Homes & Property

Who's moving: homes gossip

Elle strips off half a million

Elle Macpherson may be a supermodel and lingerie designer but when it comes to selling property she’s as vulnerable to the property slump as the rest of us.

She’s just reduced the asking price of her seven-storey, six-bedroom Notting Hill home (left) from £9.5 million to £8.95 million through Bective Leslie Marsh (020 7221 4805).

Elle, raised in Sydney, Australia, bought her classic Victorian stuccoed and porticoed property, with its swimming pool, cinema, gym, library and communal garden, in 2006 after splitting with Swiss financier “Arki” Busson.

“Elle finds London too busy and wants to move back to Australia for a more simple life,” explains a friend. This winter she’s based at her Harbour Island home in the Bahamas - surfing, sunbathing and acting as “earth mother” to her children Flynn and Cy by Busson.

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When you are both Hollywood A-listers you don’t care what rent you pay, particularly when the dollar is so strong against the pound. Hence Reese Witherspoon and her boyfriend, Brokeback Mountain star Jake Gyllenhaal, are spending a record £4,000 a week on a three-bedroom Victorian terrace house off Westbourne Grove (left).

“The owner couldn’t believe his luck when they turned up,” says Bective Leslie Marsh, which is also selling the madeover house for £2.795 million (call 020 7221 4805). The Oscar-winning Walk The Line actress recently bought an £8.5 million Spanish hacienda-style mansion in the Ojai Valley, near Los Angeles, sharing it with Ava and Deacon, the children from her former marriage to actor Ryan Phillippe.

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Best-selling children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson has decided that she needs a change after living in Kingston-upon-Thames since she was three. She has bought a two-bedroom, third-floor portered flat in an Edwardian mansion-block near the British Museum for an estimated £350,000.

“I’ve always loved the Bloomsbury Set and also wanted to experience the excitement of living near the West End with all its restaurants, theatres, films and exhibitions,” says the Dame. “I can’t wait to sample the cakes from the Patisserie Valerie nearby.”

But she retains her Victorian terrace house in Kingston, where she stores her 15,000-book library in a former dentist’s surgery at the bottom of her garden. Luckily Jacqueline’s daily habit of swimming 50 lengths before breakfast can continue, with Bloomsbury’s Oasis pool.

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The Georgian mansion owned by David Dollar, the former 11th Hussar turned chairman of the Sash Window Workshop, is for sale. Dollar inherited Cold Ashby Hall, Northamptonshire, the family’s seven-bedroom pile, from his mother, who lived there for more than 60 years until her death last year aged 97.

“She was a Justice of the Peace and a keen gardener, often opening the garden for charity, usually with a Pekinese or two at her side,” he says.

Jackson-Stops & Staff is asking £1 million for the Grade II listed property, set in nine acres near Daventry, which includes a groom’s flat, a staff flat, a double garage and a stable yard.


Published: 14 January 2009
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