Words: Harry Shukman
Depending on your personal circumstances — and who are we to make comparisons, let alone pass judgement? — it may come as a source of relief that size doesn’t always matter. On the contrary, there is such a thing as too big. One of the most enormous houses in London — after Buckingham Palace and the Witanhurst estate in Highgate — might in fact be too large for even the most rapacious owners. A quadruple-sized mansion in Knightsbridge known as 2-8A Rutland Gate is back on the property market, having been empty and unloved since 2015. The asking price for this beleaguered yet gargantuan property? A cool £200 million, making it (for now at least) Britain’s most expensive house.
Nestled in embassy-land, next to Hyde Park, a short walk to Harrods — this should be the perfect pied-a-terre for the status-minded person of property. If your fortune was made in, say, the fire sale of state assets in a certain collapsing communist country, or in the Arabian Peninsula’s carbon-based fuels industry, purchasing 2-8A Rutland Gate should be a pretty straightforward deal. In addition to being the biggest — there are 45 rooms (the Connaught Hotel, around the corner, only has 120) — it’s a contender for the most expensive house in the city, which effectively ennobles the owner with a title: baron of ballerdom. But the funny thing is, nobody wants to live there now. It is not a residence so much as a very high-return investment, a fund in which to pour in your gains — ill-gotten or otherwise — via a complex series of offshore accounts and shell companies.
Its current dilapidated condition is certainly not a great appeal, but the sale — through Beauchamp Estates — comes with planning permission for spacious underground parking, plus bigger pool and spa; above ground the house can be refitted to make space for a triple-height ballroom and living space of 62,000 square feet. Just for context: the average two-up/two-down is somewhere around 900 square feet. Then again, the windows of those houses aren’t rumoured to be bulletproof.
Rutland Gate has been home to some very swanky people since the street was built in 1753, and not all of them would have made for the most neighbourly of residents. The Mitford family — including their two Nazi-obsessed daughters — lived here in the early 20th century for the season, as did, over the years, an advocate-general for the East India Company and an arms manufacturer.
It was in the 1980s when Rafic Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, got involved that things really got interesting. Before entering politics, Hariri made billions in telecoms and construction. Not content with one property, he purchased four adjacent houses on Rutland Gate and converted them into one megamansion, as if these 250-year-old properties were nothing more than Lego bricks. The place was so large it needed four elevators climbing seven floors to carry the many guests and staff who populated this Knightsbridgian Xanadu. It wasn’t even his only house in West London — he had another £20 million pad round the back of Harrods.
Remember when the press raised an enormous stink after Boris Johnson had gold wallpaper plastered over the walls of his Downing Street flat worth £2,260? Hariri would have scoffed at the parsimony of his English counterpart. He spent millions painting the fixtures and furnishings of Rutland Gate with gold leaf. The interior was made in a style that would probably now be described as Triumpian: gold sinks, gold tissue boxes, gold bathrooms also decorated with malachite and amethyst. The phrase “41 chandeliers” should be enough to complete the mental picture.
Hariri’s untimely (depending on your sectarian bent) demise in a 2005 truck bomb precipitated the sale of his pleasure dome to the Saudi royal family, to whom he owed his billions. First it went to crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, and after his death in 2011 it ultimately passed into the hands of a Chinese property magnate called Hui Ka Yan. Once the second richest person in Asia, Hui’s fortunes took a turn when the Chinese property market collapsed, and among the private jets and sprawling apartments he had to part with were the keys to 2-8A Rutland Gate. Hui, as befits the trend of 0.01 percenters buying London property, never lived in the house, meaning it has been uninhabited for years.
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, plus various other scions of Middle Eastern royal houses and American tycoons, are rumoured to be sniffing around the property. Whoever moves in needn’t worry about the neighbours: they probably won’t be staying nearby, but are likely holed up in countries with more advantageous attitudes when it comes to enforcing tax laws and financial sanctions. Good luck to the new owner!
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