THROUGH THE £250m KEYHOLE
A dining room ‘river’ for tropical fish, 20,000 gold leaf sheets and a fake cherry tree in full bloom: phones billionaire John Caudwell’s new home
ACHERRY tree in bloom trails blossom across the glass ceiling, while bronze lizards ascend one wall and a river, full of tropical fish, wends its way under the dining table in waters kept at a precise 23c.
It’s probably best not to have too many glasses of champagne should you ever be a guest at the mega-mansion of Phones4U tycoon John Caudwell. One slip as you rise from one of those sumptuous, paisley-print, dining chairs and you are likely to get a soggy foot. No need to worry about blossom falling in your dinner, though — the tree is a very convincing and artistic fake.
Welcome to the palatial property that with its estimated £250 million price tag can probably lay claim to being Britain’s most expensive home. Billionaire Caudwell (the 97th richest person in the UK, according to the Sunday Times Rich List), who sold his phones empire for £1.5 billion in 2006, created the 15-bedroom home by joining two Mayfair houses and turning them into one palatial mansion.
The resulting residence covers eight floors and spans more than 43,000 sq ft, a surface area that fits somewhere between the size of Westminster Abbey (32,000 sq ft) and Westminster Cathedral (54,000 sq ft).
Father-of-five Caudwell, 67, has certainly come a long way from the backstreet terrace in Stoke-on-Trent where he grew up; he dropped out of school to work in a tyre factory. Then, in 1987, while living in a caravan — he bought 26 mobile phones. It took a year to sell them, but he had found his niche, and Phones 4U grew rapidly.
Now he’s a committed philanthropist, who has promised to give away 70 per cent of his fortune, declaring that ‘leaving a billion pounds to your children is never going to be a good thing’.
He splashed out £87 million on the original properties in a district populated by
embassies and Middle Eastern banks in 2012, planning to restore their original period grandeur. He moved in for a time, but then he decided to embark on the renovation project to beat all renovations — an endeavour which cost £65 million, was £55 million over budget (and more than a year late) and at one point had 300 people working on it, with the ballroom (capacity 120) deployed as a works canteen.
As he said in 2013: ‘When I first came to look at it, I felt a combination of awe and horror. I didn’t know whether to love it or hate it. And those instincts were absolutely right. What I loved was the Beaux Arts architecture of the outside, the grandeur of the scale of the rooms inside. The ballroom I absolutely adore . . .’
But he didn’t like the existing basement, the kitchen or the dining room. So he decided to make a few changes.
Television viewers will witness the eyewateringly lavish result on Channel 4 this week because the ever-gregarious Caudwell decided to allow cameras inside the home (he has several) for the final months of the project. ‘It’s really beautiful, isn’t it? It sort of takes your breath away,’ says the tycoon, who admits his nature is to ‘micro-manage’ everything.
And boy was there a lot to manage. A vast ‘iceberg’ basement, expanding on what was already present, extends for three floors below the ground.
Caudwell, whose partner Modesta Vzesniauskaite, 36, represented her native Lithuania in cycling at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, intends the property to be used for his charitable enterprises and business meetings. He founded Caudwell Children 20 years ago to provide support for disabled children and their families and has since set up the charity Caudwell LymeCo to fund research into Lyme disease, which he and members of his family suffer from.
His main home is a £12 million, 50-room Jacobean manor house in Staffordshire, plus another property in Mayfair, one in Monaco and two ski chalets.
Britain’s Most Expensive Home: Building For A Billionaire is on Channel 4 on Wednesday at 9pm.