 14 Cottesmore Gardens sold by the administrators of the affairs of Alan Bond through estate agents Savills to media tycoon Conrad Black and his Watford born journalist wife Barbara Amiel Black for “well under the asking price” for a sum of £3.5 million ($4.3 million, €4 million or درهم15.9 million).
Mr Bond had been granted mortgages valued at £16.2 million ($20 million, €18.4 million or درهم73.5 million) on the property by Bell Satellite Services on the property along with two others at 4 and 16 Belgrave Mews in London, SW1 previously according to a report published by Financial Review in March 1990.
1991 – Rented to an American businessman for £6,000 per week ($7,400, €6,800 or درهم27,200 per week).
1990 – Placed in the hands of administrators of Mr Bond’s and placed for sale through Savills for a bargain basement sum of £3.8 million ($4.7 million, €4.3 million or درهم17.2 million) according to Financial Review.
1980s – Sold to Alan Bond’s Bell Satellite Group for £7 million ($8.6 million, €8 million or درهم31.7 million).
Circa 1905 – Walter Tapper is said to have “designed a library with handsome Arts and Crafts plasterwork (now removed) at the rear of the building.”
1869 – In their current marketing blurb, Knight Frank suggest: “There has been a house on the site of 12 – 14 Cottesmore Gardens since at least 1869. The current house has been altered, extended and most notably joined over the subsequent century and a half. With the local planning department strongly opposed to further amalgamation of homes, opportunities to acquire a house of this width will be rarer still in the future.”
1850s to 1860s – Built “under the direction of David Howell, of Serjeants Inn, Fleet Street.” Mr Howell was described in 1853 as an “articled clerk to a solicitor, lately carrying on business as a solicitor.” The architecture was lauded as: “Designed in a bold classical manner, with rather fleshy consoles and modillions… and bands of Vitruvian scroll between the bases of the ground-floor windows.”
More photographs of the £36 million mansion…
An entrance hall where power and privilege have most certainly mingled previously.The 54-foot wide drawing is lauded by selling realtors Knight Frank as “arguably the best room in the house” and “double aspect.” They add: “[It has] six windows overlooking the street and additional views over the private garden to the rear.”The columns where Barbara Amiel Black once posed for photographs remain, but the subsequent owners eliminated much of the 1990s ‘brash’ that had been installed by a Watford born woman whose excess clearly offended so many.This dining room, where Conrad Black hosted presidents and prime ministers, is now somewhat diminished. The table for eight looks completely out of place and a future owner would do well to install something a little grander.A double height entertaining space was installed at the insistence of the loftier-than-lofty Lady Black in the 1990s and it remains today. However, it is now currently being used for more casual affairs such as Netflix viewing rather than being the scene of something that you’d more likely find in the ‘House of Cards’ in fact.A new owner might reinstate the grandeur of the past; sadly, however, this seems unlikely and the purchaser is more likely to be a footballer or Internet tycoon than a super-connected business tycoon.This currently very dark and very depressing study would most certainly not appeal to the very clearly very, very bright yet very, very pompous The Right Honourable The Lord Black of Crossharbour KCSG – a man who is said to count Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte as “his military heroes.” Of him in July 1997, Mark Honigsbaum in the ‘Independent’ remarked: “Although Black’s grandfather had briefly been a business partner of Harold Harmsworth, the original Viscount Rothermere, it was from his father, George Montegu Black Jr, that Black learned the art of corporate warfare, the importance of historical perspective and that gambling provides a disappointing rate of return compared to the Dow Jones index… The young Conrad was precocious. At the age of eight he sank his life savings of $60 into a single share of General Motors. He also became obsessed with Napoleon, and would astound his father’s friends by reeling off details of campaigns. Another story has him washing dollar bills and hanging them out to dry on a line outside his father’s home in Toronto. The last is apocryphal – Black says he slipped in the mud and was cleaning his change – but the image of the young capitalist, wise beyond his years, is accurate. His childhood tutor, the historian Laurier LaPierre, once asked Black why he always seemed to have the air of someone waiting for something to happen… A few years ago, for instance, the rumour went round Fleet Street that Black had bought Napoleon’s preserved penis at an auction. Black denied it, but many remain convinced that Bonaparte’s body part sits in Black’s collection of military curios… Black is no philanderer and is devoted to his second wife, the former ‘Sunday Times’ columnist Barbara Amiel. They are said to be intellectual soul mates and the parties at their four-storey mansion in Kensington are famous for bringing together a cross-section of the great and good.”One could not imagine the likes of the late great Baroness Thatcher, for example, liking the idea of sitting in this extremely depressing and dark waiting area. A new owner would do well to obliterate a décor scheme that could have only been favoured by a completely colour blind banker.A room currently described as a ‘cinema room’ measures 28’6” by 21’6” and is situated at the rear of the house. One can imagine Conrad Black having sat here for hour upon hour watching historical dramas about Napoleon with the likes of chums such as the acclaimed historian Andrew Roberts, the gambling tycoon John Aspinall and the politician and diarist Alan Clark, but a new owner will be more likely next showing episodes of ‘Succession’ – based on ‘The Telegraph’ tycoon’s rival Rupert Murdoch – than viewing historical works one most definitely suspects.Dining whilst the staff cook would NEVER have been on the agenda in the era that pomposity reigned whilst Lady Black was chatelaine of 14 Cottesmore Gardens.A 2,000 square foot entire floor fit for a tycoon… The master bedroom suite of the house takes up the entirety of the second floor of the building. It incorporates not only the principal bedroom, but also a “his” dressing room and a “her” dressing room as well as a sitting area, a bathroom, a shower room and storage rooms. It has direct lift access and is bigger than the average Brit’s entire house.A dressing room in the house where Barbara Black opened up to ‘Vogue’ and displayed “closets overflowing with dazzling evening gowns, designer handbags and 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes. ‘I have an extravagance that knows no bounds,’ she famously declared. Unfortunately for Lady Black, the article was closely perused at investment company Tweedy, Browne, a Hollinger International shareholder.”This playroom certainly did not exist in the era that Lord and Lady Black owned the property. It would be more likely crammed with books or stuffed with Manolo Blahnik shoes than toys from Toys ‘R Us. A new owner may likely reinstate it as an additional bedroom or office or games room perhaps.The pool room measures 43’9” by 26’9” and is no doubt where Lady Black spent many an hour relaxing.The garden to the rear was where Lord and Lady Black hosted their annual summer party (with guests “spilling” into their drawing room also). In surprisingly Tardis-like fashion, the duo were able to supposedly squeeze in upto 400 guests at such occasions. Amongst those said to have enjoyed hospitality there were Joan Collins and of such, magazine publisher Nicholas Coleridge wrote: “If you get a kick out of milling about with present and former prime ministers, cabinet ministers, minor royals, dukes, editors, vastly rich Americans, distinguished historians, gossip columnists, playboys and lots of pretty ‘it’ girls, then this was the place to be.”The existing floor plan of the property illustrates the vast scale of the building offered. A buyer, Knight Frank observe, has additional options and “a pre-planning consultation has been carried out with RBKC by leading architects Studio Indigo.” They add: “[It] would completely reconfigure the house adding an additional basement floor and taking the internal space to more than 15,000 square foot. The resulting house would have a 40-foot by 41-foot south-facing rear garden.”A plan of the site as presented in 1996 when 12 and 14 became known just as 14 Cottesmore Gardens.
Bungling berk Boris Johnson is supposedly upsizing and has allegedly bought the £4 million Brightwell Manor in Oxfordshire; the lavish lush that is the former Carrie Symonds will need a big budget if she is to clad the colossal 10,508 square foot crib in £840 per roll Lulu Lytle wallpaper
In November 2019, Country Life’s longstanding property correspondent described a “rare part-moated manor house set in almost five acres of gardens and grounds at the heart of the picturesque Oxfordshire village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, on the eastern edge of the Vale of the White Horse” named Brightwell Manor as a “forever home.”
Featured in The Times in an article by Liz Rowlinson in November last year after it “had three viewings so far from Americans,” the part-Tudor, part-Georgian house and its annexe and guest cottage provides a total of 10,508 square foot of accommodation over three floors. It has a total of 9 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms and if The Guardian is to be believed, it has just been sold to the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his considerably younger than himself wife.
Brightwell Manor has been owned by the same family since 1971, so, if indeed the Johnsons are the purchasers, the former Carrie Symonds will need to spend a hell of a lot of money on Lulu Lytle wallpaper to bring it “upto scratch.” This is a place that needs a lot of work and no doubt, ‘Carrie On Regardless’ already has plans bring in also ‘Lady Doors-To-Manual’ Carole Bamford’s JCB diggers to help install a swimming pool in the 4.88-acre grounds.
Suitably for the Brexiteer buffoon Johnson – who got paid an £88,000 advance in 2015 for a book on Shakespeare that he’s never bothered to actually write – in their marketing blurb, the selling agents predictably claimed: “Of its many owners perhaps the most notable was the Reverend Doctor W. R. Inge, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and Knight Commander of the Victorian Order. He was a prolific author and used the family room as his study for writing.” Maybe now, this is a room that will become the place where the “pyramid of piffle” that will be Johnson’s memoirs might finally get written.
Described as a “village of picture postcard prettiness” and as “in estate agents’ jargon, this is a sought after village, but it is much more than a pretty face” on the local community website, Brightwell-cum-Sotwell – which flooded in 2014 and has a CAMRA award-winning pub named the Red Lion where Johnson will no doubt get smashed with his wife and the likes of Henry Newman and Josh Grimstone – has a population of around 1,500 people. It lies between the towns of Didcot and Wallingford, is 55 miles west of London is and close to Didcot Parkway train station – which has trains running to Paddington in just 37 minutes.
Offered for sale in November 2019 at a somewhat punchy price of £5 million by Hamptons International, the “magnificent Grade II listed Georgian village house” stands on the likely site of the long since vanished Brightwell Castle. It was relaunched to the market subsequently for a sum £1 million lower by Andrew Russell of agents The Country House Department in October 2022.
“[This is a] properly edge-of-village house, so that you can be involved in the village community, or you can keep to yourself, depending on what you’d prefer.”
“The property used to be moated all the way around, with about two-thirds of this moat remaining today. [It was the tallest house in the area at the time of its building and it was] not good form to build a house that was taller than the local church. To rectify this, the family who built it also added a red brick tower onto the local church, St Agatha’s, which reaches just higher than the façade.”
“I believe Brightwell Manor once owned all the land around, and it was a big apple farming estate, so some of those trees may be very old.”
Johnson also currently owns a Grade II listed property in Oxfordshire, The Old Farm House at North Weston, near Thame. He bought it with his then wife Marina Wheeler for £640,000 in 2003 and most memorably came out in an ‘Xchanging’ branded hoodie to serve journalists tea in August 2018 during the scandal about him comparing Muslim women to letterboxes.
Featuring what Country Life’s Carla Passino called “true blue tiles,” Johnson – who got to keep the £1.25 million crib as part of his February 2020 divorce settlement – placed the 2,659 square foot property for rent for a sum of £4,250 per month through Strutt & Parker in April 2021. It is not known whether he intends to keep The Old Farm House or whether he’ll still be able to continue to bed down at the Knightsbridge residence of Lord and Lady Bamford that he has most recently been calling “home.”
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party.
During his time married to Marina Wheeler, Boris Johnson lived much more modestly. Clearly, his ambitious and avaricious current wife Carrie would never contemplate living in a somewhat shabby former farmhouse.During their time in Downing Street, the Johnsons lived-it-up during lockdowns with their mates. Aside from boozing and bopping to ABBA with Henry Newman and Josh Grimstone, this grasping pair grabbed at least £30,000 of organic loot from their mate Lady Bamford’s Daylesford Organic. It was delivered by bike and van and no doubt, once in residence at their new mansion, they’ll be getting a hell of a lot more dropped off from the Gloucestershire emporiums of Daylesford.The Very Reverend William Inge KCVO FBA lived in the house for 30 years. He was born in Yorkshire, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times and was also a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1921 until 1951. A “strong proponent of the spiritual type of religion,” Inge was nicknamed “The Gloomy Dean” because of his pessimistic views and of social welfare he claimed: “It penalized the successful while subsidising the weak and the feckless.” Boris Johnson will no doubt take inspirtation from this in his writing in what was once his study.
The Names & Numbers – Brightwell Manor, off Brightwell Street, Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, OX10 0RT, United Kingdom
February 2023 – Listed as “sold subject to contract” on Rightmove with the purchaser being Boris Johnson at a price of circa £4 million ($4.8 million, €4.5 million or درهم17.7 million), The Guardian reports.
November 2022 – Featured in The Times and touted as being an example as to “why Americans are buying up Britain’s country estates.”
November 2019 – Offered for sale for £5 million ($6 million million, €5.6 million or درهم22.1 million) through Hamptons International and featured in Country Life.
1971 – Sold for a sum unknown by William Inge’s sons to a family who continued to own it until its recent sale.
Of them, Penny Churchill observed: “They hadn’t been long installed in their new home when, one day, they saw walking up the drive the distinctive figure of a former Government Minister, who – figuratively if not literally – whipped out his cheque book and invited them to name their price.”
“However, having only just found the right house for them and their five children, they had little hesitation in declining their visitor’s generous offer. Now, 50 years on, a similar approach would perhaps be more favourably received.”
1954 – William Inge died at the house aged 93. He is buried in the graveyard St Agatha’s, the adjoining church to the property.
1950s – Extended by The Very Reverend William Inge KCVO FBA (1860 – 1954), its then owner. Of him, Penny Churchill observed: “[Inge was] an eminent theologian and writer, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on three occasions. He served as Dean of St Paul’s from 1911 until 1934, when he retired to live at Brightwell Manor, dying there 30 years later.”
9th April 1952 – Listed Grade II by Heritage England.
1933 – Offered for sale for £2,000 or the equivalent of £11,300 today ($13,600, €12,700 or درهم50,000 today)
1910s and 1920s – Penny Churchill stated: “Brightwell Manor remained part of a thriving estate until the outbreak of the First World War, after which it was sold a number of times as casualties mounted. A report in Country Life on March 27, 1920, announced the sale of Brightwell with six acres of land, describing it as ‘an historical and commodious Georgian Residence of very attractive appearance, having extensive views over the famous Berkshire Downs. The pasture land here is of considerable value, letting readily at £4 an acre.’”
1600s – The earliest Tudor part of the house is constructed as a “modest farmhouse modest farmhouse on the surrounding farming estate, being gradually gentrified until, towards the end of the 18th century, the symmetrical Georgian front was added. A red-brick coach house, latterly converted to a two-bedroom cottage, was added in the 1840s,” Penny Churchill suggested.
Pictures of ‘Bungling Boris’s’ new country crib…
This ain’t Chequers, but it ain’t too shabby either.The drawing room, in its current condition, resembles something like that of the home of Polly Urquhart in the 1980s BBC bonkbusting classic ‘Howards’ Way.’ No doubt, Lulu Lytle will be drafted in to deck this room out in a somewhat more gaudy shade of gold.The dining room has tones of Liberal Democrat to it that the Johnsons will no doubt want to erase.This is presumably the room where ‘The Gloomy Dean’ wrote many of his works. Will it be the place where ‘Bosie The Clown’ is actually inspired to finally finish any of his?Perhaps the calamity formerly known as Carrie Symonds will take to the piano in this sitting room and bash out some of ABBA’s tunes when visited by the pugnacious pair she allegedly nicknamed “the gays” that are Henry Newman and Josh Grimstone.Another sitting room clearly has sofas that are more of the colour of Sir Keir Starmer currently. It also features a fireplace with a tiny painting above it that would be more at home in Phillip Schofield’s broom cupboard.The kitchen is decidedly basic and still present is a 1930s AGA stove; that presumably won’t be that off-putting to the Johnsons given that this pair of grifters can rely on Lady Bamford to supply them with freebies and ready-made organic meals from Daylesford whenever they want.This staircase hallway has been wallpapered with a print that will remind the former Prime Minister of that that adorns the Pugin-esque Palace of Westminster.If Mrs Johnson wants to inspire her husband to finally put pen to paper, she could cram these shelves with relevant literature.A bedroom for Boris? This wood-panelled sleeping chamber will likely become the ‘Baby Dada’ of children unknown’s place where he and his wife rest their wicked heads.Another of the many bedrooms features a sofa that was clearly bought at Ikea. Lulu Lytle will have that straight in the skip.The house adjoins St Agatha’s church. Will the former Prime Minister become a regular there and will he attend with a view to seek redemption for his many, many, many crimes whilst in office?The gardens are flat and vast and are noted for the apple trees planted generations ago. ‘Carrie On Regardless’ might be able to develop a sideline in making cider using them or perhaps she’ll start making apple pies.The moat of Brightwell Manor could prove useful if Boris Johnson is forced to face visits from the anti-Brexiteer Steve Bray or climate change campaigners such as Greta Thunberg.Aside from the main residence, the building comes with an annexe and cottage also. Perfect for when good old Dominic Cummings wants to come round for a weekend outing; it’d save him the drive to Durham, after all.The house, seen from the side, is all front and no trousers. The Georgian element that gives it grandeur is actually not the prime part of the property; a bit like Boris Johnson himself, in fact.Viewed from a drone, the nigh on 5-acre ‘estate’ backs onto open countryside and has a vast area of gravel to the front; perfect for visits from the convoys of limousines of oligarchs like Lord Lebedev.Set back from the village but near enough to the pub for ‘BoJo’ to escape his wine chucking wife when required, Brightwell Manor has the privacy from the press a former premier will require yet gives him the ability to walk down the drive to ‘pull a John Gummer’ with a BSE burger at the garden gate if ever that might be required.Tennis anyone? The former Prime Minister can perhaps woe his next love or lover on the property’s court.A floor plan of the new home of the most loathsome leader of the Conservative Party.Seen on GoogleMaps… This will no doubt soon get blurred for the sake of privacy.Heritage England’s map will no doubt be vamoosed also.
As Evelyn Waugh’s former home sells at auction for £3.16 million against asking price of £2.5 million, we ask: “Will the new owners be able to get the £250 per year pesky tenants to do some moving on and vacate this Georgian gem?”
Whilst a Grade II* listed cottage featured recently in The Steeple Times that had been offered for the extraordinarily low sum of £1 hammered down for £257,000 at auction this week, the home of Brideshead Revisited and Scoop author Evelyn Waugh between 1937 and 1956 achieved 26% more than its estimate and went for £3.16 million on Thursday.
Having been offered at a sum of £2.5 million plus in spite of having tenants in-situ who refused entry for viewings even, Piers Court at Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire attracted significant interest and after our article made it into the pages of The Guardian and the Daily Mail even.
In the days after our feature and the days before the Allsop conducted auction, current occupants Cheshire born alleged “Evelyn Waugh super fan” Helen Lawton and her Lebanese “businessman” partner Bechara Madi were deemed “Hyacinth Bucket” type figures and “neighbours from hell.” The extraordinarily odd pair have been paying rent of just £5 per week or £250 per year to live in the 8-bedroomed Georgian manor house and were briefly directors of a company named Winston’s House Limited, which was the ultimate owner of the property.
Speaking to MailOnline prior to the auction, “former London financier” Madi – who lives in the house supposedly on a “rolling six month tenancy” and whose partner is a “friend” of the ultimate “person of significant control” of Winston’s House Limited, controversial ex-BBC executive Jason Blain – raged:
“It’s our home, for the short term and for the long term. We will be putting our Christmas tree and decorations up in the next few days. We are going nowhere.”
“You have to ask why they are selling the house for £1 million less than its market value in a low-end auction just before Christmas.”
“We are not tenants, we have a major share in the house and have put in hundreds of thousands of pounds of our own money. If you look at Companies House accounts you will see we have put money into the company that owns the property.”
“We love it here and have put a lot into the house since we came here. I’m a city boy so I have gardeners come in but I’m learning as I go along.”
“We have spent a lot of our own money on the upkeep of the house, it’s our home and we have no plans to move.”
“I don’t want to get into details but the conduct of the bank and receivers has been very aggressive. There’s something more than just simply the bank wanting to be paid but I don’t know what it is.”
“The house is owned by the company in which we are shareholders. The company isn’t selling it, the receivers are but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
Of the couple, an unnamed “villager” added: “I’ve never seen him once, but she does a bit of shopping in Dursley. I wouldn’t want their heating bills, that’s for sure.” Clearly, the pair are anything but equivalents of BBC Radio 4’s The Archers’ Linda Snell in terms of their participation in local antics.
Bizarrely, in a most curious twist, we can today reveal that “investment manager” Bechara Madi became a director of a company named Piers Court Capital Limited – based at 65 Cadogan Square, London, SW1X 0DY – on 29th November 2010 – nine years before Jason Blain purchased Evelyn Waugh’s onetime home. Even earlier, on 5th March 1996, he became a director of Piers Court Holdings.
Separately, in a move clearly designed to distract from the truth of their clear involvement with this property dating back to their formation of a company named after it in 2010, Lawton told The Guardian that she “claims to be friends with Waugh’s family” and that “she was planning a party to bring together many of his relatives at the house.”
Going further, the paper reported:
“Duncan McLaren, of the Evelyn Waugh Society, writing of a chance meeting with Lawton in 2019 while walking along a public footpath through the grounds of the house, said: ‘In recent weeks she has been very excited to learn about the Evelyn Waugh associations of her new home.’”
“He said they had a conversation in which Lawton said she knew Septimus Waugh, the author’s seventh child, and there was a plan to bring Septimus’s former nanny, who was then in her 90s, from Northumberland to the house for a day. It is not known if the visit happened.”
“McLaren wrote: ‘Helen also knows Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, and has other plans to bring Evelyn Waugh activities to the house.’”
Ms Lawton and Mr Madi, it seems, are not averse to a bit of legal action. In the summer of 2016, they were involved in a court case concerning another six flats at 65 Cadogan Square in the tony district of Knightsbridge, London. It was disclosed in evidence that Madi had supposedly sent nearly 5,000 emails over 2,009 days to a property management firm as well as “somewhat vitriolic letters” also.
In spite of the duo producing over 600 pages of documents and claiming “instances of intimidation” as well as criminality, “harassment and incitement,” the tribunal’s decided that “it is not in our finding just and convenient to make that order.”
Now, given Piers Court has clearly and most definitely been sold and has a new owner, it remains to be seen whether another bout of legal rumblings will follow involving both Lawton and Madi.
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party.
Piers Court hammered down at Allsop’s 15th December 2022 auction for £3,160,000 after a series of last minute bidding online. The property’s new owner has yet to reveal themselves.Meanwhile, High Heath Cottage, also known as ‘Mutton Castle,’ went for £257,000 in spite of its £1 “plus fees” guide price.On 27th January 1989, after it was sold for £1.25 million, the house featured in the ‘Daily Mail’ and was described as “gold bricks and mortar.”The prime problem with Evelyn Waugh’s former home is supposedly that it is blighted by noise from the M5 motorway. A leading property commentator told ‘The Steeple Times’: “On a grey winter’s day, the noise is excruciating. It’s not so bad in the summer, but the reason that it took so long to sell Piers Court in 2019 was because of the constant roar of traffic. Who’d want to pay £3 million to have to go to bed with ear plugs?” Clearly, on Thursday, someone did.Creepy… Bizarre busy bee Bechara Madi pictured lurking at the gates and in the grounds of the place he currently is still calling ‘home’ this week. Will he and his partner be there for Christmas? Quite likely. Will they be there after New Year? Likely not.Controller of Winston’s Court Limited, which counted Piers Court as its primary asset, Jason Blain with producer Deborah Schindler in Toronto in 2009. Mr Blain is best known for having racked up a colossal £1.2 million bill at the ritzy Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge that he got taken to court over recently. The ex-BBC executive has yet to offer comment with regard to the legal wranglings concerning the Georgian Gloucestershire gem once home to Evelyn Waugh and as to whether he’ll accept his chums Bechara Madi and Helen Lawton will willingly be moving on.Evelyn Waugh will be unlikely turning in his grave over this week’s developments. He came to loathe and detest living in the Grade II* listed manor house after being pestered there by a ‘Daily Express’ journalist.
The Names & Numbers – Piers Court, Wooton Road, Stinchcombe, Near Dusley, Gloucestershire, GL6 6QE, United Kingdom
15th December 2022 – Sold for £3.16 million ($3.84 million, €3.62 million or درهم14.09 million), a sum 26% higher than estimate and a sum 9% higher than it sold for in April 2019.
15th December 2022 – Auctioned with a price guide of offers in excess of £2.5 million ($3.1 million, €2.9 million or درهم11.2 million) by Allsop and Knight Frank, a sum 30% lower than The Move Market valuation and 14% lower than the 2019 sale price.
4th December 2022 – Featured in The Mail on Sunday in the gossip column penned by Emily Prescott. She mused:
“After being forced to pay a £704,000 [which eventually amounted to £1.2 million with interest] five-star hotel bill he ran up during an eight-month stay, former BBC executive Jason Blain is maybe keen to free some cash – and is selling his £2.5 million Gloucestershire home.”
“But those who fancy the six-bedroom property once owned by Evelyn Waugh are going to have to trust their instincts – and pictures of it taken back in 2018 – as no one is allowed to view the house in person before they buy it. Not even agents Knight Frank have seen the property since Mr Blain, who worked in business development at the Beeb, bought it in 2019.”
“Earlier this year he was ordered to pay the huge bill at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hyde Park after a planned six-night penthouse stay lasted months.”
December 2022 – Valued on the The Move Market website at a high price of £3.59 million ($4.40 million, €4.17 million or درهم16.15 million).
19th August 2022 – A Notice to Quit was served on Helen Lawton and Bechara Madi and “such notice was affixed to the property gate on the 22nd August 2022.”
15th June 2022 – Tammy Wilkins and Victoria Liddell appointed as receivers and managers of insolvency of Winston’s House Limited.
31st March 2021 – Filed accounts for Winston’s House Limited valued “investment property” Piers Court at £3.5 million ($4.3 million, €4 million or درهم15.6 million) and stated that £1.4 million ($1.7 million, €1.6 million or درهم6.2 million) was owed by the company to creditors at that time.
13th to 26th March 2021 – Charges against Winston’s House Limited are listed and remain “outstanding” still today from bankers C. Hoare & Co. and B.I.G. Finance Limited.
June 2020 – The then “owners” of Piers Court submitted text to Stinchcombe Parish Council for publication on their website. In it, they complained of members of the public causing “damage” and committing “blatant trespass” on the property. They moaned about “unpicked dog fouling” and announced they’d installed signs across the property telling walkers where they could and could not go.
They added: “The owners are close friends with Evelyn Waugh’s family, in particular with Septimus (Evelyn’s youngest son) who vividly remembers his early childhood at Piers Court and who is currently assisting the new owners. Given that it is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Brideshead Revisited (which was written at Piers Court), the owners will be inviting some of the Waugh family to Piers Court to mark the occasion.”
15th April 2019 – Sold for £2.9 million ($3.6 million, €3.4 million or درهم13 million). Jason Hector Blain, a former BBC executive, took a loan of £2.1 million ($2.6 million, €2.4 million or درهم9.4 million) to fund the purchase. He formed a company named Winston’s House Limited on 27th March 2019 in which he had “significant control” to control this. It counted Lee Bushell, Philip Bushell, Helen Lawton and Bechara Habib Madi as directors. The Bushells subsequently resigned as directors on 16th October 2019 whilst Ms Lawton and Mr Madi were directors only between 27th March and 15th April 2019.
“Ms Lawton had wanted the house for 25 years and eventually acquired it with the help of millionaire Jason Blain, a former BBC boss. She pays just £250 a year rent to live at the eight-bedroom property and considers herself its custodian. She and her partner, Lebanese businessman Bechara Madi, 60, claim to have paid a £300,000 deposit.”
“But the house, which sits in 23 acres, was auctioned off on Thursday after creditors called in a £2.1million loan they made to Mr Blain. Ms Lawton claims she and Mr Madi are victims of ‘legalised theft.’ They insist there is no formal sale until contracts are exchanged and are now planning their next move.”
May 2018 – The property is again placed for sale for £3 million ($3.7 million, €3.5 million or درهم13.5 million) with Knight Frank. Lauded by realtor Rupert Sturgis as “one of the most beautiful houses in Gloucestershire.”
2004 – Piers Court is again offered for sale at a price unknown. At that time House & Heritage revealed: “Under a previous owner, the library where Waugh wrote was shipped, piece by piece, to Texas, where it was supposed to be reconstructed as a museum but is still in packing cases.”
January 1989 – Sold for £1.25 million ($1.52 million, €1.43 million or درهم5.57 million).
1983 – Sold for £300,000 ($364,000, €344,000 or درهم1.3 million) by the Gadsden family to a Mr Lee via an investment company named Halcyon Holdings.
October 1956 – The Waughs moved out of Piers Court. Of the property, “breeder of Guernsey cattle and ponies” Mrs Gadsden later remarked:
“When I bought the place, it was in a virtually derelict state.”
“The beautiful stables were overgrown and battered, and the gardens were a jungle.”
“I don’t think Evelyn Waugh had much a green thumb. He put lots of statues about, but didn’t like flowers and shrubs.”
“It’s a marvellous house and we were extremely happy there. But, when I sold, I was in my early eighties and it was just too big.”
“The Waughs entertained Mrs Gadsden for lunch. The future owner of Piers Court was most accommodating, agreeing to take over cows and peasants, if required. However, she baulked at inheriting the statue of Rafael that was in the front garden at Piers Court.”
Mrs G: “I don’t want it.”
EW: “I’m not selling it to you, I’m giving it away.”
Mrs G: “It’s a monstrosity.”
EW: “Even the most cursory knowledge of western civilisation would suggest otherwise, Madame.”
“In early July, Waugh made the observation in his diary that as he moved about Piers Court, inside and out, nothing annoyed him as it had before. In his mind, it was Mrs Gadsden’s house, not his any more, so he didn’t care if the stone crumbled and the taps dripped and the weeds smothered the flower beds. He would soon be away. Evelyn thought there was a meditation on death to be constructed along these lines.”
June 1956 – Sold by Evelyn Waugh and his wife to a lady named Mrs Gadsden for £9,500 or the equivalent of £188,000 ($231,000, €219,000 or درهم847,000) today.
June 1955 – Piers Court was placed for sale with Knight Frank & Rutley by Evelyn Waugh and his wife for £10,000 or the equivalent of £198,000 ($243,000, €230,000 or درهم892,000) today.
June 1955 – A Daily Express reporter visited the house uninvited. Feeling his privacy had been irreversibly invade, Waugh decided to sell. Of why, he penned: “I felt as if the house had been polluted.”
2nd June 1952 – Given a Grade II* listing by English Heritage and described by German-British architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner CBE FBA (1902 – 1983) as a “dignified and elegant house.”
September 1945 – The Waughs return to live at Piers Court. Of it, in his diaries, he later wrote: “‘It’s the kind of house which takes a lot of living up to.”
“On Monday, September 10, 1945, a great thing happened. The nuns left Piers Court, where they’d been settled for the duration of the war, and the Waughs moved back into the house. Laura thought everything was perfect while Evelyn – bless his cynicism – detected losses and damage everywhere he looked.”
“In the cellar, Evelyn flushed out four dozen bottles of Dows 1922 and six dozen assorted claret, so things started to look up. Within a week his library was in order. That’s to say he could be sitting at his desk – cigar in hand, glass within reach – and look up from his papers to see a one-time King of England, George the Third, looking down on him from the wall, approving of his subject’s set-up. All was well with Waugh’s world after all.”
“How had the world changed for Evelyn since he had last been in residence in 1939? Mainly in the following ways: Britain and its allies had won the war, but at what cost? A post-war Labour government was in power which meant high taxes on his earnings which were used – much to Waugh’s dismay – to provide Welfare for the masses.”
“He was the author of ‘Brideshead Revisited.’ This had been chosen as Book of the Month in the United States, which meant a £10,000 windfall and an additional £10,000 in royalties to be looked forward to. Moreover, it gave Evelyn an exalted sense of his own importance. ‘If you have laurels, rest on them,’ might have been Waugh’s philosophy at the time. Besides, if he wrote more books in the next few years the income from them would be taxed at 80%.”
“He was the father of four children by now and, for the first time, would have to get used to them being around. Not in the library, of course, that would remain a child-free zone. But he could hardly keep them out of the house as a whole. Not those (Meg and Hattie) that were under school age, and not even those (Bron and Teresa) who were of school age, at least when their schools were closed for the holidays. More kids on the way? That’s how the Roman Catholic Church would have it, so yes. The Haynes’ four-poster had been erected in Evelyn’s bedroom.”
May 1945 – Waugh’s best-known work, Brideshead Revisited, is published.
October 1939 – Rented to a convent school for a year for £600 or the equivalent of £31,000 ($38,000, €36,000 or درهم140,000) today.
May 1938 – Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is published and gains “universal acclaim.”
January 1937 – Bought for Evelyn Waugh and his second wife, Laura Herbert, by the bride’s grandmother for £3,600 or the equivalent of £194,000 ($238,000, €226,000 or درهم874,000) today.
18th century – The present building was constructed on the site of an earlier 16th century house and incorporates parts of that.
Which would you prefer? One room in Knightsbridge for a punchy payment of £3 million or a detached 16th century cottage for the paltry price of £1 in the West Midlands?
In April 2017, an apartment at 199 Knightsbridge – a ritzy residence formed of 205 flats, penthouses and mews house opposite the Hyde Park Barracks that houses the Household Cavalry – sold for an astonishing sum of £90 million ($109 million, €104 million or درهم400 million).
Now, whilst Harrods Estates currently offer a 4-bedroom, 4-bathroom lateral unit that extends to 3,145 square foot in the building for £13.95 million ($16.9 million, €16.2 million or درهم61.9 million), someone on a lower budget could get just one room there for £3 million ($3.6 million, €3.5 million or درهم13.3 million). A veritable bargain or yet another indication of ‘Bonkers Britain’?
Marketed for a somewhat punchy £4,769 per square foot ($5,766, €5,537 or درهم21,177 per square foot) at asking price, a first-floor space offered by agents The Cloister is formed of a 25-foot by 22-foot living room that forms the only bedroom also. There is also a kitchen and bathroom – the former being just 5-foot wide and just 10-foot long – and frankly one is left realising this is actually a ‘home’ where only the multi-millionaire capable of buying it will clearly have “barely enough room to swing a cat.”
Situated opposite Hyde Park Barracks – more commonly known as Knightsbridge Barracks – this 629 square foot space has just two small windows and is rather awkwardly shaped. In its current configuration there’s a slimline double bed crammed into a nook with just one beside table but there’s not even a dining table. In spite of its £3 million price tag, this is a pad for those who simply want sofa suppers rather than to entertain on a grand scale.The floor plan of the space on offer illustrates just how little a multi-millionaire can actually get for their money in this neck of SW7. This is a property that is smaller than most hotel rooms and agents The Cloister make no mention of the no doubt very hefty accompanying service charges.Paltry priced High Heath Cottage – also known as ‘Mutton Castle’ due to a local tradition that a man who had stolen a sheep barricaded himself in the structure to avoid the hanging offence of being caught stealing sheep – is situated on Withy Hill Road, Sutton Coldfield, B75 6JR. It was constructed as one of around fifty servant’s cottages by The Right Reverend John Vessey (born John Harman, 1519 – 1551), who became Bishop of Exeter, and of it auctioneer Gupreet Bassi of Bond Wolfe told ITV: “This property has a fascinating history and the appearance of a mini watchtower, looking out across the valley to a lonely stretch of the old coach road from Coleshill to Lichfield, now the A446, where highwaymen could lurk. By the 19th century, the cottage was part of the Moor Hall Estate, and there was once a row of three cottages adjoining it, occupied by farm labourers in 1851. But the adjoining cottages fell into disrepair, and the present-day High Heath Cottage stands alone in the landscape much as it did nearly 500 years ago. This three-storey property is suitable for development but requires refurbishment and modernisation within the Grade II* building and green belt regulations, as well as the usual planning permission.”The cottage has two rooms on the ground floor, one room on the first floor and one room on the second floor. It has gardens to all sides and the agents add: “We understand the cottage incorporates a fireplace in each floor and is connected via a stone spiral staircase.” Sutton Coldfield town centre is approximately two miles distant.
Providing a stark contrast at the opposite end of the market, yet apparently something far more idyllic in its setting, Birmingham based auctioneers Bond Wolfe will be hoping to hammer down what they describe as “a vacant freehold Grade II* listed cottage in disrepair constructed in the 1530s by Bishop Vesey” in the “rural part of Sutton Coldfield” in the West Midlands next month.
They offer the three-storey stone-built structure with a paltry guide price of just £1 ($1.21, €1.16 or درهم4.44) and will sell the detached building on 14th December by public auction.
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party.
‘The Punchy’ and ‘The Paltry’ – Five properties at both ends of the price spectrum…
This detached, 2,061 square foot Edwardian house featured in Syracuse, New York featured in ‘The Steeple Times’ in September 2020 when it was offered for just £827 ($1,000, €960 or درهم3,673). It eventually sold in March 2021 for that sum though the buyer would have had to have shown proof of funds available to guarantee the £63,200 ($76,416, €73,375 or درهم280,639) costs of renovation required. The property’s most famous resident prior had been a German police dog named Jack that latched onto the building’s owner, Dr. Scott R. Fisher, on the Hindenburg line in France in October 1918. Supposedly, “when Jack spotted Dr. Fisher, he stuck to him and refused to leave his side – ensuring he found a way to be with Fisher his entire way back to base. Dr. Fisher told the paper that, ‘such devotion deserves reward,’ and decided to take Jack back home with him… Jack was stowed away in an overcrowded ship which was bringing American soldiers home and where each man was allowed only a certain poundage of baggage. Dr. Fisher shared his own rations with Jack because dog food was not available in the ship’s stores. When they arrived back in America, the pair settled here on Syracuse’s Southside.”In August 2017, ‘The Steeple Times’ shared news of a castle in Aberdeenshire for sale for just £130,000 ($157,000, €151,000 or درهم577,000). In “stablised” condition, but roofless the structure was lauded by Savills as “a blank canvas for someone to develop the building’s full potential as a spectacular family home or business.” Knockhall Castle had still not sold by January 2020 and was described in April this year as still being a “tumbled down romantic ruin.”In a state of collapse when sold to former ‘Country Life’ editor Marcus Binney for £1 ($1.21, €1.16 or درهم4.44) in 1981, 16,409 square foot, Grade I listed Barlaston Hall in Staffordshire – complete with a Chinese Chippendale staircase – was made safe and sold on for £300,000 ($363,000, €348,000 or درهم1.2 million) in 1992 and then offered for sale again in June 2014 for £2.3 million ($2.8 million, €2.7 million or درهم10.2 million). It was purchased for £2 million ($2.4 million, €2.3 million or درهم8.9 million) by Cameron and Claire Gilchrist-Dick since November 2020 and in a “separate sale,” the pair also snapped up the neighbouring 12th century church to use as a wedding venue.In July this year, a derelict Second World War fort in the Humber Estuary, once planned to be an ‘Island of Hope’ for detoxing drug addicts was offered for sale for £50,000 ($60,100, €58,700 or درهم220,600) at auction by Savills. Bull Sand Fort, near Hull hammered down for a punchy sum 880% higher at £490,000 ($588,500, €575,000 or درهم2.2 million) to a mystery bidder.At the top end of the market, in May 2019, we featured the possible sale of The Old Rectory in Old Church Street, Chelsea, London, SW3 for at least £200 million ($242 million, €232 million or درهم888 million). Its current owner, shipping magnate John Fredriksen, merging two adjoining properties paid a combined £70 million ($85 million, €81 million or درهم311 million) to create a two-acre compound between 2001 and 2006. It is believed that the house remains in the ownership of the Fredriksen family currently.
The Punchy – More images of the first-floor studio apartment in The Knightsbridge, 199 Knightsbridge, London, SW7 1RH offered for the outrageous sum of £3 million…
Described on the official website of what they somewhat lavishly laud as ‘The Residence,’ one room boxes in this building are somewhat laughably shouted instead as “executive studios” that are “perfect pied-à-terres.”
The exterior of ‘The Knightsbridge’ was never going to go down in history as an example of fantastic architectural design. It has a closer resemblance to a budget hotel or an office block that might appeal to David Brent.Facilities for residents number a 24-hour concierge, security, valet parking and use of ‘leisure facilities’ such as a swimming pool and business facilities including a 12-seat boardroom (which has “complimentary refreshments available”). The annual charges for such are not listed for the £3 million studio offered, but for the £13.95 million apartment also on sale currently the charges are £78,900 per annum plus £5,700 per annum per car parking space included.There’s so little space in the “executive studio” that the current resident has put a wardrobe in the hall and keeps their suitcases there also.The minute, windowless kitchen is most definitely not a space for an aspiring Nigella Lawson or Delia Smith.The current decoration scheme wouldn’t look out of place in student digs. It’s hardly what anyone would expect in a £3 million pad.The bathroom, equally, is hardly opulent.
The Paltry – More images of the £1 cottage, High Heath Cottage (AKA ‘Mutton’s Castle’), Withy Hill Road, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, B75 6JR…
Whilst this stone-built cottage might be cheap and off-the-beaten-track, it certainly will require a lot of work. Undoubtedly, however, the £1 price tag will encourage many to dig deeper – so do anticipate a bidding war on 14th December that will actually take the ultimate sale price of this property far, far higher.
An image of High Heath Cottage from the Sutton Reference Library taken circa 1908. Of it, in 2008 the Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group observed: “Sutton Coldfield has a number of stone houses dating from the sixteenth century of a kind not found anywhere else in England. According to the great historian Sir William Dugdale, Bishop Vesey built fifty-one of these stone houses here, where previously almost all the houses had been timber-framed. High Heath Cottage is the smallest of the surviving stone houses, built in an isolated spot. In the 1530s it was surrounded by the open commons of High Heath, and today it stands alone in the middle of bleak hedgeless farmland. It is a tall house, with three storeys connected by a stone spiral staircase, but narrow, with only one room on each floor, and a massive chimney. Writing in 1544, John Leland said that Vesey built the houses for his poor kinsmen, but other sources suggest that they were built to house servants of the Bishop who would keep order in outlying parts of Sutton. The house at High Heath has the appearance of a watchtower, and it looks across the valley to a lonely stretch of the old coach road from Coleshill to Lichfield (now the A446) where highwaymen could lurk. The cottage was easy to defend from attack, having, originally, only one ground-floor window. There is a local tradition that a man who had stolen a sheep barricaded himself in the cottage – this at a time when sheep-stealing was a hanging offence. He is supposed to have held out for a considerable time, and so the cottage used to be known locally as ‘Mutton Castle.’ In the nineteenth century the cottage was part of the Moor Hall Estate belonging to the Hacketts of Moxhull, and by 1824 a row of three cottages had been built adjoining it. All four of the cottages were occupied by farm labourers in 1851; one of them, William Lunt, had seven children. The adjoining cottages fell into disrepair, and eventually the end one was converted to form an extension to the stone house to make a single dwelling – the present-day High Heath Cottage stands alone in the landscape much as it did 460 years ago.”The building is clearly in a perilous state, but any of those who enthuse about Channel 4’s ‘Grand Designs’ could find far worse projects than this.If wandering like Heathcliff is your desire, ‘Mutton Castle’ could be the perfect spot for someone with £1 going spare.
![In this watercolour by Cyril Farey (1888 – 1954), which Manning Fine Art describe as “capturing Princes Court at its prime”, the golden era of a building is shown. The art dealers observe: “[This] is not merely an architectural drawing it is expressing a lifestyle that only an apartment in Princes Court can provide. As such the fashionable and modern apartment block is surrounded by a Mediterranean blue sky and Hyde Park peaks out from the sides as an Eden of lush green. The smart street is punctuated by smart, friendly, yellow awnings whilst classic, stylish cars and iconic London buses pass by.” The same cannot sadly be said of the setting today given this part of Brompton Road has become better known for housing hookers, Rolex robberies and chronic pollution.](https://www.thesteepletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Princes-Court-Knightsbridge-by-Cyril-Farey-designed-by-George-Valentine-Myer.jpg)
