£1million ground farce
Couple hit with huge legal bill after they sued friend over free garden advice
A WeALThY couple face paying more than £1million in legal costs after losing a bitter legal battle with a friend over free advice she gave them about redesigning the garden of their £5million house.
The extraordinary row began seven years ago when recruitment tycoon Peter Burgess, 62, and his wife Lynn, 61, sued architect Basia Lejonvarn for £265,000 after claiming the landscaping project turned into a disaster.
They claimed that – far from lending a helpful hand – she had negligently projectmanaged and designed their garden. In 2016, it was ruled in the high Court that Miss Lejonvarn could be liable, but she took the case to the Court of Appeal.
It sent the case back to the high Court – which ruled in 2018 that Miss Lejonvarn, 56, was blameless. Now a judge has ordered that Mr and Mrs Burgess must pay the legal costs in the case, which a source close to the case said could be ‘anything between £1.5million and £2million overall’.
ruling on the costs, Lord Justice Coulson said Mr and Mrs Burgess should have dropped their claim in 2017 and added that their decision to continue was partly borne out of ‘an irrational desire’ to punish Miss Lejonvarn which was ‘unlinked to the merits of the claims’.
The judge also noted that Miss Lejonvarn had offered to settle the case for £25,000 in March 2015 so that ‘both sides were spared the acrimony, stress and expense of litigation’ – but the offer was refused by Mr and Mrs Burgess.
After the costs ruling, Miss Lejonvarn tweeted: ‘have stood up to bullies and have won!’
Mr and Mrs Burgess had decided that they wanted to replace the steep slope in their garden in highgate, North London, with terraces, paths, lawns and mood-lit flower beds but were not happy with a £150,000 quote from an established landscape gardener. Miss Lejonvarn offered to help and found Polish contractors to carry out the work for less.
But within months, Mr and Mrs Burgess, a graphic designer, were blaming Miss Lejonvarn for a litany of alleged defects. The job was finished by the gardener whose quote the couple had rejected. The Burgesses claimed that the transformation of their garden in 2013 cost them £265,000 more than it would have done had Miss Lejonvarn never been involved. she protested she had merely provided free advice in a ‘non-commercial, informal and social context’. The 2018 high Court decision dismissed all the couple’s claims, finding that their insistence that Miss Lejonvarn negligently project managed and designed the garden ‘lacked credibility and conviction’. In the ruling on costs, Lord Justice Coulson said: ‘Mr and Mrs Burgess must have known that after the Court of Appeal judgment their claims were speculative and weak. ‘From then on, they found themselves in an absurd position where they were incurring hundreds of thousands of pounds on costs, solely in order to try and recover some of those costs from Miss Lejonvarn. They should have called a halt.’ he ordered the couple to pay Miss Lejonvarn’s costs on an indemnity basis from May 2017, meaning her lawyers will not have to prove the costs are ‘reasonable’.