Oliver Estreich’s New York real estate power brokers
In the second in a series, Oliver Estreich profiles New York’s top realtors. He continues with Eva Penson, Leighton Candler and Dana Power.
Tag: Polish
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New York’s priciest pad
The sale of a $125 million penthouse on the top three floors of The Pierre
In London this week, the Evening Standard announced that a 50,000 square foot Grade I listed Regency house, 18 Carlton House Terrace, SW1 has gone on the market at £250,000,000. If it achieves this figure, it will become the most expensive single home to be sold in the UK ever.
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Beverley Craven
This British singer-songwriter was born in Colombo, Sir Lanka whilst her father was there working for Kodak. Influenced by Elton John and Kate Bush, she began her career touring with Bobby Womack but it was her 1991 single, “Promise Me,” that catapulted Craven into the big time. After a period raising a family, she’s now back in the business and even appeared with her daughter, Mollie, on ITV’s Take Me Out in February 2012. -
Redefining Rachman
A different side to Peter Rachman is revealed
Whenever the name Rachman is mentioned, the first things that come to mind are greed, extortion and intimidation. The word is so engrained in such that “Rachmanism” now features in the dictionary, defined as:
“The exploitation of tenants of slum properties by unscrupulous landlords.”
“Notorious slum landlord” Peter Rachman (1920 – 1962) Perec “Peter” Rachman (1920 – 1962) was born in Poland and the son of a Jewish dentist. He is best known for having built up a property empire of over 100 mansion blocks in London’s Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill areas in the 1950s where he evicted longstanding sitting tenants and replaced them with prostitutes and immigrants from the West Indies. Due to the relaxation of rent controls by the Conservative government in 1957 and as no other landlord was prepared to take them, he was able to charge these unfortunates whatever he wished.
Rachman came to public attention after the Labour MP for Paddington North, Ben Parkin (1906 – 1969), became vocal about the poor housing conditions of his tenants. Parkin coined the phrase “Rachnamism” in his quest to put a stop to the activities of “rent racketeers” and highlighted him as someone who used violence to maintain control of “his manor.” The MP even went as far as to suggest that Peter Rachman’s death was merely a ploy to distract from his activities and the result was to leave the public engrained with a belief that this landlord was a “manipulative, grasping Jew” who symbolised the moral decay of Great Britain.
Ben Parkin MP (1906 – 1969) on a CND march A Radio 4 programme this week, however, highlighted an entirely different side to Rachman. In The Real Rachman – Lord of the Slums, a “barrister turned investigative reporter” named Joshua Levine suggested that those who believe Peter Rachman just to be a sordid intimidator fail to see the true persona of the man.
Levine’s witnesses, who number former tenants and Rachman’s biographer Shirley Green, do describe him as a “chancer” who was prepared to use the system to make money, but they also portray another side of this supposed “figure of evil’s” character.
Nicholas van Hoogstraten (born 1945) One immigrant tenant stated: “He was the only one who ever did anything for us” whilst others added that Rachman was “well-liked” and “too soft to be a landlord.” He was a “benefactor” and “jolly” commented others who’d rented from him and a truly notorious modern-day landlord, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, failed to see the opportunist in Rachman at all: “It’s laughable. He had no wealth. It’s an invented moral [mission].” Rachman, equally, was defined as a man “affected” by his imprisonment in a Soviet labour camp in the Second World War by his former lover Mandy Rice-Davis and as someone who suffered true sorrow over the deaths of his family there.
Levine’s examination recounts how Rachman, who drove a navy blue Rolls-Royce with a white interior, was built into a symbol of corruption and moral decay. Rachman, like so many other mythical scapegoats, it turns out only died with only one conviction: parking without lights. The truth, indeed, is often stranger than fiction.
Listen to BBC Radio 4’s The Real Rachman – Lord of the Slums at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ng4h3
Follow Joshua Levine on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/Joshua_Levine
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Harry Handelsman
This German-born property developer is best known as the pioneer who brought “loft living” to London in the early 1990s with his Manhattan Loft Corporation. His redevelopment of the Grade I listed St Pancras railway station has resulted in accolades galore and his personal fortune has allowed him to build up a collection featuring works by Andy Warhol, Anish Kapoor, Gerald Laing, Sarah Lucas and Gerhard Richter. Handelsman’s view on money is simple: “[It’s] cynical, sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t. You can’t take anything for granted.” -
Why pay less?
Living life to the full Donald G. Abbey style
“Why pay less when you can pay more?” is a mantra that some strangely choose to live by. In my time, I have encountered a couple with a different Ferrari for each day of the week, someone who proudly declared their home had a window for each day of the year and an heiress who insists upon the local baker feeding her dog daily with a freshly baked caviar pie.
When I discovered a house in California priced at $78,000,000, I didn’t expect to subsequently find out that the same vendor is also selling another of his homes in Montana at the very same price. Having done a little research into Donald G. Abbey, the commercial real estate tycoon who owns both The Bradbury Estate and Shelter Island, I discovered that here indeed is another personality whose excess knows no bounds.
I suppose when people sell homes of this worth, the asking price they set is quite irrelevant. “What,” I’m sure they ask, “is $5 million between friends?” Equally, when it comes to developing such properties, characters of this nature do not show any reserve. Bling is most definitely the order of the day and the larger and flashier one can build, I guess, the better.
An aerial shot of The Bradbury Estate, 172 Bliss Canyon Road, Bradbury, California, CA 91008, USA 
The front elevation of the main house 
The owner and his guests need not get wet on arrival in their limousines Abbey’s Bradbury Estate is a case in point. This vast property consists of a 33,000 square foot main house with 7 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. It is almost entirely made of French limestone and includes a chef’s kitchen with a pizza oven, a 2,000 bottle wine cellar, an oak paneled elevator and a leather paneled poker room. Bedrooms include domes with hand painted frescos and in addition there is a detached 6,700 square foot guest house above a 10 car garage and a 5,700 square foot pool house with a catering kitchen, gym, massage room and a subterranean EPA certified 25 yard rifle shooting range complete with a gun storage room and 2 large safes.
The hall of the main residence comes complete with a gallery and bar 
A vast library provides the perfect space to enjoy a good book 
The library’s glazed ceiling 
Another palatial reception room 
The house features a rather impressive kitchen 
Mr Abbey’s copper bath tub comes complete with a mat displaying his initials in front of it Within the 8 acre grounds there is a cross shaped infinity-edged pool – perhaps Mr Abbey is religious – that is “just a few feet short of Olympic length.” It requires 350,000 gallons of water if it is to be filled to capacity. Adjoining this is something even more ludicrous: a 1,000,000 gallon, temperature-controlled rainbow trout pond that cost some $8,000,000 to construct. The pond is said to be “adorned with perennials,” is heated by a custom gravity separator with UV filters and is “chilled for the trout by a 300-tonne central cooling plant.” At Bradbury, thoughts of water crisis in Sudan and Ethiopia come way behind the needs of Abbey’s rainbows.
The rear of the house viewed from above The Bradbury Estate’s $8,000,000 trout pond 
The estate’s 350,000 gallon near Olympic length cross shaped infinity edged swimming pool 
The property’s EPA certified 25 yard rifle range For those wanting to avoid California’s UV rays, Bradbury also boasts an acre of porches, decks, loggia and walkways. A 600ft blue stone driveway completes this “once in a lifetime trophy property” that “belongs in the portfolio of the most astute collector” and it has space for “60 foot truck access or multiple limousines.”
When Mr Abbey has tired of California, he is able to retreat to his own island in Montana. The 24 acre Shelter Island on Flathead Lake includes 7,000 feet of frontage to the water, a world class sporting clay course and 3 computer controlled tracks and docking systems that allow boats to be landed in the dry dock without riders ever leaving the craft or handling a line. The island is powered via an underground armoured utility cable that carry 12,000 amps to it along with CAT-5 computer cable and phonelines and the main entertaining space features a mammoth television of some 120-inches in size.
An aerial view of Donald G. Abbey’s Shelter Island 
Mr Abbey’s passion for copper continues with a conservatory made out of the metal on the lakeside elevation of the main residence on Shelter Island 
The Great Room of the main residence on Shelter Island 
Mr Abbey’s passion for fine wines is displayed in a bar and tasting room in the property 
The owner and his guests can access their boats without having to go anywhere near the water Abbey has built over 44,000 square foot of accommodation on his island. The main house has 5 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. His “Great Room” features ceilings of some 45 foot in height and in addition to yet another indoor shooting range, there is a kitchen that woudn’t look out of place in The Savoy hotel.
In the UK, the property most similar to anything Abbey has built has to be Updown Court at Windlesham in Surrey. Developed by a former bricklayer named Leslie Allen-Vercoe, the house was described by him as being: “The most important residence to be built in England since the 19th century.” Architectural critics did not agree and some went as far as to say that it looked like: “A cross between a Tesco superstore and Center Parcs.”
Allen-Vercoe’s behemoth of a house is gargantuan in size. With 103 rooms it includes 24 bedrooms, 5 swimming pools, a 2-lane bowling alley, a squash court, a floodlit tennis court, a 50-seat cinema and a panic room. The heated driveway that led to the house is entirely made of marble and cost some £2.5 million to construct but plainly none of this appealed to the market as it languished for sale at a price of £70,000,000 from 2006 to 2011 before being repossessed by the Irish National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). Updown Court was sold for half the original asking price to a foreign buyer in October 2011 and is, I believe, due to undergo extensive remodeling.
Updown Court, Chertsey Road, Windlesham, Surrey, GU20 6HY, UK Allen Vercoe once stated: “If Elton John were a house, he’d be Updown Court.” Equally, I imagine if Mr Abbey’s residences were to be compared to any celebrities they’d be the vulgar car crash that is Donatella Versace and the ludicrous money obsessed singer with a dollar sign in her name, Ke$ha.
Updown Court, Shelter Island and The Bradbury Estate all illustrate that money cannot buy you good taste. I suppose, though, that those who ultimately come to live in them will have plenty of space to choose how and where to enjoy their own form of misery.
For more information about Donald G. Abbey, go to: http://www.theabbeyco.com
For information on both The Bradbury Estate and Shelter Island, contact Bob Hurwitz of the Hurwitz James Company on +1 310-477-8865. Website: http://www.hurwitzjamesco.com
A website devoted to The Bradbury Estate can be viewed at: http://www.bradburyestate.com
A video of Shelter Island can be watched at: http://vimeo.com/11404637
For more details on Updown Court, go to: http://www.updowncourt.com/
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Leona Helmsley (1920 – 2007)
“The Queen of Mean” was a chain-smoking hotelier and real estate tycoon with a reputation for tyrannical behaviour. She took the view that “only the little people pay taxes” but was investigated and convicted of federal income tax evasion in 1989. Sentenced to 16 years, she served just 19 months in prison and 2 months under house arrest. Worth some $8 billion, Helmsley left her Maltese dog, Trouble, $12 million in trust. -
Leslie "Les" Allen-Vercoe (also known as Les Vercoe)
This property developer tried to sell Britain’s ugliest crib, Updown Court at Windlesham in Surrey, for £70 million in 2008. It languished on the market for years and looked like a cross between a Tesco store and Center Parcs. The mansion included five swimming pools, a heated marble driveway and 103 rooms. Nobody loved it but after it was repossessed in 2011, it was finally sold on for £35 million. Meanwhile, Allen-Vercoe appeared in the dock at Southwark Crown Court in 2012 in relation to a case involving the £10 million mortgage fraudster Joanne Sarah Pier (also known as Zoe May Fletcher and Maria Micheala). He was cleared.