Scottish castle for sale for just £28.90 per square foot
They say that owning a grouse moor is equivalent to burning £50 notes but the buyer of the 41,433 square foot Carbisdale Castle in Sutherland will take on an altogether bigger burden. (more…)
Tag: estate agent
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Knickering a realtor
Knight Frank take an unusual tack to promote a property
Knight Frank is known as the estate agent to the rich and famous. Like other realty firms, of course, they pepper their brochures with superlatives such as “exemplary”, “spacious” and “glorious” but in the marketing of 33 Portland Place, they truly take the biscuit. (more…)
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America’s Downton
An opportunity to buy an American equivalent of Downton Abbey
Downton Abbey returns to our screens this autumn and one has to ask whether its writer Julian Fellowes was at all influenced by the story of the story of Peter Widener of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania whose son and grandson both died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic. (more…)
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Confusing a castle
Confused.com founder puts castle on market for £1.5 million less than she spent on it
“Wild haired” Kate Armstrong, the Australian founder of Confused.com, bought the medieval Scottish castle Cassillis House in Ayrshire from the Kennedy clan in 2009 for £3 million. She spent four years and £3.5 million updating and improving it but is now selling it at a loss for just £5 million. (more…)
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A mean mansion
Former residence of Leona Helmsley comes to the market
Leona Helmsley didn’t do “little”. She lived by the belief that “only the little people pay taxes” and housed herself in a vast mansion on a 40-acre plot in Connecticut. Helmsley died at the house in 2007 and it is now once again for sale (more…)
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Perfectly British
An opportunity to create your own version of Downton Abbey in the Cotswolds
For a mere £27 million you can currently purchase a 6-bedroomed mews house in Reeves Mews in Mayfair. Alternatively, a buyer with the same sum to hand could splash out on something a little grander, a 774.32 acre Cotswold estate complete with a mansion, two entrance lodges and eleven cottages. (more…)
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Larry and Leigh’s love nest
Small, unmodernised former home of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh for sale for the extraordinary figure of £7.5 million
Built in 1850, Durham Cottage in Christchurch Street, Chelsea is a house “hidden behind a high dusty brick wall” that was the love nest of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh between 1937 and 1956. Now, in totally unmodernised condition, the house is for sale after failing to sell at auction (despite a bid of £6,980,000). (more…)
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Throttling a cocktail
A studio apartment with a difference in Mayfair’s Mount Street
Estate agent Roy Brooks became famous in the 1960s for the derogatory descriptions he gave to the properties he marketed and such phrases as “not enough room to swing a cat” were amongst his most frequently used. His advertisements were chronicled in two books, Brothel in Pimlico and Mud, Straw and Insults, and he’d have had a field day if he’d taken on a £625 per week studio flat in Mayfair (more…)
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Drugs and Dents
A Cumbrian mansion built by opium traders and more recently used by cannabis growers comes to the market for just £1.5 million
Built by the well-known Dent family, who made their fortune trading both tea and opium, Flass is a vast 23,000 square foot Palladian mansion on the outskirts of the village of Maulds Meaburn in Cumbria. Ironically it was also the setting for one of the country’s biggest drug raids in May 2012. (more…)
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Reducing an island
Buy a private island in Scotland’s Summer Isles for a knockdown price
The Scottish independence campaign has been in the main funded by EuroMillions winners Chris and Colin Weir. If their desire doesn’t come to fruition, however, there’s another option for them: They could buy themselves a private island. (more…)