From The New Yorker:
House of Secrets
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. No further information about the buyers was forthcoming.
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 “servants’ 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—about four hundred and fifty million
dollars.
If a vast and lavishly appointed house
in Manhattan—a palace nearly double the size of the White House—were
being redeveloped on the edge of Central Park, New Yorkers would want to
know who lived there. Londoners are equally inquisitive, and concerted
efforts have been made to uncover the identity of Witanhurst’s owners.
Shortly after the house was sold, it became known—from local gossip and
publicly accessible planning documents—that Witanhurst belonged to a
family from Russia. Several newspapers speculated that the owner was
Yelena Baturina, Russia’s richest woman, and the wife of Yury Luzhkov,
then the mayor of Moscow. (Luzhkov and Baturina reportedly enriched
themselves while he was in office, before Luzhkov clashed with the
Russian government; she now lives in London.) Baturina denied owning
Witanhurst, and in 2011 she sued the London Sunday Times for publishing an article titled “BUNKER BILLIONAIRESS DIGS DEEP.”
The
Baturina lawsuit and the continued secrecy surrounding Witanhurst have
intensified the guessing game. Generally, the names of homeowners in
Britain are listed in the Land Registry, which can be read for a small
fee. But listings for properties owned by offshore companies do not
disclose individual beneficiaries. In the British Virgin Islands,
records reveal merely the name of the “registered agent” of Safran
Holdings—Equity Trust Limited, a local agency that holds several such
positions and is connected to the company by name only—and the company’s
post-office box, on the island of Tortola.
A recent investigation by the Financial Times
found that more than a hundred billion pounds’ worth of real estate in
England and Wales is owned by offshore companies. London properties
account for two-thirds of that amount. Charles Moore, a former editor of
the Telegraph, says that London’s property market has become
“a form of legalized international money laundering.” For Highgate
residents, however, worries about the lack of transparency in the
purchase of Witanhurst have come second to a more English concern.
People irritated by the construction noise and the traffic that have
blighted their normally quiet neighborhood have no owner to complain
to—only managers.
It
might have been expected that the identity of Witanhurst’s owners would
slip out, given the volume and the scale of work at the site, and the
number of contractors involved. (Last year, I met a craftsman who said
that he was on one of six teams of carpenters working there.) But few
employees are told the owners’ names. Senior contractors who have
dealings with the family or their agents have been required to sign
confidentiality agreements. Guards protect the property, and cameras
monitor the grounds. A woman who knows the owners advised me to “choose
another story.” Stephen Lindsay, one of the real-estate agents who sold
the house, spoke to me only after I agreed to leave my phone and bag in
another room. He then put the family’s lawyer on speakerphone and
announced that he would take the secret of Witanhurst’s ownership “to
the grave.”
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....MUCH MORE
