How to spend £5 million
Lloyd Evans
I'M BEING stalked by an estate agent. He just won't leave me alone. A couple of weeks ago, posing as a lucky codicillionaire (the surprise beneficiary of a death-bed change of heart), I contacted a property dealer in St John's Wood, NVV8, and asked if he'd like to help separate me from the sum of £5 million. And you know what? He was quite keen. The first thing I've learnt is that it's much more salubrious at the top end of the property market than in the murky lower reaches: no more scruffy Polaroids crawling out of my fax machine on their bellies. Instead, a mighty Roundhead steers his Kawasaki to my front door and thrusts a handsome parcel into my welcoming arms.
Inside is a laminated triptych, full of sensuous camerawork and flowing catchphrases lauding the many graces of the house on offer. Your home-to-be is presented in a variety of bashful poses: the stuccoed façade beams in the lavender twilight; the staircase is an elegant coil of polished teak; at dusk the candlelit dining-room awaits the chatter of 24; glorious sunlight cavorts in the linen purity of the breakfast area; in the mossy garden the dawn steals majestically over the master shed; and so on.
Having selected two or three Byzantine monsters, I call my tout — Nick Ritzier — and we arrange a viewing.
On the nether side of Hampstead Heath, I find myself in Sheldon Avenue, one of London's most prestigious dead-ends. It's a peaceful lane, full of sprawling villas built in the 1920s. Outside an ambassadorialstyle residence (offers in excess of £3 million), I await Mr Ritzier. And here he comes, his Mercedes staff car spitting gravel in all directions as he sweeps to a halt and clambers out. Blue-eyed and broadshouldered, in a towering greatcoat, he strides towards me, every inch the conquering gauleiter in the middle of a busy blitzkrieg. `Let's go in,' he shouts. I'm already obeying orders.
A stooping Bengali ushers us in from the cold. Evidently the owner is absent and this is the ethnic cleanser. The ground floor looks like a casino: everything that's not made of marble is made of cow. My feet crackle with static on the spongy carpets. An old barn-door smothered in Ronseal makes a handy table for some lifestyle magazines and a knights-of-old chess set. I settle into a circular banquette of tanned leather — it's like sitting on a suede croissant — and glance into the garden through a wall of shivering glass. There's a treehouse, a slide and a trampoline with a puddle in it.
Along one side of the newt-green swimming-pool, a row of joke-Dickensian lamp posts leads down to a mini-pavilion and a couple of decommissioned barbecues rusting hungrily in the drizzle. Beyond the boundary hedge, I can see a man with an enviably low pleasure-threshold enjoying his afternoon whacking dimpled balls across acres of groomed scrub. Ah, the delights of limitless wealth.
Gauleiter Andersen summons me .upstairs and asks chattily what I'm looking for. A home or an investment? I fib to him that I redevelop pubs in the East End and, to support my claim, I start knocking thoughtfully on the plasterwork, listening like a TB specialist for the hollow noises of doom. His attitude changes instantly. I'm a fellow prospector. A co-speculator. He, too, starts knocking on walls and he becomes highly animated when we emerge on to the 'deceptively small' attic floor. He suggests smashing down various partitions, replacing the gabled roof with dormer-windows (whatever they are), and building a quartet of apartments, each with a bathtub 'en-suite'. This is his mantra, his abracadabra. He stands beneath the sloping beams waving his hands like a wizard and conjuring luxury bedrooms from nowhere. 'En-suite, en-suite,' he recites, jauntily pointing. 'En-suite, en-suite. Do you see what I'm saying?'
In nearby Bishop's Avenue, the alchemist's plans are even more extravagant. In the garden of some sopping mansion (a snip at just £4 million) he encourages me to build an entire threestorey extension. I play along, and ask what will become of the raised lawn. 'Haul it out in sacks, I reckon,' he says, 'or get a minidigger in. Semi-circular terrace out to there. Flagstone patio. Brick steps. Beautiful.' I object that the side gate is a little too narrow to admit open-cast mining equipment. 'So there's your opportunity,' says the Undaunted One immediately, 'knock down the garage, rebuild it with a glazed feature and a colonnade, match the rest of the property.'
Finally, he lets me into an Elizabethan manor-house, glossily refurbished but with its antique timbers in place and huge brick chimney stacks planted like capstans in the mottled roof. 'When does it date from?' I ask. 'February.' he says, 'was when it was finished.' Underfloor heating and satellite TV lend this brand-new folly a delightful touch of Nicholas Hilliard. We wander through a parade of identical chambers with yoghurty walls, butterscotch parquet and the kind of lighting arrangement you see everywhere these days: rows of overhead bulbs smearing the floor with pools of meaningless glare and somehow giving the impression that the property has just been selected for destruction by an alien spaceship.
Outside, I pretend to appraise the plot with a buyer's eye. 'It's on for four and a half,' says my friend the gazump-meister. 'We've had a cash offer today for four million.' I pause. He waits. 'They'll probably take four point two.' Oh really?' I say casually. This represents a moderately whopping discount of 000,000 — the price of a two-bedroom flat in the area. He moves restlessly, giving me the cold eye. He wants me to say something.
'So. What do you think?' He has the estate agent's unsettling knack of making me feel that I, by some devious means, have acquired control of his inheritance and am being obstructive in letting him
spend his own money. I tell him I'll have to sleep on it. He drops me off in Golders Green and within the hour I'm back in my garret, splaying my chilly hands across an undeceptively cold radiator.
I didn't get back to him. But still he calls, and still he pesters. 'Got a lovely instruction in today.' His voice is ardent and intimate. 'Seven bedrooms. Double garage. Three point eight. Interested?' No,' I tell him. 'Great,' he says, 'I'll pop the details in the post.'
The truth is, I'm reluctant to put him off. Only this morning another consignment of hard-core kitsch came clattering through my letterbox. My sweating fingers riffled through the details: a half-acre compound in Swiss Cottage with an exotic fish-pond in the back garden, complete with ornamental footbridge, a choir of angels round the shoreline and a bronze Cupid widdling among the dorsals. 'Viewing highly recommended.' Oh, you bet it is. And, though I could never afford one of these dreamhomes, I love to see my aesthetic taboos graphically and recklessly violated. That's what I need every morning. That's why I'm still officially 'looking' in Hampstead. Pauper that I am, I have to admit that my lofty disdain and my superior sneer are in constant need of refurbishment.
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