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A mystery buyer has snapped up what was set to become Britain’s most expensive home for just over half its asking price after the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia put the squeeze on his royal relatives.
The Holme sits alone in four private acres of Regents Park in Central London where the few near neighbours include the American ambassador.
The lawns of the 40-bedroom house sweep down to the park’s boating lake and the 200-year-old home has been described as the ‘definition of Western civilization’ by one architectural critic.
It has been owned by the family of former Saudi defence minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud since he bought it for £34million in 1991, but it was put on the market in 2023 when creditors demanded repayment of a loan for a private jet.
The asking price was a record-breaking £250million but nearly two years on it has exchanged hands for a much-reduced £139million.
The identity of the ultra-rich new owner has yet to emerge but industry insiders believe it is only a matter of time before it is revealed.
‘This is a once-a-decade kind of property . . . a mini stately home in the middle of London, in its own parkland,’ Roarie Scarisbrick of Property Vision told the FT.
‘This is not a house for the shy and retiring type.’
The Holme (pictured), set in Regent’s Park in London went on the market with an asking price of £250million in March 2023 but sold last month for £139million
Former Saudi defence minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud bought the home in 1991
Millions of pounds worth of gold leaf adorn the home’s internal décor, and even at £139million it is the second most expensive home ever sold in the UK, just pipping the £138million paid two years ago for Aberconway House in London’s Mayfair into third place.
Still towering over both is the £205million paid by Chinese tycoon Cheung Chung Kiu to another Saudi royal for the 62,000 square feet of Rutland Gate overlooking Hyde Park in 2020.
The freehold of The Holme is owned by the Crown Estate but the long lease on the Regency masterpiece was sold by the British Government to a Kuwaiti businessman for just £5million in 1984.
Six years later it was in the hands of Prince Khaled, a former Sandhurst graduate and a career soldier in the Saudi Army after it was bought on his behalf by a Guernsey-registered company called Quendon.
But in 2016 it was used as collateral for a loan that the prince used in part to pay for the lease on a private jet.
The following year, Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman ordered a crackdown on his sprawling royal family in a purge that landed some of them in jail.
Prince Khaled was not among them, but the crackdown coincided with a ‘massive’ deterioration in his finances, according to advisers who spoke to the FT.
He sold his £70 million home in Paris according to the WSJ and is thought to have also sold two expensive yachts.
The Holme was originally built in 1818 and has four acres of land. With a freehold still held by the Crown Estate the gardens can be visited through the National Gardens Scheme
The current most expensive home in Britain: Originally built as four separate family houses, the grand seven-storey, stucco-fronted residence runs from 2-8A Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge
Sales of the most expensive houses is usually done discretely and often through the use of trusts which sometimes obscures the identity of the parties involved.
So industry insiders were aghast when news that The Holme was being marketed as a ‘mini-Buckingham Palace’ leaked out in March 2023, and predicted that the sale would be botched.
‘There is practically a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of it. It’s not a good start,’ one agent exclaimed, telling the FT that usually when the most expensive homes exchange hands ‘nobody knows that it’s sold, nobody knows that it’s available, nobody knows the price’.
Quendon, which lists five of Khaled’s children among its beneficial owners, took a fresh loan out against the home in 2019 with Irish company Trinity Investments.
Trinity called in the receivers in August 2022 triggering the sale of the home, and it has now been bought by a UK subsidiary of the Luxembourg-based wealth management company Zedra.
Who will move in has yet to be revealed but an advisor to the Saudi royal family told the FT that the sale is a sign of the pressures now facing its members.
‘These are just iterations of the situation,’ they added. ‘These guys have serious problems.’
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