LOCATION: London, UK (Notting Hill)
PRICE: £2,500,000
SIZE: 1,980 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Its not often we get to discuss a celeb-owned residence in the terrifically chic and impossibly expensive international über-capital of London where an always reliable and trusted informant—let's call him Harry Hound—tells Your Mama that PETA-friendly fashion designer and rock-n-roll scion Stella McCartney's (former) bachelorette pad in London's natty Notting Hill nabe is up for sale—and currently under offer/in escrow—with an asking price of £2,500,000.
Two-and-half million pounds maybe doesn't sound like so much moolah in the rarefied world of celebrity real estate to all us Continentals and Americanos, but according to Your Mama's hard-charging currency conversion contraption that actually works out, at today's rates, to a much more substantial sounding 3,141,770 Euros and 4,040,550 U.S. dollars.
Although Miz McCartney was born to a silver-spooned life of fame, fortune, nepotism and privileged access—her father is former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and her mother is the late photographer/activist Linda McCartney—she is not some hair-brained heiress like, say, Paris Hilton who fritters her life away with a slew of silly (albeit reasonably successful) reality tee-vee programs and a fleet of douche-y cars like horrendous, 200-and-some thousand clam Barbie-pink Bentley GT. Instead, Miz McCartney has admirably forged her own impressive, respectable and successful path as a much lauded and applauded fashion designer.
In 1997, at the dewy age of 25 and just two years after graduating from the prestigious Central St. Martins design school in London, Miz McCartney was—to predecessor Karl Lagerfeld's mild skepticism—appointed Creative Director of the venerable, high-brow Paris-based label Chloé. Four years later, in 2001, she launched her own eponymous label that now encompasses lingerie, perfume, skincare products and clothes for the kiddies. Over the years Miz McCartney has designed Madonna's wedding dress, made sporty outfits for professional tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, created successful collaboration lines with mass market retailers H&M and Target, and in 2011 she was given the Red Carpet Award by the The British Fashion Council. A staunch and vocal animal rights activist, Miz McCartney does not wear or use leather in her designs. She does, for the record, make use of sensitively harvested animal by products such as silk and wool.
In August 2003 Miz McCartney hitched her wagon to publisher turned high-end and high-design furniture purveyor Alasdhair Willis who co-founded of slick and sophisticated, late-1990s design magazine/manifesto Wallpaper* and later co-founded the design-world zeitgeist-y Established & Sons furniture and design showroom that promotes the high-end and high-style designs of contemporary British and Britain-based designers.
The newlyweds—who bought a stunning 160-acre country estate about 120 miles outside London in Bishampton, Worcestershire before they were married—reportedly moved into the Miz McCartney's bacherlorette pad on leafy, serpentine, and affluently trendy Westbourne Park Road that she purchased, according an un-sourced report on the internets, in the late 1990s for around £695,000.
The stylish and savvy couple quickly began to procreate—they have four little ones now—and in 2007 dropped £4,750,000 on a pair of adjoining, down-on-their-heels Notting Hills Gate properties with a staggering 45 bedrooms and previously used as some sort of rooming house or hostel. Miz McCartney and Mister Willis reportedly converted the run-down buildings back to two single family homes, sold off one and moved into the other that's been reported to now include five bedrooms, a library, gym, home theater and, possibly, a swimming pool in the basement.
No longer in need of her Notthing Hill bachelorette pad turned family homestead, it went up for sale some time ago, according to our man on the ground, Harry Hound, for £3,000,000 before the price was lowered to it's last asking price of £2,500,000.
Current listing information and marketing materials show the unassuming yet gleaming, dove-gray stucco townhouse-type residence spans a relatively modest 1,980 square feet over four floors with a total of three bedrooms and two full and two half bathrooms.
Down below, in the half-subterranean lower ground floor, the large dining/family room has a second, under-the-stoop entry for deliveries, domestics and dirty dogs and a second, also convenient but privately situated and properly ventilated half-bathroom with direct back garden access. The compact but well-equipped galley-style kitchen has blond hardwood floors, crisp, white Shaker-style cabinetry, butcher block counter tops, and snow-white subway tile back splashes. French doors connect to the terraced and planted rear garden where a circular picnic bench was playfully custom-built around a skinny tree trunk on the upper level.
Two guest/family bedrooms on the second floor each have fireplaces flanked by built in wardrobes and share a split, hall bathroom. The loft-like master suite occupies the entire top floor and includes a completely open-plan bathroom that lacks any real privacy from the rest of the room. It does not appear in the floor plan that there are any actual closets or wardrobes in the master bedroom, which is on obvious problem for obvious reason, but there is direct and private access to a glassed in galled and tiny terrace on the roof.
listing photos and floor plan: Bective Leslie March