Rom-com king Curtis gave refugee a home in illegal ‘garage’
HE HAS, surely, everything a man could wish for — dozens of awards for box-office hits such as Four Weddings And A Funeral, eternal adoration for his smallscreen triumphs, Blackadder and Mr Bean, not to mention the undying love of his girlfriend Emma Freud, with whom he has four children.
But I can reveal that Richard Curtis is urgently seeking forgiveness from Kensington & Chelsea Council, after admitting that he and Freud flouted planning rules at their £20 million townhouse in Notting Hill, West London.
They have had to come clean because they are now trying to sell their home, as I disclosed last week.
The couple were granted permission to demolish an outbuilding in the garden in 2006, eight years after they snapped up the property for £3.6 million. In its place, they could erect a garage — to ‘be available at all times for car parking’, the council stipulated, ‘and not adapted for living, commercial or other purposes’.
That might seem clear- cut. But, according to documents submitted on their behalf by their planning agent, Curtis, 66, and Freud, 60, lost sight of the picture remarkably quickly.
‘ They intended to build it as described in the planning permissions,’ their agent now assures the council, ‘ but gradually the design changed during the build process.’
Indeed, it changed very substantially: far from ever being used as a garage, the new building was ‘reconfigured’ the year after its completion so that it boasted a double bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room opening onto a patio.
In the years that followed, it was used as ‘ ancillary residential accommodation’, sometimes as a ‘ home office’, or by nannies or a housekeeper.
Most recently of all, it was, for three years from 2018, home to a refugee, Yusuf Al Majarhi.
The couple decline to comment. But, in his submission to obtain a certificate of lawfulness, their agent argues that ‘ the outbuilding in its current form has been in situ for over four years and is therefore immune from enforcement’. How very convenient.