BULLDOZE YOUR PALACE
British couple win 14-year fight to get £48m chateau next door demolished after saying: We moved for tranquillity ... then neighbours put 132 speakers in their garden!
A BRITISH couple told of their delight yesterday after their French neighbour was ordered to demolish his £48million fake chateau.
Stephen Butt, 68, and his wife Caroline have fought for 14 years after parties at the huge and illegally constructed building shattered the peace of their own home on the French Riviera.
A court has now ordered its owner, French tycoon Patrick Diter, to demolish the lavish mansion, which has been used for high society weddings and appeared in films and an episode of The X Factor.
Because it was built without planning permission everything that has been added to the site since 2005 must go, including more than 32,000 sq ft of buildings, a heliport, a swimming pool and an approach road through a protected wood. An appeal court in Aix-en-Provence ruled that only a small original house, at just over 2,000 sq ft, can stay. Mr Diter was also fined more than £350,000 and if ‘Chateau Diter’ is not knocked down by the deadline 18 months from now he will face further fines of up to £500 a day.
Neighbour Mr Butt is a millionaire fund manager and he and his wife also have a £10million townhouse in Kensington. They bought their idyllic French home – which nestles amid green hills, olive groves and vineyards – from Mr Diter in 2001.
The Frenchman then spent a decade turning the farmhouse and outbuildings on the land he kept into an Italian-style palazzo which sits just below the Butts’ home near the town of Grasse, the perfume capital of France. Yesterday Mrs Butt, 63, who has dual FrenchBritish nationality and runs her own company in France, said wild parties had been staged in Mr Diter’s garden, with loud music blasting out from 132 speakers installed all around the grounds. She said: ‘One of the reasons we bought our home was because of the peace and tranquillity. We have spent years reshaping a rustic place with passion.
‘Sometimes we cannot sit out on the terrace as all you hear is loud music. You can’t sleep and he has had parties that go on until 5am. It means you cannot enjoy your own home. Yes, we could have moved to somewhere else as we have the money to do so, but this is our home.
‘We use it, our children use it and we have friends always visiting. It is our legacy and we do not want to give it up.’
The Butts launched their legal action along with other neighbours and won an initial victory in 2017 when judges first ordered demolition. Mr Diter, whose appeal has now been rejected, has previously mocked Mr Butt, claiming: ‘The truth is that I built something better than him... it’s a question of yours is bigger than mine.’
Mrs Butt said yesterday the issue was ‘protecting the environment and respecting the law’, ‘not who has the biggest house’.
Prosecutor Pierre- Jean Gaury described Diter’s palace as a ‘pharaonic project, delusional, totally illegal and built illegally’.
An owner whose ‘only concern is money’ had broken safety and environmental rules as well as planning regulations, he said. Mr Diter, who has rented out the chateau at up to £40,000 per day for filming and to stage extravagant weddings, is believed to have already launched moves to appeal to a higher court in France.
Mrs Butt said: ‘It has been a long battle and it is not over yet. It is not just our peace... but also all the other neighbours. We have nothing against the man but just how he does it.’
The chateau appeared on The X Factor in 2017 when Simon Cowell and Cheryl Cole flew to the South of France to film scenes with contestants.
Mr Butt is said to be one of the UK’s richest fund managers and in 2017 he reportedly received £ 34million in dividends from Silchester International Investors, the asset management company he founded in 1994.
‘He has had parties that go on until 5am’