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 £3.6million. 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.