Wexner’s mansion in England also stately
Leslie H. Wexner’s New Albany home has often been likened to an English country estate, but it turns out that the L Brands founder is one of the few people who can speak authoritatively about such a comparison.
That’s because Wexner also owns “a glorious ... stately home on the edge of the Cotswolds” that is “one of the grandest in England,” according to a recent story in London’s Sunday Telegraph.
“While pheasant shooting may be a very British pastime, few people will have realized that the host at the mansion is the billionaire American tycoon behind the Victoria’s Secret lingerie empire,” the Sunday Telegraph story said.
According to the report: “Mr. Wexner runs his business empire from a nondescript office building in Columbus, Ohio, but once a year, in time for the shooting season, Mr. Wexner
and his entourage travel to the Cotswolds and decamp to Foxcote House, built in 1740, which sits atop a hill close to the honeyed stone village of Ilmington.”
Wexner built his $47 million New Albany estate in 1990, but he paid a little less for the one across the pond — at least initially.
He bought the English estate in 1997 for about $4.5 million from Christopher Boot Holman, an heir to a British pharmacy chain, according to the report. Wexner has spent far more than the purchase price transforming the home into a $30 million shooting estate.
“They have spent a fortune on new windows, and they have done lots of marvelous things,” Holman’s daughter, Sarah Holman, said in the story. She still lives on the estate in a farmhouse.
The house has 11 bedrooms and five bathrooms, and it “bristles with security cameras,” the Telegraph said. The back of the house is shielded from a public bridle path by “a huge hedge.”
“They have turned it into a glorified shooting lodge,” Holman said. “It is not what I would have called fabulous inside. Very few people go into the house. They have shooting lunches, but not in the house itself. They use the old converted Catholic chapel, which is attached to the house.”
The Wexners “fly people in from America to do the shooting,” Holman said. “They fly in by private jet and then a huge helicopter. They are extremely nice but very, very private.
“I see Leslie occasionally when they are shooting, but he’s very shy. He’s certainly not the showing-off type of American. (His wife) Abigail is delightful, very nice indeed. He spends a lot of time with the children here.
“They are a perfectly normal, self-made family. They are very super people to own it.”
Wexner, who was also in the headlines recently in Britain after filing suit against an English auction house that sold him a stolen Ferrari, declined to comment.