At £42million, a home for the wretched rich
These days it is very hard to tell from their fancy jobtitles what people actually do for a living. everything is buried under a mush of verbiage: ‘brand’, ‘vision’, ‘passion’, ‘artisan’, ‘ambassador’, ‘innovation’, ‘global’, ‘co-ordinator’, and so on.
Princess Beatrice’s husband, edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, describes himself as the ‘Founder and Creative e Director’ of a company called Banda, which is apparently ‘a multidisciplinary, design-led d property practice’, - whatever r that may be.
Banda’s website is packed full of bespoke nonsense, eg: ‘Combining contemporaneity with timeless elegance, Banda interiors might seem like the finishing touch, when really they are just the beginning.’ What on earth does this mean?
Mr Mapelli Mozzi is currently showing clients around a sixfloor, 10,000 sq ft house in Belgravia. situated on a particularly grim-looking new square, it has an asking price of £42million.
As far as I can make out, he has been in charge of furnishing and decorating it on behalf of a Qatari real estate business which, like all companies these days, has a ‘vision’. Its vision is not just to make as much money as possible, but to deliver ‘quality lifestyles and innovation in real estate development globally’.
‘I say to my friends, if you’re going to live somewhere full time in London, it’s Chelsea, Belgravia, Notting hill or holland Park,’ Mr Mapelli Mozzi told a property journalist last week. Yet these are precisely the areas of London that have been rendered increasingly soulless by the international rich who have chosen to colonise them.
A century ago, the witty writer Logan Pearsall smith observed: ‘It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.’
What can house-buyers expect for their £42million?
‘here, life is about contentment in everyday rituals as much as the dazzling novelty of different experiences,’ promises the blurb. This means nothing at all. It could just as easily apply to a haystack or a wheelbarrow, both of which would be considerably cheaper.
The blurb says the house is ‘not just a place to be, but a place to stay, to cherish, to belong to’. Come again?
Does a purchaser need reassuring that, for £42million, they can expect not just a house but ‘ a place to stay’? It would be very depressing to spend £42million on a house only to be told you couldn’t stay in it.
Mr Mapelli MozMozzi says he pictures tpictures a ‘happy family life wwithin its interiors’,r though to my mind it looks much better suited to an unhappy fafamily. It would aappeal to the tytype of businessman nbusinessman who hahas no sense of hohow to create a hohome, and farms ouout the selection of all those ththings that give wawarmth and personality sonpersonality – tables, pictures,pic sofas, llamps, carpets,t mirrors, atmosphere etc – to a professional.
Banda has decorated the property with suitably hideous objects, such as a 650lb marbleframed looking-glass in a ‘rocklike shape’ that has been ‘handcarved from Breche Violette marble’ by the ‘Parisian studio Pierre Augustin’.
It looks like something you’d find just above a single- bar heater in a Blackpool B&B circa 1952, though we are told it ‘hangs above a classic chimney in the same stone’, thanks to ‘a reinforced hanging system’.
Another ‘ highlight of the house’ is the ‘Galet dining table by emma Donnersberg, with its handmade oak top and picturesquely pitted lava-stone legs’. It looks like something from the Flintstones.
Oddly enough, Mr Mapelli Mozzi says that most buyers will also purchase the contents and decor, perhaps because they are too busy making money to develop a taste of their own. ‘The majority of the time we do houses or apartments, people buy everything, because they are buying into what we do.’
The great G.K. Chesterton once observed that: ‘To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.’
The monument to such folly is now available in Belgravia, with a price tag of £42million.