18:24
JIM SALTY1
Who would live in a £70 million house like this? Well, David, let's go through the CCTV-monitored keyhole and marvel at 50,000 sq ft of Surrey real estate: 250 tons of Italian marble, 27 bathrooms, a quarter of a mile of under-driveway heating, 58 acres of landscaped gardens, an underground squash court, a bowling alley, a panic room with its own ancillary air conditioning and two indoor swimming pools both filled with green stagnant water and beginning to smell.
The answer, it seems, is that no one lives in a house like this, and nor does anyone want to. Updown Court, five miles south of Ascot, was placed on the market in 2005, then the most expensive property in Britain. Six years and numerous viewings later, it has still not been sold. In a bizarre development at the weekend, it was reported that it is on the verge of being seized on behalf of the Irish taxpayers.
It would not be the first twist in the property's colourful history. Bought by Prince Sami Gayed of Egypt in 1977, Updown Court was abandoned after fire damage following the storm of 1987. It stood empty for years before Anthony Pearce, a local engineer, acquired the site and tried to turn it into an Arab palace.
In 2001 40-plus Customs officials descended on the house, arrested Pearce and charged him with money laundering. Charges were dropped after an 18-month trial, but Pearce emigrated in a huff to North Carolina and Leslie Allen-Vercoe, a Middlesex-born property tycoon who made his money in Russia in the early 1990s, bought a half-finished shell for £20 million.
Turning to the roaring Celtic Tiger for further financing, Allen-Vercoe took out loans from the Irish Nationwide Building Society which eventually amounted to more than £60 million. Together they entered into an arrangement whereby his company, Updown Court, would develop the property. On finding a vendor, he'd pay back the loan and the rolled-up interest and split the profit 66:33 with the building society.
Unfortunately, Irish Nationwide went bust, and was subsumed by the even more bust Anglo Irish Bank. A significant proportion of Updown Court's debt (Allen-Vercoe estimates 50 per cent) is now owned by the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), Ireland's "bad bank" operated on behalf of the taxpayer. Nama wants its money back, and is reportedly preparing to appoint receivers in the next few days. Yesterday it told The Daily Telegraph that it would not comment on individual loans or debtors.
Allen-Vercoe strongly denies knowledge of any receivership action and points out that, if receivers were to take over his company, the property would have to be sold independently, losing substantial tax and anonymity advantages to any purchaser. Although immune from major losses himself, he is unlikely to make any profit out of eight years' unpaid work. "With the benefit of hindsight, I would have run a million miles," he says, softly spoken and dapper in a pin-striped suit.
It is not a story likely to arouse much sympathy in those struggling to shift more modest family homes. It is, however, a fascinating indictment of a certain sort of globalisation: a luxury home designed by British architects, using Italian builders, financed by overstretched Irish bankers all in the vain hope of snaring Arab, Russian and far-East buyers.
In retrospect, Allen-Vercoe, 67, thinks they got their marketing strategy wrong. They should, he says, have quietly finished the building first and then discreetly employed someone to talk to potential buyers "for want of a better word, someone like Prince Andrew".
Instead there was so much press speculation that they bowed to what they saw as the inevitable and opened the house to journalists. Chaos ensued. An erroneous article about an indoor shooting gallery prompted a visit from Special Branch. A Japanese journalist "the equivalent of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson" arrived in a white helicopter and matching mink coat. An Australian reporter climbed into the roof-top Jacuzzi topless.
"Billionaires are private people," says Allen-Vercoe. "They don't want everyone knowing they bought the most expensive house in Britain."
Potential buyers still turned up, but none followed through to completion.
Deposits were put down and withdrawn. One person wanted to move the master bedroom from the ground floor to the second and decided it was too much of an ordeal. Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbek-born Russian businessman with a 29 per cent stake in Arsenal football club, was briefly intrigued. The Maktoums, the UAE rulers, who own the property opposite, could not be persuaded to tunnel under the road and buy another one.
"We've been extremely unlucky," says John Denney, head of country houses at Hamptons International estate agents, who's been showing people round since 2008. "We've come very close but this is very much a one-off property and needs a special buyer: a VIP person from overseas looking for an alternative to London."
Bad luck is one interpretation. Another is that Updown Court is, as one reporter aptly described it, "a house of horrors". I'd been expecting to find it tacky, over-the-top and full of bling. I hadn't expected to find a cross between an abandoned Dubai hotel and a cruise ship.
Every step is accompanied by the squeak of expensive but not very attractive marble. The 100,000-piece mosaic of Mt Fuji above the master suite's swimming pool is almost unspeakably horrible. The entrance hall is soulless, despite its twin stairwells, copied from Versace's Miami mansion. The house might have 103 rooms, but you'd find more character in a Hackney bedsit.
Admittedly, the specifications are top class: £7 million was spent on electronics, plumbing and air conditioning alone. Everything can be controlled by laptop from anywhere in the world useful if you wake up in the middle of the night in, say, Riyadh and realise that you've left the lights on in one of your 27 Surrey bathrooms.
It will probably have more appeal furnished. It certainly looked great in the BBC spy drama Spooks when used to depict both the Russian embassy and, appropriately, a torture centre. It was also used as the set for a war-torn Baghdad palace in Green Zone.
Meanwhile, the overall impression is not helped by the sense of neglect murky, smelly swimming pools, flickering lights in the bowling alley and a red carpet leading up to the front door which is covered in pine needles.
The purse strings have been tightened by the lenders but running costs still amount to £60,000 a month. "I have to call up and say, 'the pool is going green again'," says Allen-Vercoe.
The good news is that Denney and Allen-Vercoe claim to have interest from three serious new would-be buyers. Updown Court is likely to be sold for considerably less than the original asking price. Nama will recuperate its loss for the taxpayers, Allen-Vercoe will sell his company and the only serious losers will be the shareholders of Anglo Irish Bank.
Then again, they've been saying for years that a buyer is just around the corner.
Perhaps a neater solution, then, would be to turn Updown Court into the Irish Embassy in the UK. It has good transport links to London and Heathrow and a useful neighbour across the road next time the country needs a bail-out. The rotting swimming pool could even be left intact as a reminder of former follies.
Palace officials were approached by officers within recent days and told the royal couple may have been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire.
