£5.95 million Uxbridge Street W8, 4,692 sq ft Would suit: someone sociable who wants New York-style loft living
This fourth-floor Notting Hill duplex flat in a converted commercial building is not for a bookish loner. Why own a 43ft light-filled drawing room with a gallery if you do not care for parties? If your social life has left you too tired to walk to the fourth floor, a lift will transport you directly into the apartment.
There is no need to share a bathroom with your significant other the morning after the night before: the master bedroom has two bathrooms, the girlie one being the largest. The other two bedrooms also each have their own bathroom. There are two parking spaces but you can easily walk to the Electric Brasserie on Portobello Road and the other amusements of Notting Hill.
£5.95 million Palace Court W2, 5,310 sq ft Would suit: security-conscious large family who like lateral living, but not of the open-plan variety
This penthouse in a very grand but still cosy Edwardian mansion block on a quiet corner five minutes’ walk from Hyde Park is two flats knocked into one. So there are five bedrooms, four reception rooms and five bathrooms, sufficient to guarantee privacy — especially as the price includes a staff flat in the basement. Smaller families who are afraid of getting lost in their own home can simply close off a section.
The flat was recently let to the supermodel, Claudia Schiffer, who doubtless made full use of its gym and, probably, its sauna. The kitchen has interesting views: for example, you can see Trellick Tower, the most famous work of the modernist architect Erno Goldfinger (an unlovely building that it’s now very smart to like).
Palace Court residents enjoy the services of a porter, a feature that provides the security that the wealthy increasingly crave. Feeling safe is, however, not the only reason why buyers are prepared to pay so much for flats: the rich prefer to take their exercise in other ways than running up and down stairs.
£6.95 million Earls Terrace, 4,702 sq ft Would suit: a family with small or teenage children who aspire to a career in rock
From the top of the No 27 bus going west down Kensington High Street, Earl’s Terrace appears to be an entirely intact relic of early 19th-century London. But behind the austere Georgian façades lie high-tech 21st-century four-storey residences: the security features range from the sophisticated to the simple (there are no letterboxes on the front doors, for example).
The four-bedroom house for sale in the terrace conforms to the super-rich person’s usual requirements for a London townhouse. There is a smart drawing room with views over the gardens of a square (Edwardes Square in this case, reached by a gate at the bottom of the terraced garden of the house); a master bedroom with its own bathroom and accommodation for staff.
But anyone growing tired of the brown and cream, Starbucks-palette decor that character-ises most expensive properties would be charmed by the patterned wallpaper in the dining room (refreshingly unsubtle). There’s also the basement, situated under the garden, so it is entirely sound-proofed — a rehearsal space for your offspring’s band.
£4.75 million De Vere Gardens, about 3,200 sq ft Would suit: a singleton, or a couple with a small child
A shabby street is something of a rarity in the zone between Kensington High Street and Knightsbridge. But De Vere Gardens can no longer resist the area’s ever-upwardly mobile trend. Candy & Candy, developers to the super-rich, are converting the former hotel premises on one side of the street into apartments. This means that the buyer of this duplex flat in a large Victorian house can look forward to surroundings as scrubbed up as this newly refurbished property. The three bedrooms on the ground floor are joined to the drawing room, dining room and kitchen on the upper floor by a glass and steel staircase. The property’s other hip elements include the antibacterial Corian surfaces in the kitchen and the colour of the paint — Labrador Sands 6, a Dulux blend that combines the best of white, buttermilk and grey.
When not admiring the perfectly nuanced walls of the flat, you can amuse yourself at the nearby Baglioni hotel or you can go for a run in Kensington Gardens.
£6.95 million Kensington Square (right), 5,127 sq ft Would suit: a family with grown-up children as three of the four bedrooms are on the lower-ground floor, which has its own front door
Turn left at the top of De Vere Gardens, turn right at Derry Street, a turning off Kensington High Street, and you come into Kensington Square, with its pleasantly varied but handsome homes. No 42, one of the most beautiful, was built between 1804 and 1805, according to the Survey of London, the bible for those who wish to ascend the capital’s housing ladder perfectly informed about the antecedents of every property.
From this work, you also learn that the back garden of this house was turned into a delivery yard by John Barker, a former owner, who was also proprietor of Barkers, the Kensington High Street department store which this year will reopen as a giant Whole Foods Market.
The nearby availability of organic food should be some compensation for the lack of a garden; the square gardens are also lovely. But it is unlikely that the owner would ever wish to go outside much. This house has been painstakingly restored by its American owner. High-lights include the wooden floors, the master bedroom’s his-and-hers bathrooms and the 32ft drawing room — which could be described as stylish, distinguished, well-proportioned or any other synonym of elegant listed by Marc Roget of Roget’s Thesaurus, who attended a school that once stood on the site of No 42.
