Tuesday Floor Plan Porn: Heath Hall

WHAT: Heath Hall
LOCATION: London, U.K.
PRICE: £65,000,000
SIZE: 2509.29 square meters, 15 bedrooms, 15 full and 2 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen, chickens, Your Mama has some personal matters that require our undivided attention. However, rather than leave the children completely high and dry in the (celebrity) real estate way we thought we'd quickly drop some hardcore floor plan porn on y'all in the form of Heath Hall, an historic, newly renovated and much expanded mega-mansion on The Bishop's Avenue, one the most (in)famously recherché residential enclaves in all of ludicrously expensive London.

Heath Hall has been on the market for a while now but recently had it's monstrous £100,000,000 asking price slashed to a still tumescent £65,000,000. A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus shows that's an electrifying $151,068,000, at today's rates, reduced down to still stultifying $98,194,200.

The seller, according to previous reports, is a property magnate named Andreas Panayiotou who purchased Heath Hall in 2006 and spent—so the stories go—£40,000,000 on the recent overhaul and expansion.

Current listing details show the Edwardian era three story (plus partial basement) mansion, a stately red brick pastiche of Classical, Arts & Crafts and Scottish Baronial styles, was designed and built in 1910 for sugar baron William Lyle and, after its recent expansion, measures in at 2,509.29 square meters. That's just over 27,000 square feet for all us non-metric types.

Your Mama counted at least half a dozen or more public entertaining rooms that include a regal, 700-ish square foot center stair hall with a massive oak staircase and a banquet hall sized dining room; a gargantuan "Garden Room" with a (melo)dramatic glass ceiling and a glinty dandelion-like chandelier. A pair of nearly 30-foot long drawing rooms, both with fireplaces, flank a refreshingly intimate paneled library. All three of the latter rooms spill out to 60-foot long, glassed in veranda that overlook the estate's formal gardens.

The floor plan first provided to Your Mama by a U.K.-based aide-de-camp we'll call Flower Perfectbush and included with online marketing materials shows Heath Hall has not just one but two kitchens. At the northeast corner there's a somewhat isolated commercial catering kitchen with walk in larder. That's a pantry, American butter beans. A more central, expensively outfitted center island family kitchen has a direct view into the adjacent family room but a strangely circuitous route to the formal dining room. It seems a bit odd to Your Mama that there's not a butler's pantry or service kitchen between the kitchen and dining room. Unless there's a weird and ill-advised pass through we don't know about, plated food must be carried from the kitchen through a vestibule off the main reception hall in order to be served in the dining room.

Even though listing details say there are 14 bedrooms and 15 bathrooms Your Mama (repeatedly) counted a total of 15 bedrooms and 15 full or three-quarter bathrooms and two powder poopers on the main floor.

At least four of the bedrooms are located in a separate wing above the catering kitchen and laundry room making them suitable for habitation by live-in domestic staff. In addition to the five guest/family bedrooms and the master bedroom on the second floor there are three large if awkwardly shaped en suite bedrooms on the third floor plus two more smaller bedrooms that share a hall bathroom.

The second floor master suite is a roomy if surprisingly simple affair comprised of a 500-square foot bedroom/sitting area, an itty-bitty stud-nook, a pair of custom-fitted windowed dressing rooms and a single, spacious bathroom sheathed almost entirely in Milas Lilac marble. The high contrast marble in the master bathroom was certainly a bold choice and we imagine many of the children will poo-poo its use as conspicuous and vulgar. And it is, hunties. It is. Even still, Your Mama thinks it's insane. Rachel Zoe might say, "It's mayj!" The free-standing soaking tub carved from a huge hunk of the same marble is just icing on the crazy cake in that glorious high luxury meets high camp style to which Your Mama is inexplicably and somewhat embarrassingly drawn. We don't want that bathroom for our bathroom but we're sorta glad it exists in all its unapologetic über-splendor. Anyhoodles poodles...

Additional creature comforts at Heath Hall include: a cloak room/powder pooper larger than most people's bedrooms; a basement level wine cellar; a discreet and fully equipped panic room (not shown on the floor plan, natch) with toilet and separate telephone wires that can not be cut; a surprisingly compact but state-of-the-art home cinema lined with cream colored suede; an indoor swimming pool complex complete with spa and multi-colored fiber optic lighting situation that kinda gives Your Mama the decorative willies. The indoor fitness area also includes an adjoining gymnasium, steam room and dry sauna and two shower/changing rooms.

Every square foot of the walled, gated and high maintenance 2.5 acre estate is landscaped to include a motor court with central water feature at the front of the house and a rear motor court for easy access to the five car detached garage. There are formal gardens, a serpentine pathway winds in and out through the sylvan edges of the estate, a hard surface tennis court and a rectangular swimming pool overlooked by a slightly elevated glassed-in gazebo.

listing photos and floor plan: Knight Frank

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