Secretive owners of unsold 45-bedroom residence overlooking Hyde Park to sell items of billionaire chic with no guide prices attached
Bejewelled bidets going cheap: London mansion's contents in public auction
07-02-2015
It is the most expensive property ever marketed in Britain, a vast, 45-bedroom mansion overlooking Hyde Park that was formerly home to a Lebanese prime minister and a Saudi prince.
But, three years after it emerged that 2-8a Rutland Gate was being discreetly marketed to select multi-billionaires for a mere £300m, the property remains unsold. Now, the Guardian has learned, its owners are preparing to sell the property’s entire contents – from ornate chandeliers to jewel-encrusted bidets to curtains, doors and even gold-plated waste-paper bins – by public auction, in a knock-down fire sale at which no low offer is too insulting.
No guide prices have been attached to the 1,252 lots on offer because “they are there to sell”, according to Mark Flynn of auctioneers ProAuction Ltd, who will conduct the sale online and at a luxury Knightsbridge hotel over two days in July. “Why put prices in people’s minds? The market is the market, and for this particular sale, everything has to be sold.”
At the end of the day, my perspective is that this is second-hand furniture
That means even those with rather shallower pockets will be able to pick up a little billionaire chic at prices a fraction of their retail value, from Murano glass chandeliers, to Lalique crystal perfume bottles, to the 24 marble bathrooms “decorated with such semiprecious stones as malachite and amethyst together with precious metals such as bronze, gold and silver”.
A lot of four 24-carat gold-plated wastepaper bins, for example, which cost £420 each, Flynn estimates could sell for as little as £10 to £15 the lot. Similarly, he suggests that the sumptuous bathrooms from luxury manufacturer Baldi, in which a bathtub alone would have cost tens of thousands of pounds, could auction in their entirety for just a few hundred pounds.
A Nain carpet made in central Persia is up for grabs. Photograph: ProAuction Ltd
A Murano chandelier by Barovier & Toso is up for auction. Photograph: ProAuction Ltd
The seven-storey property, which was built as four grand family homes before being knocked into one enormous residence, was formerly the London home of Rafik Hariri, the billionaire tycoon who was twice Lebanese prime minister before his assassination in 2005 in a Beiruit car bomb. Following his death, the house was reportedly made over to his close associate Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who himself died in 2011.
Agents representing the estate’s trustees began making discreet approaches to select super-rich clients some months later, but the house has continued to languish unsold, despite its 60,000 sq ft of floor space – just a little smaller than the playing area of a football pitch – and 68 windows with a view of Hyde Park. Last week, Swiss Group, the agents handling its sale, opted for a more open sales tactic, and the mansion can now be found listed on the property website Zoopla, “price on application”.
According to HM Land Registry, the property has been owned by Yunak Corporation, an entity registered in the tax haven of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, since 1982. Last December, a legal charge was registered against the property in favour of Omni Capital Partners, the billionaire developers Nick and Christian Candy’s financial services arm, suggesting the owners had taken out a loan secured against the property. (The penthouse apartment at One Hyde Park, built by Christian Candy’s CPC Group in a joint venture with Waterknights, sold for a mere £136m in 2011.)
Cedric Emmanuel, who is managing the sale for Swiss Group, said he was bound by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) not to discuss why the mansion was now being sold openly online rather than through discreet word of mouth.
“I think it’s a new way of marketing, to be honest. As times are changing we are more internet-related. POA means price on application, but within that it also states that there’s a strict NDA. Someone who is interested would require to fulfil that criteria before we could give any information on it.”
Going for a song: a set of four Lalique France Dahlia crystal perfume bottles. Photograph: ProAuction Ltd
Charles McDowell, a property consultant specialising in London’s most exclusive addresses, said he considered the decision to market the house online a mistake, “because people aren’t going to look on the internet and think: ‘I’m going to spend £300m plus,’ it just doesn’t happen that way. Almost certainly the buyer of this property is someone represented by someone, and so they should have just carried on, in my view, trying to place it in the market and find a suitable buyer that way.”
All the same, he said, the fact that the house hadn’t sold meant only “that the right buyer hasn’t come along. Once you get in that rarified space [at the very top of the market] you have to wait for that person to come along. It doesn’t mean that the house is not a good house or the price is not a correct price.”
The decision to sell off the contents “could just be a tidying up operation”, he said. “Sometimes people think: ‘Well, we have the contents, we might as well sell those now.’ Some people say, ‘Let’s get a bit of money out now.’”
But, while 2-8a Rutland Gate, personally decorated before his death by the exclusive interior designer Alberto Pinto, has evidently cost many millions to furnish, Flynn’s ambitions are considerably more modest for what he will expect in return: “We would be disappointed if we didn’t achieve £450,000 in total.”
Wasn’t there at least a premium attached to objects that had once stood in Britain’s most expensive house? “At the end of the day, my perspective is that this is second-hand furniture, albeit very luxurious furniture, and where it comes from is neither here nor there.”
• This article was amended on 30 June 2015. An earlier version described One Hyde Park as “the Candy brothers’ own flagship development”. The developer and owner of One Hyde Park was not Candy & Candy. Christian Candy’s CPC Group built One Hyde Park in a joint venture with Waterknights.