A “modest” mansion dwarfed by trophy home neighbours valued as high as £50 million has come on the market for the first time since it was built in 1959.
Many of the neighbouring homes have been demolished and rebuilt at a grand scale, with vast basements and luxurious modern facilities such as swimming pools and cinema rooms.
But the property on Winnington Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb has changed little in over 60 years.
“It’s a very modest house in today’s world on a very big plot,” says Marc Schneiderman of Arlington Residential, who is marketing the home.
“It’s one of the last remaining undeveloped houses of its original size from when it was built, it’s a nice opportunity for someone. Winnington Road is one of those streets where you’ve got ‘ambassadorial houses’ that are literally the homes of ambassadors.”
Having been owned by the same family for the past 63 years, the property boasts many of its original, now vintage, interiors.
It provided the backdrop to Friday night dinner scenes in the 2017 film Disobedience, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachael McAdams, about a woman who returns to the strict north London Orthodox Jewish community she grew up in. The house also appeared in the 2015 Sky series The Enfield Haunting.
The house is being sold with planning consent from Barnet council to turn it from a 2,500sq ft house with a large garden into a 13,000sq ft super home worth an estimated £15 million. This would put it in line with its neighbours, which Schneiderman estimates are five or six times the size. The average London home measures 705sq ft.
On the market for £5.75 million, Schneiderman estimates it would have cost about £2,500 when bought brand new in 1959. A comparable level of price growth would see the house fetching £12.1 billion by 2084.
Hampstead Garden Suburb was originally laid out in the early 1900s as a model suburb for working class people to rent artisan cottages in. “Not that working class people could afford them,” says Simon Henderson, Chief Executive of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. “After WWI the houses started getting bigger as a new, wealthier demographic moved in.”
At the very east end of the Suburb, Winnington Road was one of the last areas to be developed, with the bottom of the street built in the Thirties and the top end, where the home currently on the market lies, only built in the Fifties.
According to Henderson, it was always intended to have some of the Suburb’s biggest houses on it being at the leafier end of the area next to the Heath Extension and backing on to Bishops Avenue, aka ‘billionaire’s row’.
It was after the Leasehold Reform Act in 1967 that very high net worth people started to move in to the Suburb, demolishing the existing houses and building enormous mega mansions under the watchful eye of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust, who have legal powers to grant or block development in the area in addition to the council’s planning department.
Famous Hampstead Garden Suburb residents include Richard and Judy and Jonathan Ross, while Harry Styles owns three houses nearby. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson lived there for decades and Elizabeth Taylor and chat show host Jerry Springer were also partly brought up there.
