Property

The Mayfair mansion that was once the home of Gucci

Minimalists, look away now. With its magnificent 20ft-high ornately plastered ceilings, lashings of gold leaf, bookcases topped by busts of Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius – and its role as the global HQ of one of the world’s most glamorous fashion empires – this 14,000 sq ft Mayfair mansion is in need of an owner with a budget as big as their lust for luxe.For sale with a price tag of £55 million, through beauchampestates.com, the palatial Grade I listed Neoclassical Grafton Street house was built over seven storeys between 1769 and 1772 to a design by architect Sir Robert Taylor, whose pupils included John Nash. While it has more recently served as the main base of Italian fashion house Gucci, close to its flagship Bond Street store, it started out as the London home of a banker or two, before passing into the ownership of British statesman Henry Peter Brougham, the Lord High Chancellor who played a key role in passing the 1832 Reform Act and the Slavery Abolition Act a year later.

Eleanor Doughty

What to look for in a post-prime ministerial property

Eleanor Doughty

What to look for in a post-prime ministerial property

After the pomp of high office – the convoys of ministerial cars, police on the gates, the £840-a-roll wallpaper – what are a former prime minister and his spouse to do for a home? Boris and Carrie Johnson must be considering their next move. They might be hoping for the kind of arrangement that was put in place when Alec Douglas-Home lost the 1964 election. The new prime minister Harold Wilson ‘kindly put Chequers at our disposal for a day or two,’ Douglas-Home remembered. ‘Then [the hotelier] Sir Hugh Wontner, with great consideration, allowed us to stay in the penthouse at Claridges for a fortnight, so that a sense of perspective and pose was gradually regained.’ Sadly such generosity seems in short supply in the Conservative Party of 2022.

James Max

When is the right time to move house?

James Max

When is the right time to move house?

When the winds of economic change are blowing, it’s often a good idea to make your property move, batten down the hatches, and stay put for a while. We aren’t quite at that point in the cycle. However, with interest rates on the rise, inflation beginning to kick in and all the signs of a slow-down at best and a possible recession, now is the time to take some decisions.There are costs to moving and if you are going to go to all the trouble, you may want to increase your property exposure. Otherwise, you’re investing more money in an asset that will most likely grow in value at the same pace as your previous abode. Moving to similar sized properties is best done in a rising market where you secure your sale and purchase a new home at a similar time.

Liz Rowlinson

Where to invest on Italy’s islands

Liz Rowlinson

Where to invest on Italy’s islands

A world away from TV dating reality shows, raucous party boats and the VIP areas of nightclubs in the Balearics, the Italian islands are hard to beat when it comes to understated chic.Harder to reach too, and generally more arduous places to purchase a home in, the islands can offer property hunters something special. TV and film producers know this well: picture the Baroque palazzos of Inspector Montelbano’s Sicily, the private beach of Ischia or the winding cobbled streets of neighbouring Procida used in The Talented Mr Ripley.For wild empty beaches, secret coves and quaint fishermen’s houses lining ancient quaysides, the islands in the Gulf of Naples are a good place to start, reached by ferry from Naples.The nearest island, Procida, is far less well known than its glamorous sisters Capri and Ischia, will be on a few more people’s radar now that it is Italy’s Capital of Culture for 2022, thanks to is art, urban regeneration, and sustainability initiatives.

Ross Clark

What Boris’s right-to-buy gets wrong

Ross Clark

What Boris’s right-to-buy gets wrong

It isn’t hard to understand why the government should want to revive the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy, which was credited for creating a whole new class of homeowners – and in the process Conservative voters. While the right to buy has never gone away – and survived the Blair and Brown years – it is a shadow of its former self. In 2020/21, 6,994 social homes were sold, compared with 167,123 in the peak year of the scheme, 1982/83. Last year’s figure was markedly lower even than the 17,756 homes sold in 2006/07 – the heyday of the Blair housing boom. The Conservatives have already tried to revive the scheme once, under David Cameron, but ran up against serious obstacles. First and foremost, the scheme struggles now because house prices have increased so dramatically in real terms that there are few council and housing association tenants who can afford to buy their home – even with the generous discounts on offer.

James Max

How to navigate a property market downturn

James Max

How to navigate a property market downturn

Housing market data is, by its very nature backward looking. Data released by the Halifax recently paints a picture of a market that’s still rising. Prices rose again in April 2022 for the tenth consecutive month. It's the longest run of consistent rises since 2016. And prices are 10.8 per cent higher than they were in the same month in 2021. And yet the cost-of-living crisis continues to escalate. Whether it’s energy or fuel prices, inflation, or the rising cost of food, it’s all beginning to bite. And yes, interest rates have risen too. At the beginning of May the Bank of England raised rates to 1 per cent with an expectation that there will be further rises to come. All this means that buyers are significantly more inhibited than they were a year ago.

Liz Rowlinson

The Spanish islands worth investing in – from Mallorca to Ibiza

Liz Rowlinson

The Spanish islands worth investing in – from Mallorca to Ibiza

Another summer starts, and so another series of the irrepressible reality show, Love Island. Attention is focused on a rustic six-bedroom Mallorcan farmhouse being blinged up with ‘bright colours and neon signs’ for this year’s fame-hungry contestants. Its exact location is a closely guarded secret. An appetite for privacy and rural isolation on the Balearic Island has been strong trend since the pandemic started, with property hunters decamping from cities or the Spanish mainland. Whilst Spanish home sales in the first quarter of 2022 were the highest since the boom year of 2007, according to the Spanish Association of Notaries, the property markets of the Spanish islands have been outperforming those of the Costas: the number of sales were up 45 per cent in the Canaries and 21 per cent in the Balearics, year on year.

Hannah Tomes

For Generation Rent, the landlord is king

Hannah Tomes

For Generation Rent, the landlord is king

Last night, I posted an advert on property rental site SpareRoom: ‘Looking for someone to take over my room in Dalston/De Beauvoir from July. Beautiful house, large bedroom, overlooks a garden centre.’ By this morning, I had almost 60 inquiries. Bleary eyed and fuzzy from sleep, I checked my email: it was inundated with prospective tenants offering to ‘pass’ interviews over Zoom before being granted a viewing or handing over large sums of money for the deposit before even seeing the place in person. One woman had contacted me from Australia. The overwhelming response to my advert, while a plus for me, is a symptom of the lack of housing in available in London at the moment – especially for members of Generation Rent (millennials who have been priced out of the buyers’ market).

Siam Goorwich

Generation Rent is moving abroad

Siam Goorwich

Generation Rent is moving abroad

As a born-and-bred Londoner, the thought of living elsewhere has always repulsed me. And yet now I feel an ever-increasing desire to run for the hills. Thankfully I’m not alone in feeling restless and dissatisfied. And while my reluctance to live a plane ride away from my parents is keeping me in the country (for now at least), it seems many have no such qualms about abandoning ship. According to research commissioned by immigration law firm Reiss Edwards, Google searches for ‘moving abroad’ were up 1,000 per cent in April, with my generation – the much maligned millennial – apparently leading the charge. It’s hardly news that millennials – who are currently aged 26 to 41 – have not had the easiest ride. We began entering the workforce at the tail end of the Tony Blair years, just as things were about to get much, much worse.

Liz Rowlinson

The coastal boltholes that rival Cornwall

Liz Rowlinson

The coastal boltholes that rival Cornwall

May Day is behind us, the summer season approaching, and already the tensions between second homeowners and locals in Cornish seaside towns have been gleefully reported by the tabloid press. Visit Cornwall is considering a register of second homes while councils are proposing a tax on empty properties. House prices have gone up by an average of 28 per cent across Cornwall since the pandemic began, according to the Land Registry, so is it time to look elsewhere for a coastal bolt hole? The British coastline is at least 1,200km long so there are some great alternatives, although the perennial favourites can get just as ‘overrun’ as the likes of St Ives. According to Rightmove the most searched-for seaside towns this month are big-hitters like Bournemouth, Southampton, Eastbourne, Worthing and Brighton, but perhaps you fancy somewhere a little more off the beaten track? Pembrokeshire has proved a popular alternative to Cornwall, sharing the same craggy coastline dotted with fishing villages and pristine beaches but with fewer crowds and lower prices.

Emma Wells

Inside the Henley mansion that housed the Fords and the Kennedys

Emma Wells

Inside the Henley mansion that housed the Fords and the Kennedys

Turville Grange has many of the expected hallmarks of the top-end English country houses and estates on the market this spring. First comes its punchy price tag – in this case £18.75m – and lusted after location, the upmarket riverside town of Henley-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. Then there are its classic good looks: built in Queen Anne style in the 1880s, the Grade II listed three-storey house sprawls across 8,000 sq ft of space, has five main bedrooms, five staff bedrooms, two guest bedrooms and five reception rooms. There’s even a scratch or two of graffiti as proof of the requisite royal visitors – Princess Victoria, younger sister of King George V, etched the dates 1915, 1917 and 1918 into a first- floor window with a diamond ring.

Ross Clark

Right-to-buy won’t fix Britain’s housing crisis

Ross Clark

Right-to-buy won’t fix Britain’s housing crisis

The biggest long-term threat to the Conservatives is neither partygate nor even the cost of living crisis – but declining rates of home ownership. As Mrs Thatcher understood, when people are able to afford their own home, they become more conservative in outlook. They put down roots in their local area and they gain a vested interest in capitalism – just look how Mrs Thatcher won and held on to aspirational areas such as the new towns. That the rate of home ownership plunged from 70.9 per cent to 62.6 per cent between 2003 and 2017 (it has since recovered slightly) goes quite a long way to explaining why Jeremy Corbyn became such an attraction for young people in the general election of that year. But Boris Johnson’s plan to instigate a right-to-buy for housing association tenants is not the way to fix this.

Ed Mead

Is London’s housing market faltering?

Ed Mead

Is London’s housing market faltering?

Prime Central London has always been viewed as safe. It has some major plus points for the world’s wealthy – it’s on the Greenwich Meridian so can trade East and West, is an island considered geographically safe and geo-politically stable. Wherever you lived in the world you could stash a considerable portion of your wealth in this safe haven with the added bonus that, if a downturn were to grip your own country, you can relocate to London. The relative global stability of the last decade has led to empty properties. The heart went out of Prime Central London years ago. One block north and south of the Kings Road exhibits some semblance of the old days but the street itself now resembles a kind of upmarket shopping mall with precious little individuality.

Emma Wells

The Bridgerton effect: a guide to buying Georgian homes

Emma Wells

The Bridgerton effect: a guide to buying Georgian homes

With its high society intrigue, gossipy plotlines, raunchy love scenes and gravity defying hair do’s, all set against the backdrop of spectacularly sumptuous homes, Netflix series Bridgerton has rewritten the rules for small-screen period drama. The Shonda Rhimes exec-produced series gained 193 million hours of viewing time for its second series in the first three days – the highest for any English-language Netflix series in this time frame. Whether you love it or hate it – or love to hate it – its impact is undeniable, offering an irresistible twist on classic 19th-century tales of the upper classes, imbued with a modern sensibility. It has also reignited our passion for all things Georgian, with both domestic and overseas house hunters placing the hallmarks of the period at the top of their wish lists: perfectly symmetrical pedimented entrances, stucco facades, Doric columns, sash and fanlight windows and cavernous glass houses are all in hot demand.

Emily Hill

How I finally learned to love my eco-home

Emily Hill

How I finally learned to love my eco-home

Nine years ago, when I invested every-thing I had in a part-rent, part-buy, one-bedroom, government-backed eco-home which proved to be a boiling box in summer, my first instinct was to throw myself out of a window – but I couldn’t because they opened only ten centimetres. My second was to complain about it in The Spectator. Now, I return to update you on my energy bills. Prepare to turn green with envy. Friends who live successful sorts of lives – involving houses, spouses and gardens – exclaim ‘Oh, so you weren’t joking about living in a J.G. Ballard novel?’ when they come around for the book launches I host in my living room, before asking if I can open a window. ‘I can actually,’ I boast. ‘The restrictors were removed on humanitarian grounds and a man in the block next door fell out and died last year in circumstances still unreported in any newspaper.

James Max

The dos and don’ts of buying land

James Max

The dos and don’ts of buying land

You’d be forgiven for thinking that buying land is just the same as buying a house. But, other than the form of contract and the stamp duty you pay, the two transactions have almost nothing in common. When you buy a house, even if it comes with land attached, what you’re really buying is a physical structure with infrastructure (pipes, energy, drainage, and access) and most importantly the permission for that building to be where it is. And it’s that permission that holds the real value. Very often with land you’re either buying hope value or opportunity, an existing income stream and sometimes it’s a financial responsibility. Land may also be a route to receive a range of tax benefits. The work you need to do to establish not only your rights but also your responsibilities (such as maintenance of access to footpaths, for example or easements across land or rights) are significant.

Laura Freeman

The cult of the extortionate ‘English’ kitchen

Laura Freeman

The cult of the extortionate ‘English’ kitchen

A house around the corner is on its fourth kitchen in a decade. Every two or three years, the house changes hands, the pristine kitchen comes out and a newer, pristiner kitchen goes in. They are always white, they are always shiny, and when I peer through the basement windows there is nothing in the way of signs of life. I reckon I can predict the next kitchen. Think homespun, think rustic, think scullery maid in mobcap and pinny. What the rich want now is a plain old Plain English kitchen. Hand-crafted cabinets, antiqued brass, Delft tiles with authentic craquelure. Starting at £34,000 and going up to… well, how much have you got? Don’t you dare put Dulux on your artisan doors. Plain English has its own bespoke paint chart.

Liz Rowlinson

The secret to buying in Italy

Liz Rowlinson

The secret to buying in Italy

The best recent advert for the bella vita is surely actor Stanley Tucci sampling regional cuisines in CNN’s Searching for Italy exclaiming ‘oh my god’ at least four times an episode as he swoons over risotto Milanese or Sicilian pasta alla Norma. It's these sun-soaked visions of a foodie paradise that persuade scores of Northern Europeans and Americans to buy a home there. Around 30,000 Britons have moved there – mostly to Lombardy, Lazio or Tuscany – but a raft of incentives is helping draw many buyers to southern Italy, where rural properties are more affordable. Villa Castagnoli, in Gaiole, Chianti (€1,890,000, Savills) During 2021, the most popular regions in Italy for searches during 2021 were Tuscany, Sicily, Abruzzo and Puglia (Apulia), according to the property website Rightmove, whilst the most searched-for regions for the largest Italian property portal, gate-away.

Siam Goorwich

Why millennials love midcentury modern

Siam Goorwich

Why millennials love midcentury modern

I’ve recently become betrothed, so naturally I’ve started playing the fantasy house game; scrolling through property sites on my phone, highest price first, before I go to sleep at night. I thought I knew what I was looking for; a Georgian townhouse, solid stone steps leading up to a grand front door, basement kitchen, you know the drill… but then I saw it, my dream house. The main living area is a vast open plan, multi-levelled space with a sweeping wall of windows; white limestone floors contrast against its naked brick body and slatted wooden ceiling; everything is bathed in brilliant natural light, the lines between inside and outside gloriously blurred. In short, it’s a mid-century modern (MCM) masterpiece.

Tanya Gold

The social cost of Cornwall’s second home boom

Tanya Gold

The social cost of Cornwall’s second home boom

Cornwall has a boast this week and it has nothing to do with ice-cream or tides: we have made more than 2000 offers to house Ukrainian refugees. I am not surprised. The duchy is filled with second homes, and they are very often empty. Harboursides are dark in winter and the old town in St Ives is no more than a monied ghetto now. Since the war began it is often said that it is easier to offer refuge to those closest to you. The Polish don’t want Syrians, for instance, but they want Ukrainians. In Cornwall the opposite is true. A second homeowner offers his cottage to a Ukrainian family, and that is decent, but he will ignore the misery of Cornish families: of his neighbours, who he does not consider neighbours because all his relationships are transactional.

Liz Rowlinson

Why second-homers are buying in Portugal

Liz Rowlinson

Why second-homers are buying in Portugal

In recent years Portugal’s been pulling away from its image as a place for golf-playing retirees. Now it’s a fashionable and increasingly upmarket destination for home buyers who are drawn by its tax benefits coupled with its unspoilt coastlines and low-octane lifestyle. As of December 2021, there were 42,071 Britons resident in Portugal, according to the SEF, the Immigration and Border Service, the second largest group of foreigners behind the Brazilians. It is extraordinary that although the figure has fallen a little since 2020 – the pandemic has played its part – prior to Brexit, Britons made up only the sixth largest group of foreign residents in Portugal. But the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce estimates that up to 60,000 Britons own a first or second home there, and there’s an unusually high level of pre-registrations for a Moving to Portugal Event they are holding in London on 31 March.

James Max

The home improvements that are shrewd investments – and what to avoid

James Max

The home improvements that are shrewd investments – and what to avoid

Is the property market stagnating? According to the latest figures from the Nationwide House Price Index you could be forgiven for thinking that everything’s tickety-boo. Prices are up 1.7 per cent and annual growth now running at 12.6 per cent with the typical home up to 20 per cent higher than in February 2020. However, with inflation on the up, higher interest rates are on the way. Rising costs of living are seemingly out of control and there is increased market and economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whether the market remains competitive or stagnates, why move and go through all the hassle and expense when you could simply use the money you’d spend on agent’s fees and stamp duty to invest at home? If you take on the right projects, you’ll find you can add value and put yourself in a better position to sell further down the line.

Robert Jackman

The nuclear bunker market is booming

Robert Jackman

The nuclear bunker market is booming

As the spectre of nuclear war returns so does another very modern phenomenon: a spike in interest amongst the paranoid rich seeking to procure their own nuclear bunker. Over in Texas – already home to a vibrant culture of ‘preppers’ who spend their time planning for every shade of apocalypse – one creator of custom shelters, Rising S Bunkers, says it’s had a 700pc increase in interest in the last month. Made from long-lasting plate steel, their bunkers are designed to be buried under the average American yard. Of the five units sold last month, the largest fetched $240,000.A Rising S Bunker is installed in the US If you don’t have space for your own bunker – or would rather shelter down amongst like-mined survivalists – there are other options.

Alec Marsh

What the flight of Russian money means for the London property market

Alec Marsh

What the flight of Russian money means for the London property market

Ever since the early 2000s, London’s luxury property market has been the preserve of foreign investors, many of whom are purported to be Russian. In Chelsea, Highgate and Hampstead, streets of empty mansions quickly became an inevitable part of city life, while the Russian investment phenomenon was dubbed ‘Londongrad’. Thanks to the use of myriad offshore companies and ownership structures, and the practice of buying properties in the names of third parties – so called nominee accounts, it is all but impossible to identify the owners of these houses. Short of posting a private detective outside of each one for weeks on end and hoping the real owner shows up, the exact number of Oligarch-owned homes remains a mystery.

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