Now that will take a bit of cleaning, Storm...
Keatings move in after tearing down country manor to build their dream eco-home on site
RONAN and Storm Keating have finally moved into their dream home – five years after they bought a country manor and spent £3.5m (€4.2m) tearing it down and rebuilding on the site, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The pop star and his wife are now living in the five-bed eco-friendly house in upmarket Rickmansworth, on the outskirts of London.
The couple, who are parents to son Cooper and daughter Coco Knox, snapped up beautiful Beechan House in April 2016 for a sale price of £1.9m (€2.2m), according to property records.
Now the house is one of the most expensive in the area. A similar sized home with a pool was sold in January for a listed value of £3,165,000. That September, Ronan and Storm applied for planning permission to demolish the existing structure and build their ideal family home.
The couple previously spoke about their design intentions, saying they wanted to bring the house ‘back to life’.
But in chasing their grand design, they had to change their plans, after discovering the structure of the building required more extensive work. The Boyzone singer and his Australian wife then made the decision to build their dream ecohome from scratch.
The couple didn’t cut any corners when it came to the build, hiring top quantity surveyor Seamus Cooley, whose impressive portfolio includes work in Kensington Palace, to help with the design.
But quality doesn’t come cheap; the renovation costs listed by the surveyors’ show it cost £1.6m to make their dream home a reality. The contemporary home, which has an outdoor pool and extensive floor-to-ceiling windows, resembles a Hollywood Hills-style celebrity pad. The exterior is a brilliant shade of white which, along with the glazing, may be difficult to maintain in pristine condition.
Storm recently found herself at the centre of an unseemly ruckus after a contract cleaner claimed the Keatings refused to pay a £500 (€600) bill.
Cleaner Jasmina Dimitrieva claimed she had been chasing a payment for an end of tenancy clean at the couple’s previous home. But Storm took to Instagram, where she hit out at the ‘disgraceful’ state the home was left in.