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Singer George Michael Sells Swish Chelsea House
Yahoo, September 13, 2002
LONDON (Reuters) - Singer George Michael is selling his west London mansion, one of Britain's most expensive houses, without ever having moved in, his spokeswoman said on Friday. Michael wants a reported $12.9 million for the Victorian house, a stone's throw from the homes of Madonna, David Bowie and British model Liz Hurley. "He is selling the house in Chelsea," his agent said. "He never moved in, he lives in another house in north London. He bought it intending to move in but now has decided not to live there."
Although cheaper than some of Britain's biggest palaces and country houses, the house is among the most expensive in terms of money paid per square foot. The house has six bedrooms, its own tower and a walled garden. It also comes with its own parking space, a luxury in traffic-clogged London. A short bus ride from central London, the property lies between South Kensington and Chelsea, two of the most desirable addresses in London.
It dominates the quiet west London street where Ferraris and Porsches jostle for space under the watchful eye of private security cameras. "This house always commands the most extraordinary price every time it sells," Jonathan Hewlett, of estate agent FPD Savills, told the Times newspaper. Michael, 39, bought the house last year for a reported 7.25 million pounds from British television and radio presenter Chris Evans. The singer found fame in the early 1980s with the British pop band Wham! before going solo and scoring hits with the albums "Faith" and "Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1."
Most expensive house in Britain just got dearer
The Times, by Anne Spackman, September 13, 2002
CELEBRITIES cannot wait to get in to Gilston Road, London SW10.
This small street in South Kensington, once nicknamed Goldman Sachs Alley, is certainly an A-road when it comes to the residents. They include David Bowie, Rowan Atkinson and Tom Ford, the fashion designer, as well as a smattering of wealthy industrialists.
One house in particular has had more than its share of famous owners. With its tower and walled garden, it is one of the most conspicuous and attractive houses in the road.
It is also, in terms of pounds per square foot, the most expensive house in Britain.
It hit the headlines last year when Chris Evans, the ginger media mogul, bought it for £6.7 million. Then it hit the headlines just a few months later when he sold it to the singer, George Michael, for £7.25 million. At £1,700 per square foot it set the record for a property in Britain.
Now, less than a year later, George Michael too has decided to sell. He is hoping to achieve what would be a new record-breaking price of £8.25 million.
Plenty of estate agents think he could get it.
“This house always commands the most extraordinary price every time it sells,” says Jonathan Hewlett of FPDSavills. “It is a mixture of its provenance, its appearance and its location on Gilston Road, which has become a destination address.” Gilston Road sits in the patch of South Kensington which includes Tregunter Road, where Madonna also bought and sold within months. Its white stucco houses offer a mix of grand rooms, gardens and parking, which can be had for a few hundred thousand pounds in most cities, but command millions in west London.
It was not always so grand.
The first famous owners of George Michael’s house were members of the Flick family, whose German industrial empire included the Mercedes-Benz car company. They bought the house in the late 1980s, from an old lady who shared it with dozens of cats, for £1 million. It was one of the first houses in London to go for a seven figure sum.
The Flicks brought over builders from Germany completely to remodel the property, creating the basis of the house as it now is. A subsequent owner, an American banker from Morgan Stanley, turned it into a more family-friendly home.
At 4,250 square feet it is not particularly large, but its pavement appeal is enormous. “You would be thrilled every time you came home to walk up to the front door and think, ‘This is my house’,” said David Forbes of the estate agency, Chesterfield, who has sold several houses in Gilston Road.
“It has great presence on the street, with its lovely walled garden. It has always been a marker house for the market.”
Clearly these virtues are sufficient to persuade people to buy, but not to convince them to live there. One problem might be the bedrooms. The master bedroom, with large windows overlooked by houses at the rear, offers little privacy and the other bedrooms are rather small.
“It’s all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas,” said one agent. “You walk into a wonderful series of reception rooms, with a lovely library, a fine drawing room and huge kitchen, but after that it fizzles out.”
Square feet are cheaper away from the A-roads
Regency town house in Cheltenham
Five bedrooms, four reception rooms and four bathrooms. It is a Grade II listed building and has a landscaped garden with two garages. It costs £595,000, which is £245 per square foot.
Five-bedroom Victorian terraced house near Highbury Fields in North London
It is situated on a residential tree-lined road and has a large reception room, two bathrooms, a cellar and back garden. It costs £555,000 or £350 per square foot.
Star purchase - Celebrities have found a new way to profit from fame
The Times, September 12, 2002
“So now we go....through the keyhole!”, as Loyd Grossman might put it to Sir David Frost, “Dayvud, I am standing in the empty hallway of a luxury house. Over here you can see some dirt marks on the wall where a picture has been removed. Who’d live in a house like this? Here I am in the lovely library. It’s obvious that once this room bulged with at least half a dozen books. Now they’ve all been taken away. Who’d live in a house like this? And here’s a final clue for you. The drawing room tells us that the owner has obviously got a taste in broken furniture and dust sheets. Let’s review the evidence — empty hall, the library with no books, the dust sheets. Who’d live in a house like this? Eauver to you, Dayvud.”
Who’d live in a house like this? Nobody. Who’d own a house like this? Now, that is a different question. The latest celebrity fad appears to be purchasing houses and then selling them within weeks or months, sometimes without having lived in them at all. With property prices and stamp duty now so high, buying and selling quickly is a game that can only be played by the really wealthy, such as Chris Evans (rich), George Michael (very rich) or Madonna (Ritchie rich). At first sight, it seems as though it is simply another story of celebrity excess, the bricks and mortar version of Sir Elton John and his £293,000 flower bill. Yet there may be more to it than that.
Fifteen years ago the house that Mr Michael now owns changed hands for around £800,000. Now the singer hopes to realise £8.25 million for what is, by all accounts, a perfectly nice and large house, but certainly not a palace. If he succeeds in selling at this price he will have made a tidy profit less than a year after Mr Evans did exactly the same thing when selling the house to him. Nothing has appreciated in value, or rather increased in price, more in the past decade than property and celebrity. Bring the two together and the combination is explosive. Merely linking a famous name to a house, or even an area, boosts prices. It is revealing that local estate agents attribute the extraordinary asking price of Mr Michael’s house at least partly to its “provenance”, in other words to its previous famous owners.
Playing the housing market by buying up, moving in, doing over and selling out has become reasonably common. The new celebrity version is to buy a property, let it be known that they did so and then profit from selling out at the higher price now chargeable for a residence impressive enough to have housed such a famous person. Even if it didn’t. The best form of DIY, it seems, is to acquire celebrity status as an instant route to home improvement.
Dr Beverley Milton-Edwards:
Reader specialising in Middle Eastern and Islamic politics at Queen's University Belfast
Guardian, September 11, 2002
On 9/11 : "....The BBC then pulled me down into a studio and I spent the next five hours on radio contributing to commentary as we watched the live television feed of the events unfolding... Over the ensuing weeks press interest in my work was significant, to say the least....I think it has altered the sub-discipline I work in, in that a lot of people, particularly studying and researching the Islamic movement and radical Islamist groups, experienced a lot of hostility and pressure for their interest in exploring and explaining Islam.
In this respect I've felt a lot of sympathy for George Michael and the attacks on him for being some kind of al-Qaida sympathiser because he released a pop song critical of western policy towards the Middle East. It's funny, really, how worlds collide. Maybe he'll read my books now, especially as I've always bought his work.
Weller sings out, the rest stay silent
Daily Telegraph, September 5 2002
Neil McCormick on how pop has lost its will to challenge injustice and the rhetoric of war. Whatever happened to protest music? In times of conflict, musicians can usually be counted on to offer some opposition to the rhetoric of war. Pop culture is almost instinctively pacifist, rallying around the flag of universal love and, certainly at its edgier lyrical extremes, deeply suspicious of the role of political leaders. Yet, as the American president leads his country inexorably towards war with Iraq in the face of enormous international disquiet, pop seems to be looking the other way.
New Names Picked in the Fame Game
Yahoo, by Paul Majendie, September 3, 2002
LONDON (Reuters) - What do Osama Bin Laden, Stella McCartney and Ronaldo have in common? In the fame game, they are just three of the 500 new names to merit a place in one of the world's oldest reference books -- Chambers Biographical Dictionary. "The basic criteria have kept the same since the first edition in 1897 -- achievement and recognition. Those are the key watchwords," editor Una McGovern told Reuters on Tuesday.
A new edition only comes round every five years and she was the first to admit: "It is a difficult job for editors to decide who goes in. We try to reflect international coverage and who people would look up." The 2002 dictionary, being published this week, certainly mirrors a society obsessed by celebrities -- the largest number of new entries comes from the world of arts and entertainment. Hollywood stars feature strongly with George Clooney, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman taking a bow for the first time.
Fitting 17,500 entries into the dictionary is a real masterclass in the art of precis. Editors have just 150 words to tell all about George W. Bush, George Michael and David Beckham -- but Sunday's birth of soccer idol Beckham's son Romeo came too late for the dictionary deadline. Other big names, from Microsoft founder Bill Gates to children's writer Roald Dahl, are treated to bigger panel biographies but never on first entry in the dictionary.
What has George Michael got to hide?
Sunday Mirror, September 1 2002
He was spotted at Stussy in Covent Garden, London, buying 20 hats. Is he joining his friend Stephen Gately in the follicley challenged stakes? Or just giving pal Boy George a run for his money in the millinery department?
ON GEORGE
Vogue (U.S.), September 2002
"The great thing about contentment as a source of glamour is that any one of us, no matter how lacking in the usual ingredients associated with allure, can possess it. Take George Michael. Back in the day, nobody actually wanted his sex, no matter how often he beseeched us. But when I saw Michael recently at the Versace couture show, he struck me as amazing. Held by his boyfriend, he was evidently in love, evidently at home, evidently untroubled by the controversy surrounding his politically charged new video. He was happy, glamorous, and I was grateful for his proximity."
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