Tag: property

An Epic Estate

Scottish sporting estate, once home to Sir Walter Scott, for sale; it comes with nearly two miles of fishing on the River Tweed, 863 acres of land and seven houses

The Scottish estate where Sir Walter Scott, Bt. (1771 – 1732) wrote his narrative poems Lay of the Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake and his epic, Marmion, has recently been placed for sale for £5.5 million ($7.1 million, €6.4 million or درهم26.2 million).

Offered by Savills and leased by the novelist, playwright and poet from 1804 to 1812, Ashiestiel House in Selkirkshire stands above in 863 acres above the River Tweed and is 35 miles from the centre of Edinburgh. It comes with six further dwellings, 1¾ miles of salmon and sea trout fishing on the River Tweed, an in-hand stock farm, commercial forestry, a pheasant shooting, duck flighting and equestrian facilities.

Sir Walter Scott, Bt. (1771 – 1732) was the tenant of Ashiestiel for eight years prior to moving to Abbotsford, an estate he eventually expanded to some 1,000 acres

An Epic Estate – Ashiestiel, Clovenfords, Lauderdale, Selkirkshire, Scotland, TD1 3LJ, United Kingdom

Extending to 10,360 square foot and renovated in 2011, the estate’s Grade A listed main residence includes 5 reception rooms, 9 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms. It dates to the 17^th century and amongst its features are a peel tower and space described as suitable for entertaining “on a grand scale”.

Ashiestiel was last placed on the market – with just 24 acres of land and its two gate lodges – for £1.75 million in 2009 (the equivalent of £2.15 million, $2.79 million, €2.48 million or درهم10.26 million today). At the time, then owner and joint master of the Buccleuch hunt, Robert Claydon, told The Telegraph:

“I’ve come back from cubbing and caught a salmon at the end of the garden. It’s very wild countryside – south of us you won’t hit a road for 10 miles. It was the best move we ever made coming here. We escaped the rat race – people understand the countryside up here”.

May 25, 2017
Belgravia in Bloom

Grand Belgravia apartment – complete with a garden that wouldn’t look out of place at the Chelsea Flower Show – for sale

As thousands of garden lovers visit the Chelsea Flower Show this week, an individual with £8.95 million ($11.63 million, €10.39 million or درهم42.71 million) to spare could acquire a more permanent horticultural delight in the form of a ground and basement maisonette in nearby Belgravia.

Flat 1 at 57 Eaton Place provides not only 3,497 square foot – with 3 reception rooms, 3 bedroom suites and staff accommodation – but also a courtyard and terrace garden that selling agent Louise Hewlett describes as giving a “country outlook in an urban Belgravia traditional white stucco building”.

The flat is held on a lease of 108 years and a service charge of £11,689 ($15,187, €13,577 or درهم55,771) is payable annually.

May 23, 2017
Making a Manor

Refurbished Surrey manor house with connections to Detmar Blow and Gertrude Jekyll for sale for £2.55 million

Reduced in price by £200,000 since when it was previously on the market in June 2015, a Surrey manor house is again for sale – but this time for £2.55 million ($3.32 million, €2.96 million or درهم12.20 million).

First mentioned in association with Robert de Upbroke in 1282, Osbrooks at Capel, near Dorking was built as a hall and smoke bay house in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Subsequently redeveloped in the 17^th century and then extended by Detmar Blow (1867 – 1939) – an architect, contemporary of Edwin Lutyens and disciple of John Ruskin – in the arts and crafts style in the early 20^th century. The building was given Grade II listed status in November 1966 and more recently had a swimming pool, gym and garaging added.

Osbrooks in 1890

Osbrooks today (with 20th century extension to left)

Standing in 14 acres of gardens and grounds designed by amongst others the especially prolific Gertrude Jekyll (1843 – 1932), Osbrooks now provides 4,987 square foot and features 4 reception rooms, a bar, 8 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms. It includes such details as oak joinery, leaded windows and tall, diagonal chimney stacks and could very easily be used as a location in a Midsomer Murders or Miss Marple murder mystery television drama.

Of the property, in April, John Fisher of selling agents Sotheby’s International Realty told The Times: “It could be a house for entertaining as well as comfortable living. It has all the space you could require, as well as proximity to good schools”.

An adjoining 4-acre plot with stabling and planning permission for a 1,959 square foot, single storey dwelling is also available through Sotheby’s. It is offered for £450,000 ($586,000, €523,000 or درهم2.2 million).

May 22, 2017
Basement It Like Beckham

Former Algerian Embassy in Holland Park for sale for £30 million; the detached stucco house needs complete renovation and counts David and Victoria Beckham as neighbours

The former Embassy of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria in Holland Park, W11 has just been placed for sale for the sum of £30 million ($39.1 million, €34.9 million or درهم143.7 million).

Offered by estate agent Anthony Sharp, the 9,490 square foot, Grade II listed detached stucco house includes accommodation over five floors and was built in 1862. One of remaining Italianate villas designed by brothers Francis and William Radford, 54 Holland Park is described as being “in need of full modernisation” and as having “scope to create a magnificent family home”.

The buyer will count David and Victoria Beckham as near neighbours. They paid £31.5 million ($41.1 million, €36.6 million or درهم150.9 million) for 23 Holland Park in 2013 and finally took up residence there in July 2016 after completing an £8 million ($10.4 million, €9.3 million or درهم38.3 million) renovation that included, amongst other things, a vast subterranean redevelopment.

May 20, 2017
Fergus and Judith Wilson

Fat former boxer and Toad of Toad Hall-like figure of fun Fergus Wilson and his equally badly dressed Hyacinth Bucket-like wife, a former maths teacher named Judith, banned “coloured people” from renting the 1,000 properties they own in Kent “because of the curry smell at the end of the tenancy”. They were also revealed to refuse to let housing to “battered wives”, single parents and zero-hours workers in March 2017 and of them, the advocacy group Hope Not Hate remarked: “It’s almost as if [they have] taken a tick box to offend every vulnerable group in Britain”.

When taken to trial for using a mobile phone whilst driving, racehorse owning Mr Wilson – who also has a conviction for assaulting an estate agent – was fined £565 after ridiculously trying to claim he “was singing into a drinks carton that he was holding to the side of his head”.

The name of one of their horses – ‘Gone Too Far’ – sums up the most recent actions of this widely disliked duo perfectly.

May 18, 2017
Spirit & Speed

Chelsea studio house built for “spiritual artist” Arild Rosenkrantz and later home to the extremely eccentric lesbian heiress and powerboater ‘Joe’ Carstairs for sale for £8.95 million

“Spiritual seeker” and artist Baron Arild Rosenkrantz (1870 – 1964) was born in Denmark, studied in Rome and married his Scottish cousin, Louise Mackenzie, in 1901. His commissions included ceiling panels at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair and illustrating the Danish edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery Adventure and now a Chelsea home built for him is for sale for £8.95 million ($11.5 million, €10.6 million or درهم42.4 million).

Designed by the Maidenhead based architect Clifton Robert Davy (1879 – 1929) and Grade II listed since 1997, red brick built, 4-storey 5 Mulberry Walk is described as being of a “stripped Classical Mannerist style”. It features the artist’s initials on the rectangular profile downpipe and was his home from when it was finished until 1922.

Baron Arild Rosenkrantz and one of his works

Marion ‘Joe Carstairs’ once remarked: “I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer”; of her biographer Kate Summerscale added: “She was blithe, bold, courageous, unself-conscious, imperialist, impervious to social change”

Subsequently sold to the eccentric and extremely masculine heiress Marion Barbara ‘Joe’ Carstairs (1900 – 1993) for £3,000 in the early 1920s (the equivalent of just £167,000, $215,000, €197,000 or درهم791,000 today), 5 Mulberry Walk became the party venue for the “fastest, artiest, gayest, not to mention the most alcoholic and drug-addicted set in London at the time”. Carstairs – a lesbian described as “usually dressed as a man, having tattooed arms, and loving machines, adventure and speed” – remained there well into the 1930s and even had a name plaque for a doll she was obsessed with, ‘Lord Tod Wadley’, placed on the building’s door.

Extending to 3,163 square foot in total, 5 Mulberry Walk is currently divided into two apartments. The first, a ground floor studio with a 32-foot wide garden, has 1 bedroom whilst the second covers three floors and has 4 bedrooms. Each has a large artist’s studio space and in total there are 2 kitchens, 3 bathrooms and a roof terrace as well.

5 Mulberry Walk, which is most definitely ready for modernisation and reconfiguration internally, is offered by Russell Simpson.

May 14, 2017
A Fashionable Bargain

£39 million summer house on Lake Geneva that was designed by one of the architects of the Eiffel Tower to be sold at auction without reserve

Built in the Belle Époque style on the north shore of Lake Geneva, Château de Promenthoux is a 13,988 square foot house on a plot of 9 acres. It has been on the market for £38.8 million (CHF 50 million $49.9 million, €45.7 million or درهم183.5 million) but is now to be sold at auction on the 15^th June “to the highest bidder” by Concierge Auctions.

Couturier Jean Philippe Worth (1856 – 1926) commissioned Stephen Sauvestre (1847 – 1919), one of the architects of the Eiffel Tower, to build Château de Promenthoux as his summer house in 1896. The son of the “father of haute couture”, Charles Frederick Worth (1825 – 1895), opted for a building that featured Meillerie stone pillars and brick walls covered by dark wood and an interior dominated by parquet flooring, paneling, velvet wall coverings and soaring ceilings.

The private harbour of Château de Promenthoux can accommodate numerous boats and is protected by two jetties built of Meillerie stone blocks and an outside break-weather

Original owner Jean Philippe Worth and his architect Stephen Sauvestre

Current owner Linda Durand

Now restored “with modern amenities”, the 4-storey house has 7 imposing reception rooms, 8 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, 3 kitchens and separate accommodation for staff. It comes with a hydraulic lift, a gym, a sauna, the largest private harbour on Lake Geneva and also enjoys the most spectacular of views across the water.

Of why she is selling, current owner Linda Durand remarked:

The property has been in our family for almost two generations. I grew up here as a kid and then I remained in the property with my family and I raised my children here.

The property is a very large house that could be called a mansion, could be called a small castle. It’s so natural, it’s so remote, giving a big atmosphere of peace and quietness… Within just half an hour’s drive you can be skiing, sledging, cross-country.

The house is not a proper wooded house. Just the style it was given was the wood, which means the house was very safe. It is very solid, very, very well built… It was built as a family home but it could be used by an organisation for international purposes, for a consulate, by an embassy, a private club.

After discussing an auction, we decided it would be a different opportunity to sell the property in a certain time frame… We want to enable the property to continue to belong to someone in a certain time frame and not be on the market for maybe longer.

Situated within a district of Switzerland most famous for the production of white wine, Château de Promenthoux is 7.5 miles from Geneva and 27 miles from Lausanne.

May 13, 2017
Carina Reid

Thieving Chelsea based trollop Carina Reid was labeled “arrogant”, “extremely boorish” and a fraudster by a judge in May 2017. Often spotted in the now defunct La Brasserie restaurant, this tarty so-called beautician was jailed for three years in May 2016 and ordered to pay back £50,000 she’d falsely claimed in benefits a year later. Despite arguing she had no savings, taken no holidays and lived off free food from a mosque, somewhat dubious Miss Reid somehow managed to send £116,000 abroad to acquire property in Dubai in 2013/2014, paid £20,000 as a deposit for a flat in the Kings Road, SW3 and held savings of £180,000 in 19 separate bank accounts. Of this dishonest wench, Judge Douglas Marks-Moore remarked: “This is pie in the sky… You don’t listen to a word I have to say anyway. You have not got a hope in hell of getting an extension. You have been playing the system in my view”.

May 12, 2017
Fun at Faringdon

£144,000 per year sought for Oxfordshire mansion that was the scene of a most curious ménage-a-trois; it is owned by the writer Sofka Zinovieff

“Tall and willowy” writer Sofka Zinovieff inherited Faringdon House in Oxfordshire at the age of 25 from her eccentric, bisexual uncle, Robert ‘The Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy, partner of the owner of the house since 1918, the 14^th Lord Berners, Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1883 – 1950). She has recently placed it on the rental market at a price of £12,000 per month ($15,400, €14,200 or درهم56,700 per month) through Knight Frank.

Artist, composer and writer Lord Berners and “uninhibited” Heber-Percy occupied Faringdon House as a ménage-a-trois with the latter’s wife, Jennifer Fry, for several years and during that time visitors included everyone from the poet Sir John Betjeman to the artist Salvador Dalí, the Communist politician Tom Driberg MP and the writer H. G. Wells. Heber-Percy died in 1987 and it was at this time that the Georgian property passed to its current owner.

Lord Berners famously once entertained Penelope Betjeman’s horse Moti to tea at Faringdon House

Dyed pigeons are still to be found at the property

Sofka Zinovieff

Of her home, which she has variously herself occupied and also let to “cover the impossible costs”, in May 2016, Zinovieff told House & Garden:

It’s funny how it has all worked out. The inheritance hasn’t changed me in the ways that my mother feared it might. I never wanted my identity to be bound up with my house and my life in Greece has saved me from that. No one there has ever even heard of Faringdon.

Extending to 14,510 square foot, Grade I listed Faringdon House was built between 1770 and 1785 for the poet Sir Henry Pye (1744 – 1813). It includes 5 reception rooms, 12 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, stands in grounds that extend to 14.81 acres and comes with an outdoor swimming pool with turreted changing rooms and a lake.

Lord Berners’ gravestone is situated within the grounds and on it appears an epitaph he wrote himself. It reads:

Here lies Lord Berners

One of the learners

His great love of learning

May earn him a burning

But, Praise the Lord!

He seldom was bored

Curiously, another testament to the activities of the property’s eccentric former occupants lives on at Faringdon in the form of pigeons dyed in “jewelled hues”. Pictured in marketing literature for the house, a charity, the Pink Pigeons Trust, is named in their honour also.

May 12, 2017
Rich Pickings

Trophy house with a “dictator interior” in The Boltons has nearly £10 million sliced off its asking price; iceberg home behind reduced by £5 million

A house in London’s second most expensive street has returned to the market at the much reduced price of £30 million ($38.8 million, €35.5 million or درهم142.6 million) in spite of having an interior that would only appeal to the likes of Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein.

Previously marketed at £39.5 million ($47.1 million, €47.1 million or درهم188.3 million) in 2015 through Russell Simpson and now offered by Knight Frank, semi-detached 6 The Boltons extends to 9,781 square foot and comes with a 2,469 square foot mews house to the rear in Creswell Place.

Both buildings are described as “requiring modernisation throughout” and in total provide 5 reception rooms, 16 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. The main house has a lift to all floors, air conditioning and as well as parking for 5 cars, there is an internal garage and an interconnecting garden.

For those with another £32.5 million ($42.1 million, €38.5 million or درهم154.5 million) to spare, Knight Frank also offer another house adjoining the Cresswell Place mews house. Featured in The Steeple Times last May, that house, Cresswell House, has also had a rather punchy £5 million ($6.5 million, €6 million or درهم23.8 million) sliced off its asking price. A super-compound anyone?

May 10, 2017