The most expensive house in Britain

The most expensive house in Britain

It’ll get you heated driveways and ensuite swimming pools, but can £70m buy you taste? This is Updown Court, in Surrey.

You don’t need to climb far up the housing ladder these days to have a master bedroom with ensuite, but at Updown Court, in Windlesham, on the Surrey Berkshire border, the term takes on a new meaning. We are not talking bathroom here, but ensuite swimming pool – 12 metres long, with a proper deep end, reached by a glass lift that can whisk you there straight from your four-poster.

Extravagance? If you’re spending more than £70m on a house, you expect something special. So it has another four pools, a glass-walled squash court, a private cinema and a two-lane bowling alley in the basement. Oh, and several sitting and entertaining rooms, 13 bedrooms, 20 bathrooms and 43 lavatories, all set in 11 acres of landscaped gardens and 46 acres of woodland.

Spanning 50,000 sq ft – bigger than Hampton Court or Buckingham Palace, and the equivalent of 30 average houses – this neoclassical mansion, completed at the end of last year, is by far the most expensive country pile on sale in Britain.

Updown Court certainly has the ideal location for the billionaire plutocrat: central London is 28 miles away, Heathrow a 20-minute drive. Worried about the local schools? Eton College is within easy reach. The road from Sunningdale, the nearest railway station, is lined with sets of high gates concealing the kind of country houses beloved of City bonus-earners.

Drive through Updown’s own ornate wrought-iron gates (electrically operated, of course), onto the heated marble driveway – said to have cost £3m to lay – and the house looms up suddenly in front of you. It looks like something out of Bel Air or Palm Beach – not surprising, since most of the work of John Scholz, the original architect, has been for the super-rich of America.

For all that money, you might expect a longer driveway. There is also too much noise, from the road outside and from the M3, a few miles away, which even the gush of water from the 40ft fountain cannot completely mask.

Open the huge oak front door (with a small, ordinary-looking key on a plastic tag) and the first sight is of the triple-height reception area, the size of an average Victorian semi, dominated by a pair of sweeping staircases leading up to a galleried landing, modelled on the late Gianni Versace’s villa in Miami.

The sheer expanse of shiny marble – an estimated 250 tons of it has been used in the house – has visitors reaching for their sunglasses. As Leslie Allen-Vercoe, chairman of Rhymer Investments, the property’s developers, put it: “If Elton John were a house, he’d be Updown Court.” Although the singer, who lives in nearby Old Windsor, probably couldn’t afford it.

Starting at the top, the second floor is divided into two two-bedroom penthouse suites, one in the west wing, one in the east – perfect for visitors, or ideal for a granny flat, so the matriarch can marvel at her offspring’s success. Despite the opulence of the bathrooms (more marble), the bedrooms are cosy rather than spacious. Both, nevertheless, offer views of the infinity pool on the terrace.

The floor below has eight more bedrooms, each with its own ensuite bathroom and walk-in wardrobe the size of a bedsit. No two rooms in this house are the same, nor are any of them rectangular – not great for furniture, but, then again, if you have that much money, you can probably go bespoke.

The master bedroom, surprisingly, is on the ground floor. It boasts a walk-in dressing room and an 850 sq ft double ensuite bathroom. Two panels either side of the bath – clearly designed to be shared – have been left blank for his-and-hers mosaics. A panelled library, a study and a clutch of other rooms complete the east wing.

The west wing has a family room, breakfast area, private sitting room and banqueting hall. The last of these is surprisingly small, with space for two dozen diners at a pinch. Fill all those bedrooms with guests and you will struggle to feed them all at one sitting. Finger buffet in the hall, perhaps?

Here is also the second of the two indoor pools, an altogether larger affair, with ladies’ and gentlemen’s changing rooms, a sauna and a massage room. Worried about the damp air and whiffs of chlorine spreading to the rest of the house? No need. Entry to the pool area is via a high-pressure glass chamber that traps the air inside.

Besides the cinema, the squash court, the bowling alley and a wine cellar for 300 bottles, the basement contains the main kitchen, a walk-in strongroom and a granite-floored garage with the words Updown Court carved in it, presumably in case the owner forgets which of his many residences he is visiting.

Here, too, is the James Bond-like control room, from which it is possible to manage the £6m worth of heating, air conditioning and other high-tech kit, all of which, thanks to the internet, can be adjusted by the owner as he floats through the Caribbean on his yacht. It also contains a battery of video cameras that allows you to monitor and track intruders. Too many barbarians at the gate? Then make use of one of the two escape tunnels, or retreat to the panic room, also in the basement, and wait for reinforcements to arrive.

Yet such features alone do not sell a house, especially not one as expensive as Updown Court, which has languished unsold since coming onto the market in 2004, despite a boom that has seen the price of top country houses rise by more than 20% over the past year.

Although growing amounts of wealth have become concentrated in the hands of the world’s mega-rich, £70m is a huge sum of money, especially when the buyer will have to spend millions more decorating and fitting out what, in many respects, is still a glorified shell.

The most expensive country-house sale in Britain was Park Place, a 30,000 sq ft pile near Henley-on-Thames, which changed hands last month for a mere £42m. To find anything more expensive, you would have to go to London, where Sheikh Hamad, the foreign minister of Qatar, reportedly paid £100m this spring for a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park. In another entry for the record books, it was announced last week that a 29-bedroom, three-swimming-pool mansion in Beverly Hills, which once belonged to the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, is on sale for £82m – the most ever asked for a house in America.

So, why has nobody bought Updown Court? Is it the eccentric layout, the road noise and the lack of privacy? Or is the whole thing simply too over-the-top for the British market?

Savills is clearly hoping that, as the market continues to rise, the price tag will cease to look quite so excessive. Crispin Holborow, director of Savills’ country department, which is selling the house, is sworn to secrecy on the identity and number of buyers who have viewed Updown Court, but insists that all could afford it. “There is a tight screening process in place before anyone is allowed in,” he says.

The price tag, Holborow suggests mischievously, might even be too modest: “With such growing confidence and the market increasing, perhaps we ought to be asking more.” Any takers?

Updown breakdown

INSIDE

- Eight bedroom suites

- 2,650 sq ft master wing

- Two penthouse apartments

- Two indoor swimming pools

- Squash court Bowling alley

- 15 reception rooms

- Nine private balconies

- Kitchens and storerooms

- Garaging for seven cars

- Panic room

- Security control centre

OUTSIDE

- Two escape tunnels

- Guest lodge

- Gatehouse

- Staff quarters

- Stables

- Summer houses

- Three outdoor pools

- Floodlit sports court

- 40ft fountain

- 11 acres of manicured gardens and lawn

- 46 acres of woodland

The Times Online - July 15, 2007

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