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.

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

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]

Technorati Tags: celebrity, London, property, real estate

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.

Technorati Tags: celebrity, London, property, real estate

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

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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]