£8.5m doer-upper: wreck of Diana stepmother’s apartment in Mayfair
A RARE “doer-upper” apartment on Grosvenor Square that is a former home of Diana, Princess of Wales’s stepmother Raine Spencer has come on the market for £8.5 million.
The gutted shell of the fifth-floor residence at 47 Grosvenor Square where Countess Spencer once lived with her first husband Gerald Legge, the future 9th Earl of Dartmouth, needs total refurbishment.
Countess Spencer — the daughter of romantic fiction writer Dame Barbara Cartland — lived and worked in the two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Mayfair garden square in the Forties and Fifties after the couple had married in 1948. They also had use of a townhouse on nearby Chester Square. Both had interiors overseen by celebrity designer David Hicks.
Agents said it was unusual for homes to come on the market on Grosvenor
Square in such a stripped-down “blank canvas” state. Peter Wetherell, founder and executive chairman of agents Wetherell, which is handling the sale, said: “This is a unique opportunity to buy a blank canvas shell unit and modernise the property.
“Once refurbished, the apartment would serve as an excellent long-term investment and London residence.”
Wetherell has commissioned design studio Casa e Progetti to create CGI images for buyers to help them envisage how the interiors could look. They have estimated this would cost around £1.5 million. Raine Spencer lived in Mayfair virtually her whole life having been brought up at Dame Barbara’s Grade II listed mansion at 28 South Street, which is also currently for sale for £35 million.
Raine wed three titled aristocrats. After her divorce in 1976 she married her second husband John Spencer, the 8th Earl Spencer, father of the King’s first wife Diana with whom she had a turbulent relationship and was known to her stepchildren as “Acid Raine”.