It's a three-bedroom flat on Kensington Park Road, and it was home to Robbie Williams when he left Take That and moved to London. Williams shared the apartment with Nicole Appleton and later Geri Halliwell. It's a four-floor affair, with a roof terrace, right in the heart of Notting Hill. It's with Domus Nova, guide price £3.45m, particulars here.

[via Prime blog]

If these walls could talk... James Hunt edition [April 5, 2011]

Technorati Tags: property, real estate

The Marsh & Parsons agent showed prospective viewers around the nice Treadgold Street property while the owner lay dead on the sofa in the lounge. He assumed she was sleeping, and apparently left the lounge until last in the hope she'd wake up. Which didn't happen. He did notice her unusual "yellow-colour" after the viewing, though, and called an ambulance. More here and here.

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I bet some vetting took place before this contract was signed. David Cameron apparently has tenants, in his Notting Hill home, earning him around £6,000 a week. More here.

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Zoopla's revealed the UK's most expensive postcodes, and it's topped - less than surprisingly - with W8, where average property prices are in excess of £1.5m. The most expensive street? Kensington Palace Gardens... at £18m a house, on average. Other £1m+ postcodes are SW7, SW3, W11 and SW10. Virginia Water, alone, represents the rest of the country in the top ten list.

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Thanks very much to the Rat and Mouse tipster who sent me this. It's 4 St Luke's Mews, in Notting Hill, the house in which Paula Yates lived, and died, in 2000. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a very trendy location off All Saints Road, and its own share of notoriety. It's with Bective Leslie Marsh; guide price, £1.75m; particulars, here.

If these walls could talk... Simon Day edition [April 6, 2010]

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It's been a long-time in the making, but - according to sources - Elle Macpherson spent the weekend drinking bubbly (okay, she always drinks bubbly), doing some celebratory shopping (okay, she always goes shopping), bathing in milk (okay, you get the picture), because she's finally sold her Notting Hill home. For how much, we don't yet know.

If these walls could talk... Elle Macpherson's £2m price-drop edition [June 10, 2009]
Celebrities who don't sell [April 16, 2009]

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It hit the market last summer at £9.5m. Now the six-bedroom, five-bathroom, Ladbroke Gardens Grade II-listed townhouse is with a new agent, and marketed at £7.5m. A 20%-ish drop since the top of the market... sounds about right. All-important particulars, here.

If these walls could talk... London gangster edition [May 22, 2009]
If these walls could talk... Beckham house redux [April 28, 2009]

Technorati Tags: celebrity, London, property, real estate

Lohan says: "I like Notting Hill a lot. I also often stay with a friend in Chelsea. I'd move there tomorrow. I prefer London of New York. The people are less judgemental."

The other reason, apart from the non-judgemental peeps in Notting Hill? Getting away from the paparazzi. Holy shit, I'm speechless.

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Some interesting information about Lakshmi Mittal's Kensington Park Gardens, here in a must-read Daily Telegraph piece, and an explanation for what was happening during the empty years, between Bernie Ecclestone and its current ownership. Ecclestone is said to have fallen in love with the property, and paid £50m for it. There was a lot to fall in love with. The developer - David Khalili - had spared no expense.

Mr Khalili spent £84m buying and refurbishing the house in Kensington Palace Gardens, which previously housed the Russian and Egyptian embassies. The project, which employed up to 400 craftsmen every day, was said at the time to have been second only in cost to the refurbishment of Windsor Castle after the fire of 1992. Mr Khalili imported marble from the same quarry in Agra that provided the material for the Taj Mahal, and flew in stonemasons who were normally employed to maintain the Indian monument. The marble was used to build pillars surrounding a swimming pool, which were then inlaid with precious stones. An underground car park for 20 vehicles was also built.

Four hundred craftsman worked, daily, on the house, and it cost more than any other refurb project except Windsor Castle after the fire. Not bad. I reckon if you'd then just paid £50m for this, you'd be pretty excited about showing it to the wife. That's where it apparently went wrong.

But his formidable Croatian wife, Slavica, was apparently underwhelmed by the property and Mr Ecclestone, 78, sold it three years later without ever moving in.

Yeah, well? Taj Mahal, Taj Shmahal.

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Those super-exclusive crescents... Stanley Crescent, Lansdowne Crescent, Lansdowne Road, Elgin Crescent etc, the big family houses backing onto communal gardens... they're built along the route of the long-lost Hippodrome Racecourse, an early 19th Century experiment that failed when the course was constantly waterlogged. You learn something new every day.

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The two-bedroom apartment above The Travel Bookshop - inspiration for and important location in Notting Hill - is on the market. Owned by the vendor, author and publisher (and bookshop owner) Sarah Anderson since 1981, it has its own front door, a good location on Blenheim Crescent and an eccentric feature window... a kitchen window looking down into the bookshop's skylight, giving a view of daytime browsers. It's with KFH, here... offers in excess of £899,950.

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Forty million pounds of it, according to this. The property's in Holland Park, it was once the Burmese Embassy, it's been a home for the blind, by the end of 2008 it's likely to be one of the UK's most talked about trophy homes. Cowell is the latest celeb - after everybody's favourite estate agent - to extend downwards. Plans include an underground swimming pool and car park, and will comprise 21,000 sq ft.

Going underground [September 18, 2007]

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Once home to Biba creator Barbara Hulanicki, this 4-story townhouse in Kensington Park Road still features the odd nod to the fashion icon, even though she hasn't lived there since the 1980s. Check out the kitchen units... hmm. It's with Foxtons and it ain't cheap... this big house (with a garden and conservatory) is listed at £3.4m, here. Click through to the particulars for a cornucopia of photografia.

If these walls could talk... Derek Jarman edition [September 6, 2007]

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She's jewellery designer to the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kylie Minogue, she likes fairies, crystals programmed by Buddhists, things from Java, and she is environmentally-friendly enough to not fill up the bath, even though:

I have a day-bed in the sitting-room that I got shipped over from Bali - it actually cost more to ship than it did to buy... My friends and I like to chill out on it, listening to music.

The Independent visits.

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Apparently, Dustin Hoffman's having a clear-out at his London home (in Kensington we believe). Forty-two antiques from the property will go on sale at Christie's on March 7.

Celebrity Rat and Mouse - Dustin Hoffman incoming [January 11, 2005]

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We're back in Notting Hill, with what is pretty much certainly the first converted church organ factory to appear in the Rat and Mouse. Four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a garden, off-street parking and cool conservatory (inappropriate furniture not mandatory), on Swanscombe Road. It's with Bective Leslie Marsh, and has a guide price of £3.95m

.

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

I can remember writing about the complaints of the POOPS (Pushed Out Of Position) in Hampstead even before Tatler named them POOPS. Now, there's an outbreak of POOP in Notting Hill, with the upper-middle classes finding themselves being outspent and bought-out by nouveaux shouting the war-cry lovely-jubbly. But yesterday's Times was having none of it, and took an old-school Thatcherite position:

This sense of lost entitlement among the Establishment is nothing new. But if you can afford to hire a whole fairground for your child's birthday, good luck to you; if you can't, either get out there and make some money - or get over it.

Prices in the Notting Hill neighbourhood rose by an astonishing 3.7% in July, according to Knight Frank's latest Prime Central London (apartments priced at £1.5 million and up; houses priced at £3 million and up; all situated in seven swanky postcodes) survey. It's the 19th consecutive month of PCL gains... and Knight Frank explain July's extraordinary rise on Middle Eastern money, swelled thanks to high oil prices.

News just in that architect Cezary M Bednarski has secured planning permission to build two house - one on top of the other - in the Colville Conservation Area of Notting Hill Gate. The site's at the corner of Westbourne Park Road and Basing Street. Interestingly, Bednarski plans to move from his current Oxford Gardens home, to occupy the upper building. The lower 3-bedroom home will be for sale.

"He just wants to be seen as an ordinary guy with the same problems as families up and down the country."

That's a colleague talking about Tory PR master David Cameron. It's going to be a challenge, though, as the Sunday Mirror reports on his successful off-loading of a five-bedroom Ladbroke Grove townhouse for £1.1 million, more than twice the sum he paid for it ten years ago. The sale doesn't leave him homeless. He still has his £650,000 Oxfordshire constituency home, and up to £21,634 a year in public money towards his mortgage. Just like other families up and down the country. It's going to take more than removing his tie on television to normalise Cameron in his battle with David "Buster" Davis. The Rat and Mouse suggests he goes all in - gets himself a hot hatch and some proper arm candy, or learns to rock out.

Thanks to Rat and Mouse reader Marc for pointing out this example of cynical misrepresentation by a leading Ladbroke Grove estate agent. Okay, this Lonsdale House two-bedroom apartment is on the sixth floor and everything, but "great sea views"? Come on. And the agents know as well as we do that there are almost certainly tired and emotional media clowns knocking around out there befuddled and confused enough to show up on the off-chance of some crashing surf and blue horizons. This post will be forwarded immediately to the ombudsman.

Estate agent crackdown [September 27]

It'll cost you. £240,000 to be precise. At least that's what somebody has just paid for a Lansdowne Road lock-up. Okay, it's a double garage, it comes with the freehold, and power, but still... Apparently, it joined the market at £140,000, and then a bidding war broke out amongst the neighbours. It's a London record, and the Rat and Mouse would like to congratulate Savills on a job well done. More, including a picture, here.

Okay, it's so small you wouldn't want to fall over in it, but this studio-ette in Holland Park's cute Norland Square includes a key to the communal gardens and tennis court. It's on the first floor, and you get a little balcony, too. It's with Stern Studios. Viewings are Tuesday and Wednesday.

But he doesn't seem too bothered. We're still hunting. Any advances on Notting Hill, Mr Scoble?

The future - it's somewhere in Notting Hill [May 3]