Has Evans missed out on £20m homes haul?
HIS ravenous appetite for fame and riches prompted the first of his two ex-wives to conclude that he is ‘ never satisfied’ and believes that ‘ happiness lies just around the corner’.
But has motormouth broadcaster Chris Evans finally decided, at the age of 56, that he’s made enough to be getting on with?
I ask only because he has seemingly missed out on a multi- million- pound bonanza stemming from the demolition of one of his mansions — Beechgrove, in Sunninghill, Berkshire, standing in nine acres of Green Belt land less than a mile from Ascot’s worldrenowned racecourse — and its replacement by a lavish new building boasting 14 luxurious flats, two of them sumptuous penthouses.
Evans, who made £ 75 million while still in his mid-30s by selling his Ginger Media Group, appeared to have displayed his customary acumen when, in 2010, having bought another mansion in Sunninghill for £3.5million, he retained ownership of eight-bedroom Beechgrove.
He held onto it until 2019, finally selling it for £4.9 million to Millgate Homes. A property specialist tells me it would have been entirely understandable if Evans had inserted a clawback clause in the sale. ‘ He could have said: “You will pay me this amount when you get consent for development,”’ explains the specialist. But Evans’s agent tells me the broadcaster, who by then was living six miles north-east of Ascot with his third wife, Natasha Shishmanian, didn’t have a finger in the developer’s financial pie. ‘The firm that bought the house when he sold it were the ones who obtained the planning and built the development. Chris has never had anything to do with the planning, development and building on the land at Beechgrove.’ Millgate, which is selling the flats from about £1.2million each, is to be applauded for showing the kind of nerve that has typified Evans’s own extraordinary career. Back in 2018, the firm submitted plans to demolish Beechgrove and replace it with a building containing 12 flats, plus three separate detached houses ‘with triple garages’.
These were rejected amid howls from irate locals. Beechgrove was, of course, still owned by Evans at the time.