At £160m, it’s Britain’s most expensive home (and, you guessed, it’s gone to a foreign buyer)
WITH views over the park and in easy reach of the shops, it ticks off two must-haves on the typical homebuyer’s wish-list.
But when the park is Hyde Park and the local store is Harrods, you know this is no ordinary property.
This two-storey penthouse at One Hyde Park has become Britain’s most expensive home, going to a secretive offshore buyer for £160million.
In keeping with the Knightsbridge development’s reputation as a ‘luxury ghetto’ for the world’s super-rich, no estate agent brochure was made public and it is impossible to tell who the new owner is. The May purchase, recently filed at the Land Registry, lists the buyers as PHB London Holdings Ltd and PHB London Dormant Ltd. Both are registered in Guernsey, meaning their owners do not need to be named.
However, experts say they are highly likely to be from abroad.
Apartment B.10.01 occupies around 16,000 sq ft over the top two floors of Block B of the complex, built by developer brothers Christian and Nick Candy with funding from former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani.
It has two balconies overlooking Hyde Park, two wine cellars, two parking spaces and security features including bulletproof windows and SAS-trained guards.
Facilities in the complex include a chlorine-free swimming pool, spas, squash courts and – when it re-opens after June’s fire – 24-hour room service from the neighbouring Mandarin Oriental’s Heston Blumenthal restaurant.
The apartment’s sale price – which does not include stamp duty of up to £23.9million – beats the previous record of £140million paid by exiled Russian billionaire Andrey Borodin for the Park Place stately home near Henley-on-Thames in 2011.