“London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan,”
House of Secrets:Who owns London’s most expensive mansion?
BY ED CAESAR
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. 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. (The largest residential property in Manhattan is said to be a fifty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion, on East Seventy-first Street between Madison and Fifth, owned by Jeffrey Epstein.) 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 “servant 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 to four hundred and fifty million dollars pounds.
Witanhurst has always been an attractive place to park new money. In 1814, Joseph Crosfield, a twenty-one-year-old chemist, started a soap-and-candles business in Warrington, in the industrial northwest of England. The company was passed down to his son, George, and then to his grandson Arthur. By then, the company—now named Crosfield & Sons—was worth a fortune.Arthur was no mere businessman: he was the 1905 amateur golf champion of France and a musician who composed many pieces for piano. In 1906, he won the parliamentary seat of Warrington, becoming a Liberal M.P. for four years. He eventually married Domini Elliadi, a fine tennis player who was the daughter of a Greek merchant. (She competed at Wimbledon and once won the Swiss ladies’ title.) In 1911, Arthur sold the family business. With the proceeds, he bought Parkfield, an elegant eighteenth-century house in Highgate.
Highgate had only recently been subsumed by London’s late-Victorian sprawl. Before then, the village of Highgate had abutted the Bishop of London’s hunting grounds to the north and Hampstead Heath to the southwest, and was situated on the main road from London to the North of England. (The notorious highwayman Dick Turpin hid out in a pub, The Flask, which faces Witanhurst.) Because of its elevation and its handsome views, Highgate became a favored place for rich families from London to build summer retreats.The Crosfields knocked down much of Parkfield and started afresh with a new house and a new name, Witanhurst, which, in Old English, means “Parliament on the Hill.” Arthur commissioned the Scottish architect George Hubbard to design a gigantic new building, and the landscape architect Harold Peto to create a raked Italianate garden. Witanhurst’s décor was formal—walnut wall panels, cornices embellished with gold leaf—but it had some arriviste quirks. In the music room, three ornate crystal chandeliers were reflected in ceiling-height mirrors, giving the effect of endless dazzling light. The house also had three hundred and sixty-five windows—one for each day of the year. Nearly sixty years after the site was sold to the Crosfields, Lady Phyllis Greig, who had grown up at Parkfield, told an interviewer that she was horrified by Witanhurst. “We tried to keep things in scale,” she said. “Not like the present monster.”
In 1985, Witanhurst was sold by its latest owners—Noble Investments, a shell company said to be connected to the al-Hasawi family, of Kuwait—to Mounir Developments, a company registered in Panama. The beneficiary of Mounir Developments was later revealed in court to be a branch of the Assads, Syria’s ruling family, that had gone into exile. The Assads eventually tired of the burdensome estate, and in 2005 they put it up for sale. In court, Somar al-Assad—a cousin of Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria—revealed that he hadn’t spent the night there in eight years.
In 2007, a developer named Marcus Cooper bought the house from the Assads, for thirty-two million pounds. At the time, Witanhurst was so dilapidated that it was the subject of several official complaints from the local council—a significant deterrent to an international buyer. Cooper repaired the house sufficiently to address the complaints and put it back on the market, for seventy-five million pounds. He then hired Glentree Estates and another agency, Knight Frank, to find a buyer for Witanhurst who was wealthy enough to restore the house. In London during the late aughts, two kinds of buyers generally fit that description: billionaires from Russia or from the Middle East. Glentree produced a hardback brochure filled with panoramic photographs and hyperbolic text. Its pitch began with three words: “Dacha. Chateau. Palazzo.”
On June 5, 2008, Grant Alexson, an agent at Knight Frank, made an appointment to visit Witanhurst with Yelena Baturina. (This presumably gave rise to the rumors naming her as the owner.) Baturina arrived at the property with an Englishman who did not reveal his name or occupation to Alexson. Baturina seemed to like the house, but after the tour she communicated through her representative that she would not be making an offer. Four days later, Alexson heard that the house had been sold to Safran Holdings, for fifty million pounds. He had no idea who the buyer was, and Glentree Estates had not shown anyone the house. Clearly, some private deal had been made. Alexson’s agency received a commission, but the secrecy of the deal puzzled him. “It was a very funny business,” he says. Later, Alexson discovered that his colleague Stephen Lindsay had made the sale without his knowledge. Lindsay now works at a rival agency. He told me, “They came to me through their lawyer. They wanted it to be kept private and confidential. We did the deal, we kept it quiet—end of story.”
Soon after the purchase, Safran Holdings submitted expansion plans to the local council. The plans were initially rejected, and Safran Holdings hired a prominent barrister, Sir Keith Lindblom, to lead an appeal at a public hearing. Lindblom amassed expert witnesses to make the case for a major redevelopment of Witanhurst. An architect insisted that the proposed design would not clash with neighboring properties; a hydrologist allayed fears that basement additions might displace the water table. At the appeal, a planning expert, Caroline Dawson, attempted to alleviate concerns about offshore ownership: “While the applications were made in the name of Safran Holdings, this company represents the Russian family which owns Witanhurst. The company was formed to pursue the restoration of Witanhurst and its reuse by the family.” She also suggested that Witanhurst, “whilst impressive, is not suited to the needs of current everyday living for the only families likely to be its market.” Safran Holdings won its case, and renovations began.In 2011, Michael Hammerson, a local councillor, complained to the Daily Mail about the changes at Witanhurst, noting, “We don’t want limos with smoked windows and men in dark glasses with bulging breast pockets, and the place surrounded by CCTV. That’s not Highgate.”
In fact, Russian plutocrats own many homes in the area. Alisher Usmanov, Russia’s third-richest man, who founded the mining company Metalloinvest, owns Beechwood, a white stucco Regency villa. On the Bishop’s Avenue, a “billionaires’ row” between Hampstead and Highgate, several large houses are owned by Russians. Andrey Yakunin, the son of Vladimir Yakunin—the boss of Russian Railways, and one of Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends—lives nearby, in a mansion worth four and a half million pounds. Andrey Yakunin’s son, Igor, attended Highgate School, a prestigious private school. In recent decades, huge amounts of foreign money have poured into London’s most expensive neighborhoods. Henry Pryor, a British real-estate agent who represents many foreign clients, told me that, although Paris and New York have experienced a similar phenomenon, the trend was particularly pronounced in London. Many foreign billionaires, he said, like the fact that London is an English-speaking capital midway between Asia and New York. In recent years, more than seventy per cent of newly built properties in central London have been bought by foreign investors—often for cash. Billionaires, Pryor said, acquire “London property in the same way that they acquire expensive watches or high-powered motorcars.”Many Londoners wonder whether the influx of rich buyers has provided any benefit to less affluent residents. Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, has studied the effect of foreign money on the city’s property market, and likens it to a three-bowl fountain of the type often found in London parks. A jet of water fills the topmost and smallest bowl; overflow spills into the middle bowl and, eventually, into the bottom, largest bowl. In Hamnett’s analysis, the constant pump of water is money flowing into the most expensive parts of London. Residents who might have hoped to live in Kensington are priced out, and thus look farther from the center—say, in Islington. Prices then rise in Islington, and people who might have bought property there must look yet farther out. According to the mortgage lender Halifax, house prices in two boroughs of London increased by more than twenty-four per cent last year. “People are being sequentially displaced,” Hamnett said.There has been some windfall from the foreign-property boom. New laws have increased taxes on high-value houses: if Witanhurst is sold for three hundred million pounds, the buyer will owe about thirty-six million in taxes. And owners of houses that are registered offshore and worth more than twenty million pounds must pay an annual charge of two hundred and eighteen thousand pounds.
London also benefits from the employment of carpenters, interior decorators, and landscape gardeners. The renovation of Witanhurst alone has provided many dozens of people with work. At the end of 2014—a particularly frenzied phase of the renovation—a builder at the site speculated to me that the project was then costing approximately two million pounds a week. Whatever the precise total, the refurbishment project has surely outstripped the initial estimate of thirty-five million pounds. “It is many tens of millions,” one contractor said. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is ambivalent about the rise in foreign-owned property. In a recent radio interview, he said, “The success of London is having the weird effect of making it very hard for Londoners to afford to live there. . . . In assets, there is no question that there is a steady impoverishment of the bourgeoisie, and we need to address it.” However, he did not want to scare off the private jets. “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan,” Johnson said. “We’re proud of that.”
Next door to Witanhurst is The Grove, a row of gorgeous brick houses from the late seventeenth century. The street has always attracted famous residents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent his final years in a rented room in No. 3; Kate Moss and her husband, Jamie Hince, now own the entire house. Yehudi Menuhin sold No. 2 to Sting and Trudie Styler. George Michael owns No. 5.
For half a century, Sir Patrick Sergeant and his wife, Gillian, have lived in No. 1, and on a warm fall day last year I visited them. Lady Sergeant is a small, spry woman of eighty-eight. Sir Patrick, who is ninety-one, is a former financial journalist and publisher. The magazine Private Eye once described him as looking like “an ageing matinée idol.” When we met, he apologized that his movement was a little stiff; he had played tennis the previous day. The Sergeants took me into their garden, which borders Witanhurst. Lady Sergeant peered over the fence on tiptoe. Dozens of workers in neon jackets were filing in and out of the mansion. Trucks filled with detritus from the renovation rattled toward the gatehouse and onto the main road. Pneumatic drills clattered.In 1961, when the Sergeants moved in, Lady Crosfield was still living at Witanhurst. Sir Patrick remembers her as “a delightful old girl—mad about owls and tennis.” She sometimes let the Sergeants play on her courts. After Lady Crosfield died, in 1963, Witanhurst was largely dormant—until, as Sir Patrick put it, “these bloody Russians bought it.”
Sir Patrick used to have an unblighted view across the Heath—essentially, the same view that Coleridge had seen from his second-floor window two centuries earlier. Now the gray-green roof of Witanhurst’s Orangery appears like a hillock at the bottom of the Sergeants’ garden. The new building is imposing but not garish: with double-height round arch windows and a shallow roof, it resembles a departmental college library. Nevertheless, the Sergeants consider its location obnoxious and, in 2013, they planted a hedge to block it out.There was still a spot from where you could see past the Orangery and imagine the old panorama. The day I visited, the leaves of the oak trees on the Heath were turning, and the dense canopy of treetops shone green, russet, and yellow. Sir Patrick, holding my hand to keep his balance, said, “It used to be a beautiful view.” The Sergeants believe that the proceedings next door have knocked about a million pounds off the value of their house. They may be right. Kate Moss and Jamie Hince’s house, which is similar to No. 1, was bought in 2011 for more than seven million pounds.
Sir Patrick told me that the current rumor in Highgate was that the house belonged to Vladimir Putin, although he was skeptical. I asked Lady Sergeant whether she had ever been given any clues about the identity of her neighbors. “Never!” she said, over the hammering of the construction crews. Then, in as rueful a tone as the noise allowed, she added, “Why have we had to put up with this for five years?” At that point, the Sergeants decided not to ruin a fine day. They went inside and poured three glasses of champagne. It was 11:30 A.M.
In June, 2014, I met with Robert Adam, an architect who has designed many large houses. He won the commission to rebuild Witanhurst in 2008, having been interviewed by an agent of the owners. He told me that local opposition to the development was overblown. Property owners had a right to build whatever they pleased, as long as it did not harm anyone else. “Houses are a major expression of people’s status and ambition and dreams,” he added.
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 to four hundred and fifty million dollars pounds.
Witanhurst has always been an attractive place to park new money. In 1814, Joseph Crosfield, a twenty-one-year-old chemist, started a soap-and-candles business in Warrington, in the industrial northwest of England. The company was passed down to his son, George, and then to his grandson Arthur. By then, the company—now named Crosfield & Sons—was worth a fortune.Arthur was no mere businessman: he was the 1905 amateur golf champion of France and a musician who composed many pieces for piano. In 1906, he won the parliamentary seat of Warrington, becoming a Liberal M.P. for four years. He eventually married Domini Elliadi, a fine tennis player who was the daughter of a Greek merchant. (She competed at Wimbledon and once won the Swiss ladies’ title.) In 1911, Arthur sold the family business. With the proceeds, he bought Parkfield, an elegant eighteenth-century house in Highgate.
Highgate had only recently been subsumed by London’s late-Victorian sprawl. Before then, the village of Highgate had abutted the Bishop of London’s hunting grounds to the north and Hampstead Heath to the southwest, and was situated on the main road from London to the North of England. (The notorious highwayman Dick Turpin hid out in a pub, The Flask, which faces Witanhurst.) Because of its elevation and its handsome views, Highgate became a favored place for rich families from London to build summer retreats.The Crosfields knocked down much of Parkfield and started afresh with a new house and a new name, Witanhurst, which, in Old English, means “Parliament on the Hill.” Arthur commissioned the Scottish architect George Hubbard to design a gigantic new building, and the landscape architect Harold Peto to create a raked Italianate garden. Witanhurst’s décor was formal—walnut wall panels, cornices embellished with gold leaf—but it had some arriviste quirks. In the music room, three ornate crystal chandeliers were reflected in ceiling-height mirrors, giving the effect of endless dazzling light. The house also had three hundred and sixty-five windows—one for each day of the year. Nearly sixty years after the site was sold to the Crosfields, Lady Phyllis Greig, who had grown up at Parkfield, told an interviewer that she was horrified by Witanhurst. “We tried to keep things in scale,” she said. “Not like the present monster.”
In 1985, Witanhurst was sold by its latest owners—Noble Investments, a shell company said to be connected to the al-Hasawi family, of Kuwait—to Mounir Developments, a company registered in Panama. The beneficiary of Mounir Developments was later revealed in court to be a branch of the Assads, Syria’s ruling family, that had gone into exile. The Assads eventually tired of the burdensome estate, and in 2005 they put it up for sale. In court, Somar al-Assad—a cousin of Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria—revealed that he hadn’t spent the night there in eight years.
In 2007, a developer named Marcus Cooper bought the house from the Assads, for thirty-two million pounds. At the time, Witanhurst was so dilapidated that it was the subject of several official complaints from the local council—a significant deterrent to an international buyer. Cooper repaired the house sufficiently to address the complaints and put it back on the market, for seventy-five million pounds. He then hired Glentree Estates and another agency, Knight Frank, to find a buyer for Witanhurst who was wealthy enough to restore the house. In London during the late aughts, two kinds of buyers generally fit that description: billionaires from Russia or from the Middle East. Glentree produced a hardback brochure filled with panoramic photographs and hyperbolic text. Its pitch began with three words: “Dacha. Chateau. Palazzo.”
On June 5, 2008, Grant Alexson, an agent at Knight Frank, made an appointment to visit Witanhurst with Yelena Baturina. (This presumably gave rise to the rumors naming her as the owner.) Baturina arrived at the property with an Englishman who did not reveal his name or occupation to Alexson. Baturina seemed to like the house, but after the tour she communicated through her representative that she would not be making an offer. Four days later, Alexson heard that the house had been sold to Safran Holdings, for fifty million pounds. He had no idea who the buyer was, and Glentree Estates had not shown anyone the house. Clearly, some private deal had been made. Alexson’s agency received a commission, but the secrecy of the deal puzzled him. “It was a very funny business,” he says. Later, Alexson discovered that his colleague Stephen Lindsay had made the sale without his knowledge. Lindsay now works at a rival agency. He told me, “They came to me through their lawyer. They wanted it to be kept private and confidential. We did the deal, we kept it quiet—end of story.”
Soon after the purchase, Safran Holdings submitted expansion plans to the local council. The plans were initially rejected, and Safran Holdings hired a prominent barrister, Sir Keith Lindblom, to lead an appeal at a public hearing. Lindblom amassed expert witnesses to make the case for a major redevelopment of Witanhurst. An architect insisted that the proposed design would not clash with neighboring properties; a hydrologist allayed fears that basement additions might displace the water table. At the appeal, a planning expert, Caroline Dawson, attempted to alleviate concerns about offshore ownership: “While the applications were made in the name of Safran Holdings, this company represents the Russian family which owns Witanhurst. The company was formed to pursue the restoration of Witanhurst and its reuse by the family.” She also suggested that Witanhurst, “whilst impressive, is not suited to the needs of current everyday living for the only families likely to be its market.” Safran Holdings won its case, and renovations began.In 2011, Michael Hammerson, a local councillor, complained to the Daily Mail about the changes at Witanhurst, noting, “We don’t want limos with smoked windows and men in dark glasses with bulging breast pockets, and the place surrounded by CCTV. That’s not Highgate.”
In fact, Russian plutocrats own many homes in the area. Alisher Usmanov, Russia’s third-richest man, who founded the mining company Metalloinvest, owns Beechwood, a white stucco Regency villa. On the Bishop’s Avenue, a “billionaires’ row” between Hampstead and Highgate, several large houses are owned by Russians. Andrey Yakunin, the son of Vladimir Yakunin—the boss of Russian Railways, and one of Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends—lives nearby, in a mansion worth four and a half million pounds. Andrey Yakunin’s son, Igor, attended Highgate School, a prestigious private school. In recent decades, huge amounts of foreign money have poured into London’s most expensive neighborhoods. Henry Pryor, a British real-estate agent who represents many foreign clients, told me that, although Paris and New York have experienced a similar phenomenon, the trend was particularly pronounced in London. Many foreign billionaires, he said, like the fact that London is an English-speaking capital midway between Asia and New York. In recent years, more than seventy per cent of newly built properties in central London have been bought by foreign investors—often for cash. Billionaires, Pryor said, acquire “London property in the same way that they acquire expensive watches or high-powered motorcars.”Many Londoners wonder whether the influx of rich buyers has provided any benefit to less affluent residents. Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, has studied the effect of foreign money on the city’s property market, and likens it to a three-bowl fountain of the type often found in London parks. A jet of water fills the topmost and smallest bowl; overflow spills into the middle bowl and, eventually, into the bottom, largest bowl. In Hamnett’s analysis, the constant pump of water is money flowing into the most expensive parts of London. Residents who might have hoped to live in Kensington are priced out, and thus look farther from the center—say, in Islington. Prices then rise in Islington, and people who might have bought property there must look yet farther out. According to the mortgage lender Halifax, house prices in two boroughs of London increased by more than twenty-four per cent last year. “People are being sequentially displaced,” Hamnett said.There has been some windfall from the foreign-property boom. New laws have increased taxes on high-value houses: if Witanhurst is sold for three hundred million pounds, the buyer will owe about thirty-six million in taxes. And owners of houses that are registered offshore and worth more than twenty million pounds must pay an annual charge of two hundred and eighteen thousand pounds.
London also benefits from the employment of carpenters, interior decorators, and landscape gardeners. The renovation of Witanhurst alone has provided many dozens of people with work. At the end of 2014—a particularly frenzied phase of the renovation—a builder at the site speculated to me that the project was then costing approximately two million pounds a week. Whatever the precise total, the refurbishment project has surely outstripped the initial estimate of thirty-five million pounds. “It is many tens of millions,” one contractor said. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is ambivalent about the rise in foreign-owned property. In a recent radio interview, he said, “The success of London is having the weird effect of making it very hard for Londoners to afford to live there. . . . In assets, there is no question that there is a steady impoverishment of the bourgeoisie, and we need to address it.” However, he did not want to scare off the private jets. “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan,” Johnson said. “We’re proud of that.”
Next door to Witanhurst is The Grove, a row of gorgeous brick houses from the late seventeenth century. The street has always attracted famous residents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent his final years in a rented room in No. 3; Kate Moss and her husband, Jamie Hince, now own the entire house. Yehudi Menuhin sold No. 2 to Sting and Trudie Styler. George Michael owns No. 5.
For half a century, Sir Patrick Sergeant and his wife, Gillian, have lived in No. 1, and on a warm fall day last year I visited them. Lady Sergeant is a small, spry woman of eighty-eight. Sir Patrick, who is ninety-one, is a former financial journalist and publisher. The magazine Private Eye once described him as looking like “an ageing matinée idol.” When we met, he apologized that his movement was a little stiff; he had played tennis the previous day. The Sergeants took me into their garden, which borders Witanhurst. Lady Sergeant peered over the fence on tiptoe. Dozens of workers in neon jackets were filing in and out of the mansion. Trucks filled with detritus from the renovation rattled toward the gatehouse and onto the main road. Pneumatic drills clattered.In 1961, when the Sergeants moved in, Lady Crosfield was still living at Witanhurst. Sir Patrick remembers her as “a delightful old girl—mad about owls and tennis.” She sometimes let the Sergeants play on her courts. After Lady Crosfield died, in 1963, Witanhurst was largely dormant—until, as Sir Patrick put it, “these bloody Russians bought it.”
Sir Patrick used to have an unblighted view across the Heath—essentially, the same view that Coleridge had seen from his second-floor window two centuries earlier. Now the gray-green roof of Witanhurst’s Orangery appears like a hillock at the bottom of the Sergeants’ garden. The new building is imposing but not garish: with double-height round arch windows and a shallow roof, it resembles a departmental college library. Nevertheless, the Sergeants consider its location obnoxious and, in 2013, they planted a hedge to block it out.There was still a spot from where you could see past the Orangery and imagine the old panorama. The day I visited, the leaves of the oak trees on the Heath were turning, and the dense canopy of treetops shone green, russet, and yellow. Sir Patrick, holding my hand to keep his balance, said, “It used to be a beautiful view.” The Sergeants believe that the proceedings next door have knocked about a million pounds off the value of their house. They may be right. Kate Moss and Jamie Hince’s house, which is similar to No. 1, was bought in 2011 for more than seven million pounds.
Sir Patrick told me that the current rumor in Highgate was that the house belonged to Vladimir Putin, although he was skeptical. I asked Lady Sergeant whether she had ever been given any clues about the identity of her neighbors. “Never!” she said, over the hammering of the construction crews. Then, in as rueful a tone as the noise allowed, she added, “Why have we had to put up with this for five years?” At that point, the Sergeants decided not to ruin a fine day. They went inside and poured three glasses of champagne. It was 11:30 A.M.
In June, 2014, I met with Robert Adam, an architect who has designed many large houses. He won the commission to rebuild Witanhurst in 2008, having been interviewed by an agent of the owners. He told me that local opposition to the development was overblown. Property owners had a right to build whatever they pleased, as long as it did not harm anyone else. “Houses are a major expression of people’s status and ambition and dreams,” he added.
Adam, a raffish man in his sixties, is a classical architect who can recite the exact proportions of a Corinthian column. I observed that there was a vogue for digging out enormous basements beneath London properties—creating so-called “iceberg houses”—and asked him if he approved. “I don’t have a problem with people digging a big hole in the ground and living in it,” he said. He could even summon a classical rationale for underground living spaces: “The Romans did it. They had a thing called the cryptoporticus, so you could keep cool in the summer.”
The basements at Witanhurst, Adam conceded, were not about keeping cool. He suggested that the trend of adding basements was connected to “a huge amount of capital coming into London, and not enough land.” But Witanhurst was already big enough to have twenty-five bedrooms. Why the need for so much extra space? “You can’t put the word ‘need’ on this,” Adam said. “The word is ‘want.’ ”
He smiled when I asked about the owners. When he won the commission, the agent who interviewed him said that their identity was a matter of profound secrecy. Adam responded, “Don’t tell me—I’ll just get drunk and tell someone.” Since then, he has had meetings with the owners’ son, but Adam declined to share the name, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
In October, 2008, Philip Masterman was hired as the on-site architect. Looking around Witanhurst, he was taken aback: “It was quite daunting, really, to think that you’re going to have to transform something like that.” He was also surprised by the proposed schedule: the family wanted to move in before the 2012 Summer Olympics. The landscape architect, Michael Balston, told me, in a telephone interview, that Witanhurst’s owners were “very interested in the combination of statuary, stonework, and water at Versailles.” But Balston would not divulge the family’s identity. “I can’t say a word,” he said, laughing. “There’s a guy standing by me with a gun.”
Most paths leading to the owners of Witanhurst remain carefully obscured, but some bread crumbs have been scattered. Two companies are associated with the property: Witanhurst Construction Management Limited and Witanhurst Interiors Limited. To comply with British law, both list their directors at Companies House, a government registry. Almost all the named directors are British developers or managers with unremarkable histories. But one director of Witanhurst Interiors is Russian: Alexei Motlokhov, a thirty-three-year-old Ph.D. in economics whose dissertation focussed on mineral resources. In documents filed at Companies House, Motlokhov listed several home addresses, including a triplex apartment at Flagstaff House, a complex on the Thames. Land Registry documents say that it was bought, in 2008, for seven million pounds, and is owned by an offshore company named Flagstaff Investments Group Limited. Coincidentally or not, Flagstaff Investments is registered at the same address where Witanhurst’s owner, Safran Holdings, is listed: Box 438, Road Town, Tortola. (The original name for Safran Holdings, it turns out, was Flagstaff Development Limited.)
It’s not immediately obvious how Alexei Motlokhov, who completed his doctorate in 2006, acquired such an expensive apartment—or why, given his expertise in mineral resources, he is a director of Witanhurst Interiors. However, Motlokhov’s father, Vladimir, works for a giant Russian fertilizer company, PhosAgro, and between 2000 and 2008 Vladimir Motlokhov was also the vice-governor of the Murmansk region, where PhosAgro’s mining operations are based.
The Financial Times has called PhosAgro “a powerful market player with a lot of secrets.” Most of the shares are owned by offshore companies. PhosAgro was formed by executives who had worked at Apatit, a Soviet mining interest; it now owns Apatit as a subsidiary. The resulting company was PhosAgro.
It’s not immediately obvious how Alexei Motlokhov, who completed his doctorate in 2006, acquired such an expensive apartment—or why, given his expertise in mineral resources, he is a director of Witanhurst Interiors. However, Motlokhov’s father, Vladimir, works for a giant Russian fertilizer company, PhosAgro, and between 2000 and 2008 Vladimir Motlokhov was also the vice-governor of the Murmansk region, where PhosAgro’s mining operations are based.
The Financial Times has called PhosAgro “a powerful market player with a lot of secrets.” Most of the shares are owned by offshore companies. PhosAgro was formed by executives who had worked at Apatit, a Soviet mining interest; it now owns Apatit as a subsidiary. The resulting company was PhosAgro.
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