A Belgravia mansion has sold for £38 million in central London’s first super-prime property deal of the year.
The 9,049 square foot, eight-bedroom property on Wilton Crescent, which was originally the London home of the Earls of Bessborough and most recently financier Glenn Maud, was sold by Fairway Capital to a UK buyer. The deal included a mews house on Kinnerton Street.
The buyer was among four bidders who were mostly from overseas and in London over the festive season shopping and to look at properties for sale. Fairway Capital said they had all waited until the UK general election and autumn budget were out of the way before starting talks on the sale.
The property, which had been bought by fund manager Fairway Capital in 2021, was fully refurbished recently by Leconfield Property Group, which built a private health spa in a newly created basement under the main house with a nine-metre swimming pool with wave technology, a treatment room, steam room and changing facilities. The work also restored cornicing, reproduced Louis XVI fireplaces, installed new kitchens, bathrooms and a passenger lift.
Originally one of the London homes of the Ponsonby family, the Earls of Bessborough, the mansion served as home to Sir Spencer Cecil Ponsonby, who was a son of the 4th Earl of Bessborough, a senior diplomat and courtier. Sir Spencer, a cricket fanatic who laid the foundation stone for the pavilion at Lord’s Cricket Ground, used to practice cricket on the lawns of the mansion’s crescent-shaped garden.
During the 1990s and early 2000s the mansion served as the London home of the then billionaire financier Glenn Maud, who commissioned Robert Kline, the decorator to King Charles III, to interior design the house in a makeover reported to have cost £6 million.
Last year saw a 25 per cent drop in the number of sales and a 34 per cent drop in the value of properties worth more than £15 million, due to a combination of Stamp Duty rises, changes to the UK’s Non-Dom regime, the general election and the new Labour government, according to a recent report from Beauchamp Estates.
George Brooksbank the Chief Executive of Fairway Capital, told The National the prime central London property market has “gradually come back to life” over the last six weeks, with an upturn in enquiries, offers and sales.
But international buyers, especially those from the Middle East, the US and Asia who are driving sales in the London super-prime market, are “extremely discerning”, he said.
“The demand is for newly built and newly refurbished homes, with new interiors and dressed as a turn-key offering. Buyers are far less interested in unmodernised second-hand properties, especially those that need refurbishment and are poorly presented.”
The trend was evident in a deal in late November which sold one of the fund’s flagship assets, a £26.25 million 5,222 sq ft apartment on Old Park Lane in London’s Mayfair, formerly part of the Rolls-Royce HQ, to a young international buyer.
“The average age of buyers of London homes worth £25 million or more is now just 41, down 12 years in the last decade,” said Mr Brooksbank.
“These younger buyers are also driving the London trophy home market because their age enables them to take a long-term investment view on the London property market, purchasing and holding for 10 to 20 years, which makes sound financial sense given Stamp Duty costs,” he added.
Prices of new and refurbished properties at more than £15 million are expected to rise this year by just 1 per cent or 2 per cent, Paul Finch, Director and Head of New Homes at Beauchamp Estates told The National. But in markets such as Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Hampstead, especially for second-hand homes that require refurbishment, prices are likely to soften by between -2 per cent to -4 per cent.
“The market in 2025 will be driven by buyers from the United States and Middle East, in particular purchasers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar,” added Mr Finch.
