ROBBIE WILLIAMS , THE NEIGHBOUR FROM HELL
Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page shows us around his spectacular home and reveals the pop star’s mega basement isn’t the only threat the Gothic wonder faces
Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page had no interest in his neighbour Robbie Williams’s performance at the opening ceremony of the World Cup this week. As for his mooted new role on The X Factor, where the former boy-band member is expected to replace Louis Walsh on the judging panel, well, Page doesn’t even have a TV in his sitting room.
Besides, ‘one of the great brains of rock music’, as Queen guitarist Brian May called him, has far weightier matters on his mind.
‘I’m caught in a vice,’ says Page, as we sit in the Gothic splendour of the dining room of his Kensington home.
‘There’s that side,’ he nods to the nextdoor end of terrace house, which is owned by former Prudential chairman Sir Harvey McGrath, who is said to be worth £100 million. ‘And that side.’
Page has the look of someone who has trodden in something unpleasant as he points to Woodland House, the 47-room mansion next door which Robbie Williams bought for £17.5million in 2013 following the death of its previous owner, colourful film director Michael Winner. His frustration is understandable. Page, 74, has spent the best part of seven years defending Tower House, his Grade Ilisted property against a plethora of planning applications from neighbours for underground gyms, subterranean swimming pools and goodness knows what else that he fears will affect the fragile fabric of his truly historic home.
Most recently, he appeared before Kensington and Chelsea councillors personally to object to Williams’s long-held desire to build a mega-basement under the garden.
He argued vibrations caused from the digging could irreversibly damage the ‘richly decorated’ interior of Tower House that was conceived by the revered Victorian architect and designer William Burges, who also created Cardiff Castle’s Gothic interiors. ‘Richly decorated’ doesn’t come close to describing the artistic and architectural wonders within.
‘My name’s Jimmy Page, but that is not important,’ he began in his plea to Kensington councillors last month. But, of course, to the rest of us it is, particularly in light of the comments Williams was said to have made at a radio station two years ago in which he accused Page of being ‘mentally ill’, although he later apologised and withdrew the remark.
‘I haven’t seen Robbie Williams since he bought the house,’ says Page in his first ever interview on the subject. ‘He hasn’t even popped in a letter to say, “I’m your neighbour. How about a cup of tea?”
‘This “two rock gods at war” nonsense is to steer everyone away from the fact that if
‘Robbie just doesn’t seem to care this is a listed building’
you damage these interiors you can’t replace them,’ he adds.
‘And him,’ he continues, warming to his irritation at the man from the Pru. ‘He’s a particular nuisance. He was recently knighted. You’d think he’d have some concern about the heritage of this building.’
Which is why Page this week invited the mail into his breathtaking home.
Tower House is Page’s sanctuary. only those closest to him have crossed the threshold since he bought it from actor Richard Harris in 1972, shortly after the release of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, which featured Stairway To Heaven. He paid £350,000, outbidding David Bowie, for the house that was Burges’s home and showroom until he died here in 1881.
‘I came to view it in the evening. It was dark,’ he says. ‘I’d heard about the house and was so interested in Gothic revival and PreRaphaelites. When I walked in I thought, “oh my goodness gracious. This is unbelievable.” Then I started seeing all the details and thought, “This is absolutely magical.” It was like walking into an architectural Aladdin’s cave. It had such an effect on me when I came out of the house that I was heady from the experience.’
We visit on a glorious early summer’s day when sunlight pours through the stained glass windows. Page opens the door himself. There are no minders. No flashiness.
The interior is truly intoxicating. So much so you can only look around and wonder.
It is a place of fantasy, of classical allusion, of the finest attention to detail and beauty.
‘This isn’t a place for a party and it isn’t a place for a p**s up,’ says Page.
He is, don’t forget, a rock star with a wild reputation. ‘Judge for yourself. I’ve never had parties here. I’ve been very well-behaved, as you can see,’ he says.
We look up at the ceiling in the vast entrance hall, which is painted with stars.
‘It’s the position of the constellations at the time Burges took occupancy of the house. Isn’t it lovely?’ he says. ‘I discovered that more recently and thought, “oh boy, that’s a little nudge to keep staying with this whatever happens.”
‘The original stained glass windows used to depict dawn, midday, dusk and midnight. But they got broken so the four seasons were put in there as replacements, probably by Richard Harris.’
When Harris bought the house in 1969 after it had stood empty and suffered vandalism for several years, he described it as the biggest gift he had ever given himself and spent a small fortune employing the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company, to restore it to the splendour of Burges’s days.
We move to the spectacular dining room dominated by a circular table, commissioned by Harris, emblazoned with signs of the zodiac that reflect those painted on the ceiling.
‘The ceiling is enamel on iron — a Burges feature. Apparently there was a fire in here in the days of Richard Harris, who liked to have huge candelabras on the table. one got knocked over. The enamel on iron saved the house.’
He shudders. ‘Can you imagine losing this?’ He sweeps a hand around the room.
You can’t. This is not a house, it’s a work of three-dimensional art.
A tiled frieze of characters from english folklore lines the walls: Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, Robinson Crusoe. The same frieze can be seen in Cardiff Castle.
‘We had a detailed survey and some of the tiles have gaps behind them because the walls are uneven so they’re holding themselves up, which is fine, but if you start to get vibrations . . .’ He puts his head on one side. ‘The person from the council said we could put some padding over it if the permission went ahead, which is a bit cheeky, isn’t it?’
Cheeky? It is actually shocking, particularly given a report by three english Heritage civil and structural engineers who advised against the man from the Pru’s application to enlarge his basement in 2014 for fear of damage to ‘the high heritage value of the interior finishes to Tower House’.
A subsequent appeal was dismissed. The irony isn’t lost on Page that his recently knighted neighbour is a patron of the Royal Society of Arts.
‘When you have those structural engineer reports and the appeal is dismissed you think, “That’s it. You’re not going to be threatened again with all this stuff”, but it just keeps coming. english Heritage — or Historic england as it’s been renamed — doesn’t come to your support any more. They defer any opinion to the council.
‘Him,’ he nods towards Sir Harvey’s end-of-terrace house. ‘Got stopped by english Heritage. Now he’s been allowed to gut his house and install a lift because he has applied for a legal licence — which, because it’s internal works, doesn’t need planning permission. They might be fooling around with the foundations for the lift, but they won’t tell us what they’re doing.’
Page takes us into the library where Burges’s imagination ran riot in painted ceilings, friezes and a fireplace that resembles the Tower of Babel. The carved stone mantel is made up of letters of the alphabet. ‘With a dropped ‘H’ in honour of the Cockneys,’ explains Page as he points to the ‘h’ in the stone beneath the mantle. ‘He had a sense of fun.’
He rubs a finger over the ‘h’. ‘See that crack,’ he points to a hairline in the chimney-breast. ‘If that started to move . . .’
He leads us through to the drawing room where love is the central theme, with a ceiling painted with medieval cupids and walls covered with mythical lovers. Carved figures from the medieval French poem Le Roman De La Rose decorate the chimney piece.
Aptly, in Burges’s time it was a music Room.
Indeed Harris, who kept a collection of stringed instruments here, famously said at night he could hear them play by themselves.
‘michael Winner used to come here often,’ says Page. ‘He was always such a joy to see. He loved to talk . . .’
And for a moment Page is lost in a different time. ‘Forget fame and fortune, I just wanted to be part of the music revolution,’ he says. ‘Rock and roll just leapt out of the speakers of your parents’ radio and sort of seduced you. It pulled you in.’ much like this house? He nods.
‘You create pieces that reflect emotions. Sometimes it can be dark, but the classical musicians always had a connection with nature. I could see that as well.’
With which we find ourselves upstairs in the Butterfly Room, a celebration of the natural world where wild flower friezes decorate the walls and the painted butterflies in the stained windows dance in the sunlight.
‘Creating music is like panning for gold,’ Page says. ‘I play things I sort of know on the acoustic guitar over and over so it almost becomes a mantra.
‘Then you find you’re playing something you haven’t played before and you recognise that point when you’ve got it — that piece of gold. Then you take all the pieces of gold and string them together.’
on to Burges’s bedroom, where the theme is sea creatures, including a carved mermaid on the chimney-breast and a ceiling of mirrored gilt stars as if you’re viewing the night sky underwater.
‘The mermaid you see at the top,’ he says with a hand on the fireplace, ‘that’s a baby mermaid being born.
‘But you can see lots of cracks in her and the possible danger. vibration could really cause damage to this, then you’re putting the painted work in real peril. You can’t really patch it up, can you?’
There is no doubt that Page has a passion for this house.
It is a love affair that has outlasted a lengthy relationship with Patricia ecker, the mother of his son, James, and a marriage to Jimena, mother of his adopted daughter Jana, 24, daughter, Zofia, 21, and son Ashen, 19.
They divorced in 2008 and for the past three years he has shared his life with 27-year-old poet Scarlett Sabet, who has appeared in Tv shows Skins and Peep Show.
‘I don’t see myself as the owner of this house,’ he says. ‘I didn’t buy it to speculate or sell it on. I am just a custodian.’
Which is why he is prepared to go to court should the planning decision that has now been deferred, following his appearance before Kensington councillors, go ahead.
‘I will keep defending until people take notice. The council has a duty to protect listed buildings like this,’ he says as we climb the spiral tower staircase to the second floor where Richard Harris’s bed is in a guest room and a carved Jack and the Beanstalk decorates the fireplace in a nursery.
‘This is on the gable that overlooks Robbie’s garden,’ he says. ‘I’ve been told this is particularly vulnerable. It’s hard to say exactly what’s going to happen at which point, but they can’t guarantee there won’t be any damage.’
THE fact is not lost on Page that if he were to take a hammer and chisel to this fireplace it would be a criminal offence for which he could face up to two years in prison and an unlimited fine.
‘This house has always embraced me,’ he says. ‘It elevates your spirits. I’ve been so fortunate living here and I’ve felt like that pretty much every day. All this is such a nightmare and it shouldn’t really be going on.
‘Robbie is aware this is a Grade I-listed building, as is he,’ he nods towards the man from the Pru. ‘They just don’t seem to care.
‘This isn’t about one rock god fighting another rock god. I just see Robbie as a resident who, up to this point, hasn’t even lived here and is trying to maximise every square inch he’s got without even considering the heritage value of this house. How can you do that?’