London is known for luxury real estate at exorbitant prices. Now comes The Holme, an elegant period villa in Regent’s Park that could beat the previous record price. According to those involved, the seller is expecting a price of 250 million pounds (a good 280 million euros), according to media reports.
The 35-year-old Saudi Prince Abdullah Bin Halid Al Saud, his country’s representative at the United Nations in Vienna and ambassador to Austria, and his family are listed as the owners in the land register. Apparently he needs money urgently. He had pledged the London mansion and other New York properties as collateral for a three-digit million dollar loan that he can no longer repay. Now an insolvency administrator wants to sell the property to the highest bidder.
The property, built in 1818 in Georgian style, stands in the middle of Regent’s Park, one of the British capital’s large central parks. In front of it stretches a picturesque little lake on which ducks and geese make their rounds. Walkers can admire the white neoclassical building with half-columns on the facade surrounded by trees from a distance.
A builder as a builder
The client was real estate developer James Burton, one of the building tycoons of his day, who rebuilt entire districts, including Regent Street and Bloomsbury, for the kingdom’s upper class. The house in Regent’s Park was part of an overall plan designed by architect John Nash for the area.
The luxury residence sits on more than one and a half hectares (four acres) of private land in the park. That alone is exceptional in London, where most people live in rather cramped quarters. The villa covers almost 2700 square meters of living space.
It has about forty bedrooms and lounges, a magnificent dining room, a sauna with a whirlpool, eight garages and its own tennis court. Beauchamp Estates, a luxury real estate agency, and brokerage firm Knight Frank are currently offering the exquisite property discreetly, but this was leaked to the media this week. Now the press hype is great.
If the asking price of £250m is actually reached, The Holme would be the most expensive residential property ever sold in London. The previous record is £210million for a 45-room house on the south edge of Hyde Park that a mysterious Far East buyer bought four years ago.
It later emerged that the Chinese billionaire Xu Jiayin, the founder of the real estate group Evergrande, which has since been badly hit, is behind the buyer and a Caribbean letterbox company. Xu is now in such financial trouble that media reports say he would like to sell the Hyde Park residence again. Previously, the house belonged to members of the Saudi ruling family.
pressure on the royal family
The villa in Regent’s Park also has an eventful ownership history. And looking back shows how extremely prices have risen in the past few decades. The current owner family acquired the residence in 1988. At the time, they paid £15million. The buyer was the current ambassador’s grandfather, a former Saudi crown prince and defense minister. The previous owner, a Kuwaiti investor, paid £5m to buy it from the Crown Estate just four years earlier. That was considered a record sum at the time.
The fact that Abdullah Bin Halid Al Saud, who is in debt, has to sell his property could also be related to the fact that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is putting pressure on the numerous princes of the Saudi royal family, as the “Financial Times” speculated.
Supposedly it’s about a campaign to fight corruption and nepotism. Princes are said to fear for their sinecures and are trying to stop so ostentatiously indulging in a life of luxury. That could have an impact on London.
A large part of the luxury real estate in the Thames metropolis belongs to the foreign super-rich, above all Arab oil sheikhs and billionaires from the Far East, and some Russians too. They’ve bought up half-towns like Kensington and Chelsea and Mayfair, and they’ve been the favorite clientele of London estate agents. The oil money bubbled, the ruble rolled. Because so many Russians settled temporarily, the English capital was nicknamed “Londongrad”.
Tens of thousands of properties were also bought quasi-anonymously from shell companies registered in the Channel Islands, the British Virgin Islands or other tax havens – ideal for money laundering. This became embarrassing for the British – late but still – especially since the Ukraine war, when they imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs. In the meantime, the government is trying to shed more light on the dubious ownership structures and wants to force letterbox companies to disclose the actual owners of real estate.