Following up on the amazing story immediately below, something more mundane, if you can call it that, in the way of quarantine quarters.
From The Steeple Times:
A Cut Cost Château
Vast “fairytale” château in France’s Loire Valley for
sale for ‘just’ £28 million in spite of having
had £80 million spent
already on its renovation; it was most famously owned by Madame de
Pompadour
In 2017, a Lebanese-born, Monaco-based property developer named Edmond Baysari placed what selling agents Sotheby’s International Realty describes as the “most beautiful and majestic castle in [the] Loire Valley” on the market. It’s so big and so costly to maintain that it remains for sale still today.Harvard educated Mr Baysari purchased the 102,257 square foot château for about £4.3 million in 1983 from the Parisian glassmakers Saint-Gorbain. It had been used as their company retreat from 1939 and had earlier belonged to Jeanne Antoinette Poisson – the official chief mistress of Louis XV from 1745 to 1751 and a woman better known as ‘Madame de Pompadour’ – in the years prior to her premature death from tuberculosis in 1764 aged just 42.Providing “regally appointed” accommodation so vast that it is not even described in detail that includes around 50 bedrooms and a wine cellar capable of housing 30,000 bottles amongst other things, Château de Menars – or the ‘Palace Pompadour’ as some have nicknamed it – costs around £800,000 per year to run. In total, some £80 million has been spent renovating it “using the same methods” that the king’s mistress originally employed.Of why he is selling, the heirless businessman’s lawyer, Jack Anderson, told Reuters in 2017: “[Mr Baysari] realises destiny is going to take him… His goal is to know that it’s in the hands of someone who’s going to continue the beauty of the chateau and maintain it.”The 104 acres of grounds that surround the château includes vineyards yielding pinot noir grapes, “elegant” geometric grassed lawns and more than a mile of frontage to the River Loire. Classical sculptures and gazebos abound and there is, according to Reuters, “a cobbled courtyard large enough to land a helicopter” also.During Baysari’s ownership guests at Château de Menars have supposedly numbered Prince Charles, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mick Jagger and President Ronald Reagan. Now, Sotheby’s International Realty point out: “We think this could be perfect for the creation of a luxury hotel complex… Or for the acquisition of an extraordinary and very large private property.”....
....MUCH MORE
Quite the pile.
