Property

03/06/03 - Property news section

Liz leaves London behind

By Compton Miller

Evening Standard

Actress Elizabeth Hurley, when not jet-setting with her boyfriend, Arun Nayar, is enjoying a new role as a country bumpkin. She is now seldom seen at her £2 million Chelsea home, preferring the paparazzi-free lanes around her £2.75 million farmhouse in Barnsley - not the Northern mill town, of course, but the upmarket Cotswolds village. Should Liz want to let out her five-bedroom Victorian terraced house off Fulham Road, she could expect £2,500 a week in rent. Douglas & Gordon are quoting that for an identical house in the same street.

A dreary five-bedroom flat close to Marylebone flyover seems an odd choice as a location for the latest film by trendy Hollywood screenwriter Richard Curtis, of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill fame. But the large second-floor home will star in his new romantic comedy, Love Actually, with Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Liam Neeson. "I think it was because of its quirkiness," says Ash Residential, asking £ 600,000 for the 78-year lease. "The sitting room looks as if it's set out for a Jehovah's Witness meeting."

Eight months after the death of Baroness Serota, former deputy speaker of the House of Lords, her husband, Stanley, is selling The Coach House, their three-bedroom Hampstead home. The detached Fifties property, with a west-facing garden and off-street parking for two cars, is available at £ 1 million through FPDSavills. The Serotas were married for 60 years and their son, Sir Nicholas Serota, is director of Tate Modern and Tate Britain.

Sarah Waters, author of BBC2 series Tipping The Velvet starring Rachael Stirling, Keeley Hawes and Jodhi May, has bought her first flat. She has invested some of the proceeds of her Victorian lesbian-chic novels in a Kennington property. Awardwinning Sarah became a full-time writer seven years ago after writing her PhD thesis on gay and lesbian literature. Now she and her two cats are saying goodbye to the rented Brixton flat they have shared.

Best-selling novelist Isabel Wolff is to let her three-bedroom Georgian terraced house in Islington for £600 a week through Holden Matthews. The reason? "I'm moving to Notting Hill to live with my partner Greg, who is a QC," says Isabel, who is expecting a baby later this year. "My new house is great for the summer as there's a patio and conservatory, plus a large kitchen/diner for entertaining." Isabel's fifth romantic comedy, Behaving Badly, will be published this August.

Find this story at
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/homes/news/articles/5137213?version=1
©2003 Associated New Media

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