The £26m pleasuredomes… but can anyone really afford these vast mansions on St George’s Hill?
Tying up your fortune developing a couple of mansions priced together at just over £26 million takes a little nerve at a time when banks are wobbly, Greece is in flames and the Middle East’s hopeful spring could yet turn to chilly winter.
Potential clients for developer Chris Burdge’s pleasuredomes on St George’s Hill in Weybridge, Surrey, would have Vladimir Putin’s daughter Maria, entrepreneur Theo Paphitis and Indian actress Shilpa Shetty as neighbours.
Set in 964 acres with 450 houses, St George’s Hill was established as a private estate in 1911. By the Sixties the ‘popocracy’ had moved in, with The Beatles, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard living there.
Top drawer: The grander of the two mansions, Ravenridge, is priced at £14.75m
Burdge has just put the finishing touches to his fully furnished, turn-the-key-and-you’re- in houses: one a £14.75 million, 16,400 sq ft monster, Ravenridge, enjoying stunning views over the Surrey hills; the other, Burghley House, slightly more modest at £10.9 million and 12,400 sq ft.
‘I have taken greater risks in my business career,’ says Burdge, 55, a former accountant who retired eight years ago having pioneered laminate flooring in the early Nineties, at one point controlling 62 per cent of the market.
‘I have seen the most subjective decisions taken during my career – talking and drinking late in hotel bars where the greatest risks are that everyone will forget the deal you have agreed by the morning.’
Fearless: Developer Chris Burdge
Burdge, who went to a grammar school in Harrow, North London, with Michael Portillo and Clive Anderson, had no great fears spending £5 million in 2006 on the five-acre plot, occupied by a Fifties three-bedroom chalet. He successfully applied to build two houses on the site.
‘I had done a bit of this before, building houses at Praia d’El Rey in Portugal. I’ve also built four houses on the Wentworth estate.’ He consulted the doyen of local property – Tim Garbett of Knight Frank, whose career has been spent selling houses on St George’s Hill – for advice.
‘Both of the houses will probably sell to Russian, Kazakh or Middle Eastern buyers and my bet is that they will buy them fully furnished and only use them for a couple of months a year,’ says Garbett. The houses have indoor pools, saunas, gyms, pool-table-and-bar areas and sweeping show-off staircases. There is parking for six cars and servants’ quarters to the side.
‘We have tried to keep the affluence just on the right side of obscenity,’ says Burdge cheerfully. The houses’ architecture is an unthreatening kind of bloated Georgian with a columned portico over the entrance, balconies at the back and a fourth loft-storey looms above ornamental ballustrades.
This houses the vast main bedroom suites. ‘Everything is safe, conservative and suburban,’ says Garbett. ‘And the fixtures and fittings for this market must have the kind of standard you would expect to find at the Dorchester or Lanesborough hotels.’ With, one assumes, not a trace of laminate flooring to be found.
Knight Frank, 01372 464496