Posts tagged ‘celebrities’
Adele quits her rented Sussex mansion
As Someone Like You singer Adele is named the sixth richest under 30-year-old in the world, it’s evident her new wealth is being ploughed into property as she casts around for a £10m London property and prepares to buy a £2.5m Brighton seafront house next door to Fat Boy Slim and Zoe Ball. Which means it’s curtains for the £15,000-a-month Sussex mansion she began renting in February this year.
But Lock House, which she was filmed walking around for a US television show recently, and which has now been put up for rent again on Zoopla.co.uk, has a fascinating history featuring the sort of heartache Adele loves to sing about. This includes links to a doomed land speed record holder, Turkish royalty, a troubled property tycoon and an order of nuns.
Lock House was built in 1900 but by the 1930s had become the home of Andrew Harvey, father of world speed record holder Donald Campbell’s wife Gina Harvey. Then, in 1971, the house became a nunnery belonging to the Roman Catholic Order of the Visitation, which in turn sold it on in 2003 for £2m to a Turkish princess, Ayse Gulnev Sutton, wife of high rolling London-based property developer Nick Sutton.
At the time of buying Lock House Nick Sutton had recently been voted Young Property Person of the Year and was riding high both as the founder of several successful businesses and as the ‘secret’ buyer of Craven Cottage, Fulham FC’s west London home ground – a deal which (happily for fans) fell through.
After this the couple, who cut dashing figures on the London social scene, then concentrated on their hotel development firm, which went on to build and operate famous name hotels including Brighton’s seafront Lansdowne Hotel.
While building a Radisson hotel in Cardiff, which is now the city’s tallest, their firm’s operation in the city was reported to be in administration leaving behind unpaid bills of up to £3 million. It is now in the hands of a receiver, Deloitte. The couple have not lived in Lock House now for over a 18 months.
Found: Cheryl Cole’s London bolthole
This is a legacy post from the findaproperty.com blog which is now maintained as an archive within the Zoopla blog. Links have been preserved.
As Cheryl Cole finally resurfaces after her X Factor humiliation, the six-bedroom home where she has been laying low has just come on the market, FindaProperty.com has learned. The price tag for the 5,000 sq ft property, in the affluent north London suburb of Hadley Wood, is £3.15million.
Cole, who paid a reported £3,500-a-week to rent the new-build mansion – where she escaped the world’s media after being so publicly fired and lived in, up until very recently – was no doubt impressed by the Poggenpohl kitchens, Villeroy & Boch bathrooms, cinema room, ‘ilight’ system (that lets light pour into a room so that the walls look like giant windows) and the very long private driveway overlooking landscaped gardens that takes you to the main building.
The interior design scheme is monochrome, and the master bedroom comes with a suitably large dressing room to house all those sequinned off-the-shoulder numbers, and enormous bathroom with ample storage space to house the hairspray-addict’s products.
Hadley Wood, a semi-rural part of London in the borough of Enfield and close to Barnet, where you’ll find huge footballer-friendly homes, clearly holds good memories for Cole. A few miles away lies Wrotham Park, where Cheryl and Ashley married in Hello-tastic style in 2006; Hadley Wood is also where the couple shared a home in 2007.
The area’s detached properties with gated fronts mean it’s a magnet for celebrities, and a private security firm roams the area to keep them all safe. Singer Emma Bunton, rugby player Kyran Bracken and Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Niko Kranjcar all live here, while Amy Winehouse escaped the pubs of Camden by moving here (she has since moved on).
“In total, I’d say between 2,000 and 3,000 people reside here – of those, quite a few are successful business people as well as celebrities,” says Justin Godfrey, associate director of the Barnet office of Savills. “We also get a number of footballers because it offers easy access to both the Tottenham and Arsenal training grounds – and with Tottenham building their new training grounds close by, I expect we’ll see even more footballers in the future. It’s a very discreet area, so celebrities can go about their business undisturbed, and it has a village feel with lots of green open spaces – yet on a good day, you can drive to Mayfair in 35 minutes.”
Typical prices for detached homes are predictably steep, starting at £700,000, and going up to £9million. These homes are not for the understated: in the most desirable streets – Beech Hill (where Cheryl Cole’s rented home lies) Camlet Way and Hadley Common – the houses here measure between 5,000 and 10,000 sq ft.
Words: Jessie Hewitson
“Arrrggghhh!” Home Alone house for sale
This is a legacy post from the findaproperty.com blog which is now maintained as an archive within the Zoopla blog. Links have been preserved.
Will anyone buy a home that’s famous for being burgled? The owners of a property in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka are about to find out after putting their four-bedroom house on the market for £2.4m (£1.47m).
But it’s not just any home, of course. This is where cute-as-a-button Macauley Culkin charmed the pants off the cinema-going public in 1990 while playing Kevin McCallister – the eight year old who outsmarts a couple of dim-witted burglars when mistakenly left at home while his family go on holiday.
The film Home Alone, directly by Christopher Columbus, was a blockbuster and earned more than $477m (£291m) at the box office and spawned three sequels (of varying quality).
Current owners John and Cynthia Abendshien, lived in the home while the movie was filmed and say it was chosen because of its warmth and “clear representation of family life”.
Previously approached by producer John Hughes’ company about using their property as a set for his earlier film Uncle Buck, the couple declined that approach. But when the location scout came knocking about Home Alone they say they finally decided to open their front door to the cameras.
John Abendshien describes the film’s child star Culkin as “a nice, but quiet young boy” and says the couple spent most of the five-and-a-half month shoot camped out in their master suite.
“This property has been home to our family for more than 20 years, and has been a perfect location for us to raise our daughter,” he says. “There is such a strong sense of community in Winnetka and we will always have fond memories of the fun we’ve had here and the many people we’ve come to know and love.”
Marissa Hopkins, of listing agent Coldwell Banker Residential, has clearly embraced the home’s film credentials as a key selling point. She says: “Very few homes have a leading role in a movie, in a sense becoming an additional character.”
While FindaProperty loves the idea of living in a piece of big screen history, we were also deeply impressed by the unique handpainted dining room walls, which we think have been ever so slightly overlooked in the brouhaha over the film. Seriously though – wouldn’t you just love to eat your tea in that room. Wonder if we could recreate it at home…
A ‘Gardeners World’ home for sale in Hampshire
This is a legacy post from the findaproperty.com blog which is now maintained as an archive within the Zoopla blog. Links have been preserved.
Fans of the BBC’s Gardeners World will no doubt see a green-thumbed opportunity in the news that Barleywood, the four-bedroom Hampshire family home of Alan Titchmarsh, is back on the market.
The Alton home and its extensive 1.2 acre gardens were the backdrop to the hugely popular television gardening programme for seven years until 2002 when Titchmarsh quit the show and moved to a nearby Georgian farmhouse.
The gardener, who also writes novels, is a broadcaster and hosts ITV1’s Popstar to Operastar with Myleene Klass, sold Barleywood to air traffic controllers Kevin and Jane Gothard nine years ago.
But Titchmarsh, who clearly still has a soft spot for his old family home located in the Hampshire village of Beech, announced the property was back on the market in his latest fan newsletter.
“Many of you will recall Barleywood from my years with the BBC’s Gardeners World, and it is wonderful to hear that the garden has been enjoyed just as much by its current owners,” Titchmarsh said.
“Kevin and Jane Gothard are moving after 9 years and judging by the photographs on agents Knight Frank’s website, have done a fabulous job in keeping up with what was quite a large garden.”
The Gothard’s have said of the garden: “It still feels like Alan Titchmarsh’s garden. We maintain what he created and haven’t altered or added anything.”
Titchmarsh was obviously chuffed by the kind words saying: “That’s a wonderful compliment for any gardener and I wish them all the best for their next home.”
Now the house selling is sorted, FindaProperty wonders if Titchmarsh could possibly help us rescue some rosemary that’s looking a bit worse for wear? We promise we haven’t over watered …
Barleywood is on the market with Knight Frank for £925,000.
Green with envy at Eva’s new London home
This is a legacy post from the findaproperty.com blog which is now maintained as an archive within the Zoopla blog. Links have been preserved.
French born Bond girl Eva Green has swapped north London for the capital’s southwest with news she’s now renting a ground floor flat in Fulham.
Green, 30, who won a Bafta for her star turn in Casino Royale, moved to London in 2005 from her native Paris and lived in Primrose Hill and Maida Vale before venturing to Fulham – one of the capital’s most laidback celeb friendly postcodes.
There are no shortage of Fulham fans at FindaProperty towers and we’ve already been asked to pass on a number of offers to Miss Green, in case she’s ever looking for someone to take her along to a home game at Craven Cottage.
Over to you then, Eva.
