Victoria Beckham tours Brian Blessed’s former home
In April, the blog that preceded The Steeple Times featured an article on Clarence House in Richmond.
At the time this former school and home of actor Brian Blessed was priced at £22,500,000 but after languishing on the market, the price has been slashed by £4,500,000 to £18,000,000.
Victoria Beckham pictured in the garden of Clarence House, 2 The Vineyard, Richmond Hill, Surrey, TW10 6AQThe front of Clarence House would no doubt need “pap proofing” to suit the privacy requirements of David and Victoria Beckham and their family
In recent days Victoria Beckham has been pictured touring this and other properties in south-west London. No stranger to securing a bargain and worth some £160 million, Mrs Beckham could no doubt slice a little extra off if she decided to proceed. She and her husband are allegedly set to return to the UK and an unnamed source is quoted as revealing:
“David has been really missing London and the UK recently. The royal wedding, the Olympics and now Christmas coming up have all made him long for the UK. He talks about being in London a lot and he misses his family, so it would make perfect sense for the family to all move back to Britain. For the Beckhams, Eton [as a school for their sons] would be the ultimate arrival.”
Since the pupils of Eton College recently parodied the ‘Gangnam Style’ high-energy Korean disco music, maybe they’ll also embrace the Beckham boys
Perhaps if the couple don’t manage to get their sons to “go Eton Style,” they could reopen Clarence House as a school. The most famous pupil to pass through the doors was Bernardo O’Higgins (1778 – 1842), the liberator and founding father of Chile.
If one spent $2,000,000 on cosmetic surgery, one would expect to end up looking fantastic. It didn’t quite work out in the case of the billionairess “Bride of Wildenstein,” though, as instead she discovered the husband she thought she’d please in bed with a 19-year old Russian. Feline like in appearance, the purr of this New York socialite is said to be just as bad as her bite. She’s known to be a skilled hunter and pilot and once boasted her telephone bills were at least $60,000 a year. Surprisingly far from camera shy, what on earth will she look like at ninety?
A marine residence with a history tied to the Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, the Special Operations Executive and Babycham
The House on the Shore on Thorns Beach at Beaulieu in Hampshire is a home that wouldn’t look out of place in the Hamptons or Rhode Island. Dramatically situated next to the Solent waters to the north of the Isle of Wight, this suitably named building wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1980s BBC series Howards’ Way. It could. Indeed, have been an ideal home for Gerald and Polly Urquhart. (more…)
Another rumoured sale of “Beckingham Palace” is reported
November 2012: In March this year, the blog that preceded The Steeple Times looked into reports that David and Victoria Beckham would be selling their Hertfordshire home, Rowneybury House (better known as “Beckingham Palace”). For all the talk of that sale, as far as we are aware, it still remains in their possession. In recent days another media source has reported that the house is indeed on the market and that the Beckham family are now moving to New York. This has now become a story akin to that of “the boy who cried wolf” and it’s one that we’ll only believe to be true when the removal vans actually pull up.
March 2013: In a further update, the story has resurfaced but the supposed price is allegedly now just £10 million. That’s quite a reduction.
Whenever there’s a quiet news day, British newspapers like to put out claims that David and Victoria Beckham are to sell their Hertfordshire mansion, Rowneybury House. Such a sale has never followed but that the Mail Online chose to run this as a lead article is indeed interesting in view of the footballer’s recent return to LA Galaxy.
“Beckingham Palace” before it was altered: Rowneybury House, Harlow Road, Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, CM21 0AJThe results of the “Posh” makeover included extensions, garden landscaping and even a soccer pitch
Similar stories, for example, ran in the Mirror in April 2007 and again in September 2010. In the latter piece, an unnamed spokesman stated:
“We can confirm David and Victoria have had their UK home valued.”
Strangely all of these stories share a lack of credited sources and are written in the same vein on each occasion. Though Rowneybury House has certainly not come to the open market to date, today’s suggestion that the couple are selling as they think it “wasteful to hold on to when they never visit” would appear a sensible course of action.
Rowneybury House itself was built in the 1930s and used as a council owned orphanage. Bought by the Beckhams in October 1999 for £2,500,000, the couple vastly altered and enlarged the Grade II listed house to include 7-bedrooms, a recording studio, gym, pool room and indoor and outdoor pools. They even added a 52ft garden pavilion complete with a huge barbecue reputed to have cost £70,000.
In the grounds, which extend to some 24 acres, the Beckhams have added a petting zoo for their children as well as a soccer pitch, two full size golf holes, a floodlit tennis court and a helicopter landing pad. Three gazebos, one “romantic,” one “lakeside” and another “ornamental” were also constructed.
The sum total for all of this work is, for some reason, always quoted in the mainstream press at £18,000,000. Though it is obvious that vast expense has indeed been spent on Rowneybury House by the couple, the figure does seem a little exaggerated. Equally ludicrous is the suggestion that they will sell at a loss.
The Beckhams’ time at Rowneybury House has not been without drama. In 2002, police foiled an Eastern European gang who planned to kidnap them from the house and on occasions intruders were caught in the grounds. Further drama ensued in 2008 when the pair’s housekeepers, Eric and June Emmett, were arrested after being accused of stealing items of memorabilia.
I myself found myself involved in a story about the house when, in 2004, I worked for a PR firm who were representing an estate agent selling an adjoining property. The owners Mick and Lynda Allen, who I believe eventually sold their home, Rowneybury Bungalow, to the Beckhams, used the surrounding publicity to attempt to launch the pop career of their daughter Nikki. I am not certain how she subsequently fared.
David and Victoria Beckham with their children Brooklyn Joseph, Romeo James, Cruz David and Harper SevenThe $22,000,000 “Italian style” 9-bedroom Los Angeles home the Beckhams have owned since 2007
The Beckhams, who are worth some £160,000,000, now spend the majority of their time in America and are said to prefer it there. When in the UK, they opt mainly to stay at either Claridge’s or The Savoy as both are more convenient for Mrs Beckham’s meetings at her design studio in Battersea.
Both the Mail Online and the Mirror suggest that Victoria Beckham has recently been looking at apartments “next to Hyde Park” so that she can maintain a smaller base in the UK. Perhaps a move to the £7,000 per square foot One Hyde Park development could be on the cards.
If this news is indeed finally true, it’ll certainly be the end of an era for the pad dubbed “Beckingham Palace” as a portmanteau of “Beckham” and “Buckingham Palace.”
A Modernist masterpiece based upon simple rationalism
Two buildings were designed by architects Carlo di Carli and Antonio Carminati in 1953 – 1954 in Milan’s Via dei Giardini. Both are considered Modernist masterpieces and both stand proudly in this, the city’s only tree lined street.
Architect and designer Carlo di Carli (1910 – 1999)Carli’s awarding winning 683 Cassina chair
Carlo di Carli (1910 – 1999) is considered to be amongst the “master[s] of Italian design” and is best known for a chair named the 683 Cassina that won him the Compasso d’Oro award in 1954. He was a leading figure at the Polytechnic of Milan and worked extensively with Longhi and Cinoca. An exhibition of his works was held at the Triennale Design Museum in 2011.
Santos Versace’s residence in the Via dei Giardini, MilanA colourful, simplistic Versace designed reception roomVersace’s design influences continue in the property’s games roomVersace’s influence is clear in a shower room in the propertyWhilst one could definitely have imagined Gianni Versace relaxing on this roof terrace
Laid out in the shape of an octagon overlapping a rectangle, one of these rationalist buildings is a five-storey 22,000 square foot single family residence. It boasts an elevator, a private garden and a roof top terrace and in last week’s Evening Standard, Lorenzo Mercolini of Sotheby’s, who is selling it for Santo Versace, president and co-CEO of Gianni Versace SpA and a Member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic, commented: “There is simply no other property in Milan like it.”
Santo Versace
Santo Versace (born 1944), like his late brother Gianni and sister Donatella, is a colourful character. A graduate of the University of Messina, he worked first as a banker and then as an accountant. He gave this up in 1976 to support his brother in his rising career as a designer and effectively was the business brains behind the house of Versace. The company now generates over $1 billion a year in retail sales.
Married with two children, Santo Versace launched his political career in 2008 with Silvio Berlusconi’s The People of Freedom party before sensationally quitting in September 2011. His parting words to the “king of bunga bunga” were:
“I like to work. And in (Mr Berlusconi’s political party), there’s no need for people who work.”
He is now a member of the Alliance for Italy party and regularly speaks out against corruption in Italian politics. Mr Versace has not given a comment as to why he is selling his base at the heart of Milan’s shopping district.
You’d have to be Gaga about Versace to purchase this Via dei Giardini mansion though. The asking price is a staggering £40,000,000.
In the blog that preceded “The Steeple Times,” Matthew Steeples took a look at The Manor House at Stoke Poges in March 2012. It’s still on the market at £13,500,000 and though the price has yet to be cut, there has been uproar about revelations that the former owners, South Buckinghamshire District Council, sold the freehold and a sculpture by John Deare for just £300,000. A link to the May 2012 “Bucks Free Press” article about this is included at the end of this article. What a Carry On!
The Manor House, Park Road, Stoke Poges, Slough, Buckinghamshire, SL2 4PGAn image of The Manor House sometime between 1910 and 1929
Estate agents particulars are funny things. Normally gushing with nonsense such as “prestigious,” “luxurious” and “architect designed,” property agents rarely miss a trick when it comes to selling historical and personality related peculiarities.
Sidney James as The Reverend Flasher AKA “Big Dick” Turpin with Barbara Windsor as Harriett in a scene filmed in The Great Hall at The Manor House, Stoke Poges for the film Carry on DickThe Great Hall at The Manor House today
I was therefore somewhat perplexed that the brochure for The Manor House at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire didn’t contain reference to its appearance in the 1974 classic Carry on Dick.
Agents Savills instead opted to gush about the house’s previous owners, who numbered Francis Hastings, second Earl of Huntingdon, Sir Edward Coke and Thomas Penn, son of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. The brochure also goes to the lengths of describing visitors who have included Queen Elizabeth I, Charles I and Sir Thomas Gray and points out that Sir Edwin Landseer used The Manor House as a studio whilst painting his most famous work, The Monarch of the Glen, in 1851. The filming of For Your Eyes Only and Bridget Jones’ Diary in the adjoining Stoke Park also get mention but Savills utterly neglect the starring role of the building as the home of the Reverend Flasher, played by Sid James, in Carry on Dick. Plainly “Big Dick” is not someone they wish this £13,500,000 house to be associated with.
The Manor House is now a quarter of its original size as, on his return from America, Thomas Penn decided the house too dilapidated for his own occupation. He commissioned James Wyatt to build him the new mansion that is now Stoke Park Club in the 1790s and demolished the majority of The Manor House.
Stoke Park as the backdrop to a golf match between James Bond (Sean Connery) and Auric Goldfinger (Gert Froebe) in For Your Eyes Only (1981). Oddjob (Toshiyuki Harold Sakata) caddies.
In 1911, shortly after the Stoke Park golf course was laid out, further refurbishments were carried out that included the creation of the current Great Hall from the former kitchen, the introduction of bay windows and a new grand staircase.
In 2010, Comer Homes acquired The Manor House and brought it into the 21st century. The 11,227 square foot main house and 7,966 square foot of guest and leisure accommodation were completely renovated and such things as multi-zoned, multi-sourced entertainment systems, CAT5 cabling and underfloor heating installed.
The extremely neutral style of decoration is perhaps a reason that a buyer has yet to biteThe uninspired theme continues in the kitchenWhilst this bedroom could be located, well, erm, just about anywhere
Just 35 minutes drive from Mayfair and now looking somewhat like a hotel out of the Mr & Mrs Smith guide, The Manor House is an extremely manageable country home as it stands in just 10 acres of grounds. It will no doubt have huge appeal to a popstar, Euromillions winner or Russian oligarch. When viewing, however, they just better not mention “Big Dick” as no doubt soon the agent will have had “enough of it!”
For more information on The Manor House, Park Road, Stoke Poges, Slough, Buckinghamshire, SL2 4PG contact Nick Ingle of Savills Beaconsfield on +44 (0) 1494 73152 or download a PDF brochure from:http://residentialsearch.savills.co.uk/property-detail/311852
This mouthpiece was born in Rettendon, Essex in 1958 and vents bile on all manner of subjects. Articles such as: “Why don’t more women moan like me?” and “Liz Jones’ baby craving drove her to steal husband’s sperm in ultimate deception” are frankly illustrative of why she’s so unpopular. After she got banned from the majority of fashion shows and her husband left her, she quit London for Somerset in 2007 to feed organic muesli to the rats in the barns of a 47-acre farm she purchased as her “rural idyll.” That misadventure came to a sticky end in November 2012 after she’d alienated the whole county by calling them, amongst other things, “smelly” and “faintly Amish.” Goodness knows whom she’ll choose to offend next. Phillip Schofield sums her up best: “She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged.” Our advice: Just steer well clear of this acid tongued poison pen.
The rise and fall of the “wealthiest divorcee in history” has been extraordinary. A former nude model for her first husband’s Knave magazine and star of adult films such as “The Nine Acres of Nakedness,” Patricia Kluge is the daughter of an Englishman and a Scots-Iraqi. She married her second husband, the late John Kluge, chairman of Metromedia and once the richest man in America, in 1981 after belly dancing for him at a dinner party in New York. As part of her plan to dovetail herself into the top drawer of American society, the couple built a 24,000 square foot mock 18th century English-style mansion, Albermarle, in Virginia and stuffed it full of Chippendale furniture. She got this as part of her $100 million divorce settlement in 1990 and wisely invested part of the payoff in a highly successful business trading football cards but then vanity struck. The Kluge Estate Winery project that she started with her third husband, William Moses, bankrupted the pair in June 2011 and the Bank of America foreclosed on her properties. A lifeline came from “longtime friend” Donald Trump who purchased the vineyard and employed her, but even he’s now uttered the words: “You’re fired!” and sent her packing. Of her newfound predicament Kluge commented: “What did we lose? Material things, nothing too important. When something like this happens you really see who your friends are, those you can rely on, and we have many friends.” Here is a lady with fortitude that can only be described as admirable. It’s probably best, however, to keep her away from the cash register.
Matthew Steeples examines the truth behind Liz Jones giving up on her “rural idyll”
The Mail’s Liz Jones is a waspish woman who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Those who’ve paid even a moment’s attention to her bleating, will be familiar with lines such as: “Last week, my brand new £1,300 MacBook Pro broke” and “Phil Spencer wanted his £46,000 and he wanted it now!” She never stops talking about money and the size of what she both owns and owes.
Liz Jones
In today’s Femail, Jones bores on about about how she feels “like a cross-dresser” trying out the Kardashian Kollection of clothing in a pointed attack on Kim Kardashian, but it was for her diatribe yesterday that she truly got the goat of the nation in “[bidding] a ferocious farewell” to life in the country in an article entitled “Goodbye… and good riddance!” 2,151 people have commented so far and most of them have been far from sympathetic.
When Upcott Farm at Brushford, near Dulverton in Somerset came up for sale in 2007 at a price of £1.6 million, it featured in an article by The Telegraph’s Caroline McGhie. The 5-bedroomed farmhouse came with a 2-bedroom annexe, a courtyard of barns and stables and 47 acres of land. McGhie waxed lyrical about the merits of moving to this location: “People come here for the peace and quiet, the night skies, the dramatic coastline, and they work from home,” she stated before adding: “You can find everything here, including butchers, bakers, afternoon tea and cake, fish and chips, an art gallery and a shop selling fishing tackle.” Of Upcott Farm itself, she concluded:
“This would suit a member of the new wave of buyers dubbed Droppies (Disillusioned Relatively Ordinary Professionals Preferring Independent Employment Situations).”
McGhie got it half right: Upcott Farm sold to someone who considers herself far from “relatively ordinary” and someone who is far from “professional.” The purchaser, however, was certainly someone who’d become “disillusioned” with what she’d bought and someone whose desire to be “independent” and create a “situation” just alienated all she encountered. The buyer, you’ve guessed it, was none other than Elizabeth Ann Jones.
Jones was born in Brentwood, Essex in 1958 and studied journalism at the London College of Printing. She became editor of Marie Claire in 1999 but was sacked, she herself suggests, for “listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month.” Here, it seems, began Jones’s obsession with all things material and here she also met an Indian BBC radio journalist named Nirpal Dhaliwal in 2000.
Jones married Dhaliwal but the union was to prove an “utter disaster” as he had affairs with women she terms “younger, dimmer [and] slimmer.” “I’m no racist” Jones was divorced in 2007 and said goodbye to her “3,000 square foot of Islington real estate” and “easy, if super-busy, London life” in favour of the green, green grass of Somerset.
Whoever’s side you see it from, five years of hell followed. Jones baited the locals and they grew to loathe her. She wrote columns and a book, The Exmoor Files, where she attacked them as “faintly Amish… feral, old and smelly” and another hack and neighbour, Jane Alexander of The Telegraph, responded: “Dulverton [was] positively fizzing with fury” after each and every publication.
Of the local restaurants, Jones stated:
“I have given up trying to eat out in restaurants here on Exmoor… It is still stuck in the Seventies, with only things in baskets and rum babas on the menu… If you tell the waiter you are vegetarian, you are stared at, incredulously, as if you are black.”
She whinged about her inability to find love:
”I will never, ever meet a man here in the middle of a moor, where even to be in possession of your own teeth is a bonus.”
And whined about fieldsports:
“I didn’t increase my popularity by being unable to pass a party of men and often children with guns, shooting rabbits and deer, without getting out of my BMW and saying: ‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your Saturday morning?’ The look of shock on their faces that I had the cheek to challenge them was priceless. I would stop, too, and shout at huntsmen on horses, galloping on tarmaced roads, one hand on the reins, the other clamping a mobile phone to their heads. ‘You will ruin your horses’ tendons!’ I would wail.”
Whilst Jones found little to like in her new community, they found nothing positive in her arrival either. Her dog was blamed for worrying lambs, and Jones’s inability to control it, locals say, was an indicator of the chasm between her life and theirs. In 2009, one neighbour went as far as to tell Danny Brierley of The Independent:
“We have got nothing in common with her, really. I think she may find it difficult to make any kind of life here now. She is not a very friendly person and we are all sick to death of talking about Liz Jones. A hatred has been building up for months. She is actually having a go at people and they are not going to tolerate that. She has feelings like all people, of course she has. But everyone wants her to leave and leave now. No one can make her, but we think she will go. I don’t see how you can live in such a small community with people who think that way about you.”
Matters came to a head when Jones’s precious black BMW convertible, “bought in 2005 for £26,000,” was pelted with eggs and teenagers fired shots at her letterbox with an air rifle. A local councilor even dressed up as her in the local carnival and yesterday Jones took revenge on those she blames for her “five-year prison sentence” and deprivation from Space NK, Cath Kidston and Illy coffee.
Instead, the article just shows the true reality of this bombastic harpy. The lines Jones penned speak for themselves. Country people don’t welcome someone who planned to “hack for miles across the open moorland in my Prada jodhpurs” anymore than the folk of Knightsbridge welcome Arabs treating their roads like racetracks. The gardener who had to endure Jones yelling “walk faster!” at him didn’t deserve such anymore than a bus driver in SW11 deserves abuse from his passengers. Jones concludes:
“I’m now a different person. I became so lonely. I would often get in my car, not just for the warmth, but for the kind voice of the satnav lady. I’ve learned that an amazing view and a pair of nesting grey herons are not enough to make me happy.”
27 acres of land including paddocks and a fishing lake remain on the market through Savills and Strutt & Parker at a price of £200,000 at Upcott Farm
Miss Jones bleats that she’s taken a £500,000 loss on Upcott Farm, which languished on the market at first at £1,900,000 and then £1,750,000 for three years. The “unexpected” sale of the property has given her the ability to “flee back to the city” but the locals and even the “Droopies” should be warned: there’s still 27 acres of the farm unsold and on the market at a price of £200,000. Halloween may have passed but the battleaxe in the Beemer could still call again.
Could the number 13 be the reason Halcyon Hall has failed to sell?
Several over the top Californian residences we’ve featured on The Steeple Times, namely the $40,000,000 Chateau d’Or in Bel Air and the $87,000,000 Villa del Lago on the Newport coast, were properties that have seen huge price reductions. Though $15,000,000 has been sliced off the asking price of the Bel Air pad, it remains unsold and meanwhile Villa del Lago, now renamed One Pelican Hill Road, achieved just $18.5 million in a bankruptcy auction. It sold for less than a quarter of what the developer originally sought for it.
The 25,000 square foot Chateau d’Or, 10425 West Sunset Boulevard, Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, CA 90077 first came on the market at $40,000,000 in 2009. At $25,000,000, it still hasn’t sold.One Pelican Hill Road North, Newport Coast, Newport Beach, Orange County, California, CA 92657 was originally on the market for $87,000,000. It eventually sold at a bankruptcy auction for just $18,500,000 and features a 17,706 square foot Italianate mansion with 8 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms. Additional features number staff accommodation, a gatehouse, garaging for 17 cars, a 1-acre lake with terraced waterfalls, a tennis court, stabling and a riding area and a private vineyard with a wine cave.
We believed monstrous white elephants like these were confined to the US, but we are afraid we’ve come across something today that truly proves otherwise. The behemoth we refer to is a 14,000 square foot house in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Built in 2005 for a businessman named Barry Beck, “Halcyon Hall” stands on the site of a far more modest property that was simply known as 11 Newlands Avenue.
The phrase “halcyon days” refers to “the seven days of winter when storms never occur” in the Greek myth of Alycone but whether this inspired Beck in naming this place is unknown. He and his wife, Pauline, did, however, decide upon an “Elizabethan theme” for the residence and our pictures illustrate their extravagantly eccentric tastes adequately.
Halcyon Hall, 11 Newlands Avenue, Radlett, Hertfordshire, WD7 8EHThe entrance hall is guarded by a pair of knights in full suits of armourThe hall and entertaining salon is far from understatedThe main staircase is guarded by a life-size bearThe dining room attempts to look ElizabethanWhilst the kitchen dabbles with medieval meets “The Real Housewives of New York”Decorating mish-mash continues in a formal entertaining spaceAnd the “games gallery” isn’t exactly neutral eitherThe master bedroom suite takes “over-the-top” to another levelBut it is the thirteen seat cinema that we find most curious
Undoubtedly the construction of this vast Hertfordshire crib is of a high quality but the look is nothing other than ludicrous. Here is a mix of pastiche, ostentatiousness and just plain odd. Not even a WAG could have come up with décor this curious and such things as a private cinema with 13 seats can plainly not be the choice of someone who follows the curse of the hangman’s noose.
This 7-bedroomed house, which stands in 1.17 acres, would strangely, though, be ideal for someone who is a little paranoid. As well as all the security features you’d expect of any multi-million pound mansion in the Home Counties, it also includes a bathroom that doubles as a panic room. If you close the door in a certain way, steel bars supposedly come down making sure no intruder can follow you inside.
Two knights in full suits of armour guard the entrance hallway and a life-size stuffed bear stands dominant in the games gallery of the house. Plainly this beast’s not persuaded anyone to bite yet as whilst the price of Halcyon Hall has fallen from £15,000,000 in February 2011 to just under £13,000,000 in November 2012, the house remains on the market. We suspect that the curse of “Unlucky Thirteen” may well be alive and well somewhere between numbers 11 and 15 Newlands Avenue.
Halcyon Hall, 11 Newlands Avenue, Radlett, Hertfordshire, WD7 8EH is for sale through Statons. For more information telephone: +44 (0) 20 8445 3694 or email:[email protected]
