Designer, filmmaker, and billionaire Tom Ford has made a headline-grabbing home sale in the UK. Bloomberg reports that Ford has paid somewhere north of $104 million US for a mansion in the ritzy Chelsea district of London, an off-market deal that sources claim was big enough to make it the most expensive home sale of the year in the entire United Kingdom.
Ford made the buy sometime over the summer but it's only recently being reported, and comes less than two years after he sold the fashion brand that bears his name to Estée Lauder for some $2.8 billion. The sale also went against the recent trends toward a "slump" in luxury real estate in London, partially provoked by upcoming changes in UK tax law that have given deferential tax incentives for "non-doms," individuals residing in the country while their official homes of record are elsewhere. Taxes on purchases of second homes were also recently raised within the UK.
Victor Boyko/Getty Images
Neither of those factors kept Ford from snapping up this particular property, although it is possible that he negotiated a small discount before closing the deal. But sources told Bloomberg that whatever Ford paid was enough to make this the year's most expensive home purchase within the country.
Details on Ford's new Chelsea digs are scarce, but it's said to be a "white stucco-fronted mansion" typical of the neighborhood, somewhere between the famous Hyde Park and River Thames. Its previous owner held onto it for nearly 20 years, having paid about $20 million for it back then. It has been reported that it has nine bedrooms and features like a glass elevator and a home movie theater.
The Times reports that Ford's new mansion brings the total value of his worldwide real estate portfolio to about $300 million. Some of his other holdings include a $42 million Aspen mansion, a $52 million Hamptons residence where Jackie Kennedy Onassis once lived, and a townhouse in Manhattan.
