‘This is where people with staggering wealth end up’: who will buy Britain’s most expensive house?
T wice a day for the past 12 years, Markus Roggen, an artist and fashion consultant, has walked past the house at the end of his road and wondered to himself: “Why is it still empty?” Roggen’s road is no ordinary road, and the house on the corner is no ordinary house. It is a 45-room “private palace” with 116 windows, 68 of which have views over Hyde Park, in the most exclusive and pricey corner of central London. Welcome to 2-8A Rutland Gate, officially Britain’s most expensive house, and a property that lies completely empty.
Every day, thousands of people pass the building, which stands on the busy Kensington Road near a stop for the number 9, 23 and 52 buses, but most of them probably don’t give it a second glance.
Like many neighbours, though, Roggen, 48, is obsessed with it. He lives in a top-floor, two-bedroom flat owned by his “much richer boyfriend”, 100 metres up the street. “It is the talk of the neighbourhood,” says Roggen, who is tall, thin and dressed all in black, with a mop of artfully messy dark hair. “On both my morning and evening walks I pass it, and I want to know more and more about it.”
Roggen, who grew up on a farm in Bavaria and feels “blessed” to live in the centre of London, has tried peering through the windows, but that provided few clues. “It is totally vacant, there’s nothing in it at all – not even doors,” he says. “There has only ever been one light on, in one small room in the basement.”
Photos of the interior, published by developers, show a hollow shell, with crumbling internal walls, missing floorboards and half-ripped-out bathrooms. “I try to imagine who would live there, but it is just so big, I can’t,” Roggen says. “There’s a dark energy about the house. I wouldn’t live there even if
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