Terraced house - yours for £25m

Mira Bar-Hillel5 April 2012
The Weekender

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It was born out of a deal struck in 1826 between a landowning grandee and a great builder, required an Act of Parliament to build and was home to the legendary socialite Chips Channon.

Now the massive residence at 5 Belgrave Square is on sale at £25million, making it the most expensive terraced house in the world.

It is also one of the few remaining homes in a square inhabited mostly by embassies, high commissions, royal colleges and institutions.

Jonathan Hewlett, of estate agents FPD Savills, said: 'This is a rare chance to buy a freehold house on the Grosvenor Estate.

'The price tag will buy you seven reception rooms, all with period fireplaces, and a home cinema.

"On the second floor there is a massive master bedroom complete with sitting room, bathroom and dressing room. And there are six further bedrooms - all with their own bathrooms - on the third and fourth floors."

The property's lower ground level has a Turkish steam bath, gym, two kitchens and a rear garden leading to a detached mews house which has four bedrooms and three bathrooms above the double garages. The main house has plans for a basement swimming pool which has not yet been built, and a lift.

Belgrave Square, the brainchild of the first Marquess of Westminster and Thomas Cubitt, was built gradually and completed in 1847. By then it had became home to a veritable Who's Who of the British nobility, including the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Essex and Earl Grey.

Its architects included Sir Robert Smirke, designer of the British Museum, and George Basevi, a pupil of Sir John Soane and a cousin of Benjamin Disraeli. The house at number 5 was acquired in 1935 by Sir Henry " Chips" Channon, the American-born bisexual who did not allow his position as Conservative MP to interfere with his main role as the uncrowned king of London society - and its gossipy chronicler.

It was, he claimed at the time, "dirt-cheap compared with all the other houses we have seen, but we will make it gay and comfortable".

He succeeded in this throughout the grim years of the Second World War, culminating in a birthday party for 30 in the lavish dining room in 1944 where he developed the practice of lacing the cocktails with benzedrine which he said "makes a party go".

Channon made number 5, which suffered some bomb damage, into a rococo-style extravaganza based on his visits to Bavarian castles.

He paid what was then the astounding sum of £6,000 for ornamental plasterwork by a French master plasterer and erected a Rex Whistler chimneypiece in his music room.

The finished product impressed Harold Nicolson, but not Noel Coward whose verdict was: "Very grand - and rather agony."

In 1958 the house passed to Channon's son Paul, the former Tory cabinet minister, now Lord Kelvedon. It was sold to the Institute of Directors, and then the British Plastics Federation, which lived up to its name by tearing out most of the baroque and rococo interior.

Now listed Grade I, it was bought in the early 1990s by a Greek family who declared war on the modern interiors and restored the house to its original glory if not extravagance.

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