Its price has earned it coverage from Bloomberg and Business Week. It's a 16,000 square foot, at the southern end of Kensington Palace Gardens, and it sounds - from something Aylesford International (handling the sale) say - it's either not quite reached the market yet or it's never going to appear formally, but buying agents "know". The exact guide price also remains undisclosed, other than it will be more than £100m.

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The survey was by Lloyds TSB, and its Borough (Kensington & Chelsea) dominates the top ten list. Campden Hill Square has an average property price of £4.9m... former home to Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser (and venue for the famous IRA bomb meant for her previous husband Conservative MP Hugh Fraser in 1975. Second came Merton's Parkside, with an average price of £4.8m, and Drayton Gardens was third with average prices of £4.4m.

The rise and rise of top-end London property... it appears unstoppable. New figures by Primelocation show "prime" London property up 10% in 2011. That's £306 a day.

[photograph by Peter Jordan]

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It's a 15-bedoom house that, until 2004, belonged to the Russian Government and was apparently used as a spy base. It still had "radio rooms" when its previous owners took it over and spent £20m making it a home. Roman Abramovich reportedly spent £90m buying the property. More here.

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If you're within twenty miles of Kate Middleton's new Kensington Palace Gardens home, then it's probably just the $1500 of air fresheners she's said to have purchased for the property. I like the way the Americans call it a "cottage".

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From the Monopoly board, that is. And replaced by Kensington Palace Gardens. Somebody from Foxtons is in favour:

Andrew Weir, central area director at estate agents Foxtons, believes this shift in property power is entirely warranted: "This street [Kensington Palace Gardens] boasts sensational period buildings, many with movie-like features such as underground swimming pools and marble pillars made from the same quarry as the Taj Mahal. "With the average price of a property fetching a staggering £19m, this street has become one of the most sought-after in the world."

Fair enough, but to lose Mayfair completely? When it's going through a period of residential revival (after so many properties turned commercial in the hands of the hedge funds)?

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Another of those data-crunches courtesy of Mouseprice reveals Kensington's Victoria Road as England's most expensive, with an average property price of £6.4m. Kensington & Chelsea was home to 14 of the 20 most expensive streets. 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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You can smell the money – literally – wafting over from the floral display featuring contorted orchids crammed trendily – and brutally – into tall vases.

Holy Moses! Orchids - literally - raised on money. Over at the Primelocation blog, Cheryl Markosky gets to go inside 54 Academy Gardens (£30m) in Kensington, a 6000 square foot duplex with five bedrooms and some grand but modern interior space, poke around and sniff the affluence.

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The London market's set to blow up in an extravagant excess of top Capital property values, according to London Central Portfolio, a property search and management company. Expect - according to LCP chief Naomi Heaton in conversation with the Standard here - Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea prices to rebound 80% from recent lows.

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I'd heard - on the grapevine - via a number of estate agents about growing numbers of Italians setting up home in London, driven by a combination of a strong Euro and a strange domestic tax situation involving a temporary amnesty. Now - according to Investors Chronicle:

An influx of Italian cash buyers to the central London property market is skewing house price indicators and leading to over-optimistic forecasts of a housing market recovery.

The story comes via, ahem, Capital Economics, and uses data from Savills, who claim 80% of Kensington enquiries and 70% in Knightsbridge are from Italian buyers.

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[Via the London House Hound], Madonna's Sheffield Terrace rental - from where she house-hunted for two years, and was burgled while she slept - could be your rental, if you've £13,000 a week to spend. Particulars, here.

Meanwhile, Prince Harry's girlfriend has apparently been property-shopping in London. Chelsy Davy's daddy is said to have dropped £1.65m on a two-bedroom flat. Where? Don't know, yet. Suggestions welcome.

If these walls could talk... they'd say "re-wind" [October 21, 2009]

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Tony Benn MP has put his weight behind a campaign to stop Kensington & Chelsea council selling off Holland Park School's playing fields to developers (who plan, apparently, to knock up a bit of luxury housing). The school's being rebuilt, and the council's looking to raise cash. Benn - who sent his own children to the school, and whose wife was chair of the governors - clearly has an emotional attachment to the institution.... the first purpose-built comprehensive in London. More here.

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Except, only by the Standard. Mittal's people remain silent.

Mittal seals giant Kensington Palace Gardens deal? [May 23, 2008]

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Rumours are surfacing that Lakshmi Mittal has bought another gaff in Kensington Palace Gardens, this time for his son Aditya. The property was on the market for £117m. Mittal's apparently denying all knowledge of the deal. We'll come back with confirmation should we find it.

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The Evening Standard reports on falling asking prices here and there across the capital, including many of the top postcodes. According to Rightmove figures:

Average asking prices in Kensington and Chelsea have fallen £33,000 to £1,458,558 - down more than 2.2 per cent between March and April.

Oddly, though, asking prices rose (by 3.8%) in Hackney.

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It's a five-storey home in Kensington's Upper Phillimore Gardens, rumoured to have exchanged for £80m, the deal done by a Ukrainian businesswoman and friend to Elton John. If the rumour's true, it's something of a triumph for Mike Spink, who bought the property (number 17) in June 2006 for... £20m, and has spent a further on it £10m since. Hey, is somebody going to tell the super-prime market, there's supposed to be a price crash happening here...

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Kicking the series off... a bright and arresting, love-it-or-hate-it three-bedroom modern townhouse on Kensington's Abingdon Road off Kensington High Street, with off-street parking, a huge reception room, conservatory, garden and innovative design. £3.9m, here

Tomorrow, a budget penthouse.

The Particulars - what's this about?

A two-bedroom, two-bathroom let, on Pembroke Road between Kensington High Street and Cromwell Road... apparently rented by Sir Elton John and David Furnish during 2005 when their usual Holland Park pad was being refitted. It's 2,450 sq ft, and rents for £2,000 a week. For more details, go here.

If these walls could talk... 17th Century hooker edition [June14, 2007]

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So property price increases in Prime Central London might have taken a hit, but the same can't be said for rental growth which, according to Knight Frank, reached its highest point in eight years... 12.2% June-to-June. If you're a landlord, how did you do in the postcode lottery? Here are the winning numbers... SW1, SW3, NW1, SW10, W8, and the bonus postcode is W14. This month's jackpot isn't as high as you might expect. Although house prices in these postcodes have slipped slightly in the last quarter, they've still, historically, outstripped rental growth, meaning that in a lot of cases yields aren't actually that impressive. If you own the property, though, and you bought it in time... who cares?

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It's always a shame when an interesting comment comes in way at the back of the blog where it's unlikely to be seen. So you'll forgive me if I occasionally drag the more interesting little snippets of London residential life to the front? Recently, we had this interesting thread on the subject of the Ferrier Estate. Now - in contrast - life on what was - at least in 2005 - London's richest street.

I live in Earls Terrace, W8, and the place is like Fort Knox: I can not do a thing without CCTV cameras and the Gorillas (security people) watching everything. I will have to escape from this prison.

Posted by rebel child at May 8, 2007 10:56 PM

Technorati Tags: London, property, real estate

The Times reports that well-heeled Londoners are waking up to the fact that, although period features and location are always advisable, nothing feels more like luxury in the Capital than a bit of space. As news of Barratt's first downloadable home, the iPad, reaches the papers, some new Kensington residents have proved that they're prepared to pay up to £12 million for a few thousand square feet more than the average, over at Phillimore Square, a new luxury development in W8. The Times' Anne Ashworth calculates you could fit as many as 23 iPads into the largest of the Phillimore Square apartments.

Westcity, the developer, says that the homes sold unexpectedly quickly without publicity, despite not being ready for occupancy until mid-summer. This is a further indication of the buoyant state of the City- bonus-driven London property market. What some agents call a "feeding frenzy" among buyers is being exacerbated by a shortage of homes for sale, especially really large ones.

Read it here.

Size matters [March 3]

The International Herald Tribune tells the story of property developer Mike Spink and his choice to build a giant, 5,200-square-foot family house in the Holland Park Avenue district, in a space in which he could have built a row of mews houses. He says part of his reasoning is that he wants to produce a property that can't be compared (in terms of value) with anything else... because there isn't anything else remotely like it in the neighbourhood. Is it a good plan? Well, his record so far is pretty good - they say that none of his developments have remained on the market for longer than 24 hours. The new one is due for completion in the summer, and he's talking about £9 million. You can read more, here.

Kensington & Chelsea has the highest concentration of private security in the country, with fearful residents paying £1,000 each to club together and have their residential streets patrolled by the ex-police and ex-military. But the borough also has a historically low crime rate. And, according to this, it's not only unwelcome visitors who end up feeling intimidated by the area's private police.

His name's Jonathan Hunt (yes, rhymes with shunt), he's known in the trade as the hardman of London property, but we know him as the man who, back in 1981, founded Foxtons. And the news is that the Sunday Times has been digging around in the Land Registry files and discovered he's recently become Lakshmi Mittal's new neighbour, spending £14,073,287 on 10, Kensington Gardens. It's a seven-storey, Grade II-listed mansion, and plans are afoot to build an underground sports complex, including a pool under the garden, which will be accessible via a sliding tennis court surface. Hmmm. The full story, here.

The Sunday Times isn't the only broadsheet to focus on London carparking. Here's the Telegraph, wondering aloud (okay, in print) whether the big future development profits are going to come from carparks. Ross Clark talks to John Law, of York House Developments, about the 86 parking spaces he's almost entirely sold (for £132,000 each, apparently) under a tennis court off Kensington Church Street. It's a question of planning. Years ago developments sold with parking... now they don't. And councils are granting many times more permits than there are spaces.

God, not another did you know you could by an entire grid of four-bedroom homes in Glasgow for the price of a single garage in central London stories... (like you can park your car in Glasgow and duck over to Quaglino's... like you can park your car in Glasgow and expect it to be there when you return...). Actually, this is the mother of all expensive London garage stories, because the Sunday Times have put together a little guide to garages currently for sale, from a £300,000 single garage behind Egerton Crescent in Chelsea (features: "in addition there is a rainwater drainpipe..."), to an underground parking space off Kensington High Street on the market at £95,000. More, here.

First it was Dickens & Jones, now ThisIsMoney reports on the imminent departure of another much-loved London department store. Barkers is going... leaving the residents of Kensington with a journey to Knightsbridge if they find themselves in need of expensive French kitchenware or a Crombie coat. Expect, apparently, a giant American health food shop to take its place. But, in the north west, the news is better. According to this, Brent Cross is to get London's second Apple Store. Why's that good? Okay, I'm biased (the Rat and Mouse is produced on one of a number of Macs in my own little Mac Museum), but the Apple Store on Regent Street is about as entertaining an experience as any computer store could be (and the best place to go for a bit of free WiFi).