newyorker | Witanhurst, London’s
largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre
plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city
center. First owned by Arthur Crosfield, an English soap magnate, the
mansion was designed in the Queen Anne style and contained twenty-five
bedrooms, a seventy-foot-long ballroom, and a glass rotunda; the views
from its gardens, over Hampstead Heath and across the capital, were
among the loveliest in London. For decades, parties at Witanhurst
attracted potentates and royals—including, in 1951, Elizabeth, the
future Queen.
In May, 2008, I
toured Witanhurst with a real-estate agent. There had been no parties
there for half a century, and the house had not been occupied regularly
since the seventies. The interiors were ravaged: water had leaked
through holes in the roof, and, upstairs, the brittle floorboards
cracked under our footsteps. The scale of the building lent it a
vestigial grandeur, but it felt desolate and Ozymandian. A few weeks
later, Witanhurst was sold for fifty million pounds, to a shell company
named Safran Holdings Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands.
No further information about the buyers was forthcoming.
In
June, 2010, the local council approved plans to redevelop the house and
five and a half acres of grounds, maintaining Witanhurst as a “family
home.” It was the culmination of a long battle with other Highgate
residents, who did not welcome such an ambitious project. Since then,
Witanhurst’s old service wing has been demolished and replaced with the
so-called Orangery—a three-story Georgian villa designed for “everyday
family accommodation.” And beneath the forecourt, in front of the main
house, the new owners have built what amounts to an underground
village—a basement of more than forty thousand square feet. This
basement, which is connected to the Orangery, includes a
seventy-foot-long swimming pool, a cinema with a mezzanine, massage
rooms, a sauna, a gym, staff quarters, and parking spaces for
twenty-five cars. In late 2013, the local council approved plans for a
second basement, beneath the gatehouse, which will connect that building
to both the main house and the Orangery. Earlier this year, the owners
also sought planning permission to extend an underground “servants’
passage.”
When the refurbishment is
complete, Witanhurst will have about ninety thousand square feet of
interior space, making it the second-largest mansion in the city, after
Buckingham Palace. It will likely become the most expensive house in
London. In 2006, the Qatari royal family bought Dudley House, on Park
Lane, for about forty million pounds; after a renovation, its estimated
resale value is two hundred and fifty million pounds. Real-estate agents
expect that the completed Witanhurst will be worth three hundred
million pounds—about four hundred and fifty million dollars.
If
a vast and lavishly appointed house in Manhattan—a palace nearly double
the size of the White House—were being redeveloped on the edge of
Central Park, New Yorkers would want to know who lived there. Londoners
are equally inquisitive, and concerted efforts have been made to uncover
the identity of Witanhurst’s owners. Shortly after the house was sold,
it became known—from local gossip and publicly accessible planning
documents—that Witanhurst belonged to a family from Russia. Several
newspapers speculated that the owner was Yelena Baturina, Russia’s
richest woman, and the wife of Yury Luzhkov, then the mayor of Moscow.
(Luzhkov and Baturina reportedly enriched themselves while he was in
office, before Luzhkov clashed with the Russian government; she now
lives in London.) Baturina denied owning Witanhurst, and in 2011 she
sued the London Sunday Times for publishing an article titled “BUNKER BILLIONAIRESS DIGS DEEP.”
The
Baturina lawsuit and the continued secrecy surrounding Witanhurst have
intensified the guessing game. Generally, the names of homeowners in
Britain are listed in the Land Registry, which can be read for a small
fee. But listings for properties owned by offshore companies do not
disclose individual beneficiaries. In the British Virgin Islands,
records reveal merely the name of the “registered agent” of Safran
Holdings—Equity Trust Limited, a local agency that holds several such
positions and is connected to the company by name only—and the company’s
post-office box, on the island of Tortola.
A recent investigation by the Financial Times
found that more than a hundred billion pounds’ worth of real estate in
England and Wales is owned by offshore companies. London properties
account for two-thirds of that amount. Charles Moore, a former editor of
the Telegraph, says that London’s property market has become “a form of legalized international money laundering.”
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