Posts filed under ‘Interesting properties’
Small is beautiful – are studios losing their bedsit stigma?
The London-based agency Marsh & Parsons is selling a flat in ultra-desirable Holland Park – where Simon Cowell has a home and where even the average house price is just under £1.5m – for a relatively modest £395,000. The catch is that the property measures just 413 sq ft – or to put it another way: it’s a studio.
Increasingly, Brits are foregoing space for these bonsai-proportioned homes that offer better affordability. Studios with good storage space or mezzanine sleeping areas are particularly popular: the Holland Park property makes the most of its high ceilings, with a sleeping area and a dressing room underneath. Internal folding doors shutting away a kitchen are a good idea – any dirty dishes can be hidden in a heartbeat when friends call; as is a simple, white minimalist colour scheme. (It’s best to save the bold patterned wallpaper for a home where you don’t have to debate whether a colander takes up too much space in the kitchen.)
“Studios are becoming increasingly popular with first-time buyers,” says William Hughes-Ward, sales manager of the South Kensington & Chelsea office of Marsh & Parsons. “Over the past ten years studios have become less like bedsits and more stylish abodes, which, with a bit of creativity, can offer great living space.”
Ballymore’s Pan Peninsula development features a 305 sq ft studio on the 30th floor, currently on the market for £310,000. It comes with a fold-up bed that disappears into the wall (though not when you are asleep). The flat has a masculine monochrome colour scheme and views over Canary Wharf.
And it’s not just Prime Central London – areas such as Holland Park, home to Russian oligarchs and women with improbably small dogs – that is seeing these new breed of studios pop up. In fashionable Dalston, East London, some disused garages on the Lockner Estate are being converted into bijou homes.
When finished, they will be cosy studios for young professionals to rent at a cost of just £11 a week. These homes will measure just 124 sq ft, so warn the cat – it should tuck its head in mid-swing.
Homes with a difference
Jessie Hewitson takes a look at some weird and wonderful homes currently on the market.
Hot on the news that Naomi Campbell’s billionaire boyfriend is to build a love nest for the couple just outside of Moscow in the shape of a Star Trek spaceship designed by Zaha Hadid – really – we decided to take a look at some of the homes on the market with unexpected selling points.
A contender is the five-bed property that is a converted train station in Kingsbridge in Devon, which comes complete with station sign of Loddiswell on the outside of the building and an indoor pool located within the building that housed the former signal box room.The property, on the market for £750,000, is on the market with Marchand Petit.
One topical selling point has only emerged recently: a view of the Shard. Even a “partial view” of the pointy building is being touted as a wallet-opening piece of information by Hamptons International, an agency currently selling a 646 sq ft high-spec studio flat for £485,000 in Cinnamon Wharf, Shad Thames.
Meanwhile a four-bed detached house in Haringey, north London, is a property designed and built by the lead architects of the Eden Project and the international terminal at Waterloo station. Fiona Galbraith and Andrew Whalley originally bought the site and built this modernist house early in their career as their family home (they have since relocated to New York as Whalley, who used to work with Richard Rogers, is head of the New York practice of Grimshaw Architects). The current owners, a young couple, bought the property off Galbraith and Whalley, and are now selling it for £810,000 through Winkworth. The home, as you would expect, is extremely energy efficient.
Interesting properties: what’s that puffing in the garden?
It is not unusual for vendors to offer extra items to buy on top of a property’s sale price including white goods, curtains and even carpets.
But William Heller, who has just sold his large five-bedroom detached house near Bideford in Devon for £875,000 had been offering the most surprising additional item we’ve heard of for a while – a steam railway.
For an extra £150,000 the buyer of his home Amberwynd was able to acquire a working miniature railway in the huge grounds to the rear of the property. The line is no child’s plaything and although the gauge of the rails is narrow, locomotives of up to 3.5 tonnes operate on the line pulling carriages transporting up to 80 people.
The line starts at a station to the side of the property before winding through trees in its landscaped back garden, past the signal box and out through a small wood and into a large field, which it travels around in two large ‘S’ shapes before the line ends.
Mr Heller, whose day job is being a TV cameraman, is a life-long train enthusiast who has taken his love of railways from attic model sets slowly through to his current line. On running days his trains run to strict schedules and he is joined by a station master and signalman while Mr Heller drives the trains.
Britain’s first £200m home revealed
The number of people who can afford it will be very small, but nevertheless one of London’s most venerable landmarks is to be converted into a home and sold for £200m making it Britain’s most expensive home.
The property, which was built in 1750 for the Second Earl of Egremont, was until 1999 the ‘In and Out’ club on one of London’s most famous thoroughfares, Piccadilly, overlooking St James’s Park and Buckingham Palace.
The club, which takes its unofficial name from the prominent entry and exit signs on the property’s street-facing boundary walls, was originally named the Naval and Military. In 1999 it moved to new premises at No.4 St James’s Square after failing to negotiate terms for a new lease at its now former address.
No. 94 Piccadilly was originally known as Cambridge House, a name that its current owners, publicity-shy billionaire property developer siblings David and Simon Reuben may wish to resurrect.
They bought the Grade I listed property and its neighbour, the American Club, for £130m in 2011 after they had stood unused for a decade while the previous owner tried unsuccessfully to get planning permission and funding to convert them into a hotel.
Instead, this week it was revealed that the Reuben brothers are to convert No.94 into a 48-bedroom mansion with a 35,000 bottle wine cellar, underground swimming pool and gym.
Until that work is completed and a £200 million price tag achieved Britain’s most expensive property is Park Place, a Berkshire mansion that Russian billionaire Andrey Borodin paid £140 million for in 2011 followed by an apartment at One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge sold – also in 2011- for £136 million.
See Zoopla’s list of London’s most expensive streets.
Exclusive: Pictures of Duffy’s flat before the fire
One of London’s most expensive penthouse apartments went up in smoke last night after a serious fire gutted the property, which earlier this year was up for sale at £8.75 million.
The apartment, which features a swimming pool, huge fish tank, private parking, four bedrooms, a cinema and two roof terraces, had been rented out to the ‘Rain on my parade’ singer Duffy while she records her new album in London. The Welsh warbler had, last night, been about to vacate the penthouse on the 10th floor of Abbot House off Kensington High Street when the blaze broke out.
Up in smoke: the gorgeous and celebrated interior of Duffy’s penthouse apartment before the blaze.
Duffy, along with around 20 other residents, had to evacuate the building late in the night as some sixty fire fighters tackled the blaze, which ripped through most of the penthouse before being doused in the early hours of the morning.
Two songs of Duffy’s point prophetically to the fire (well sort of) including ‘Smoke without fire’ and ‘Big flame’ but what many will lament are the penthouse’s now lost interiors, created by artist and architect Francis Machin who modelled many of London’s landmarks including Ransomes Dock on Battersea Embankment. His father, a designer, created the current Queen’s heads featured on UK postage stamps.
Lucky escape: singer Duffy had to flee her rented luxury apartment in Kensington, London as a fire ripped through the property.
While the blaze is a blow for design, luckily the apartment’s interiors were preserved within the property history section of Zoopla and after a bit of digging we found these. We can only hope they can be stored to such a wonderfully former glory (pictured above and below).
