After 40 years in residence, a recently completed three-year restoration and expansion, and a decorative revamp spearheaded by designer-to-the-stars Kelly Hoppen, Boy George is ready to pack up his rainbow collection of over-sized hats and move on from his longtime home in London’s leafy Hampstead. Known as The Logs, the walled and gated estate is available through Mark Pollack at Aston Chase at £17 million, an amount that a few clicks and clacks on the conversion abacus shows equals about US$19.5 million at today’s rates. The listing was first spotted by Daily Mail.
Perhaps unfairly described in the “Pevsner Architectural Guides” as a “formidable atrocity,” and more humorously in the 1974 book “The Streets of Hampstead” as a “wonderful uncertainty between Gothic and Italian,” the playfully outlandish Grade II listed residence was built of plain beige bricks embellished with red Mansfield stone around 1868 as the private residence of engineer and developer Edward Gotto. Overlooking Hampstead Heath, the home was later expanded and by the 1950s, The Logs had been carved up into maisonettes, one of which was occupied by comedian Marty Feldman, known for his bulging and strangely wayward eyes.
A fearless and usually maquillaged sartorial dare devil, George acquired the historic property when just in his twenties, around the time Culture Club was defining the 1980s new wave music scene with their seminal early albums “Kissing to be Clever” (1982) and “Colour by Numbers” (1983). It’s not clear if The Logs had been returned to a single-family home at the time the now 61-year-old icon acquired it but as it stands now, there are six bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms sprinkled throughout almost 5,500 square feet. The bulk of the house is just two stories, but a multi-level tower section contains a top-floor meditation lounge and, just below, a study/bedroom and a roof terrace.
The unconventional layout incorporates a modestly proportioned entry vestibule that gives way to a triple-height space that doubles as the reception hall, stair gallery and dining room. Ringed by balconies lined with florid wrought iron railings, the cathedral-esque space is festooned with Corinthian marble columns and kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows. Polychromatic artworks, some of them by George, animate the walls. Indeed, throughout the house, are eye-catching artworks created by George, such as a pink and orange painting of performance artist extraordinaire Leigh Bowery and a photographed portrait of late trans model and socialite April Ashley.
Elsewhere, the spacious living room is toned down with a monochromatic collection of taupe-colored furnishings and jazzed up with a DJ table, while a glass-walled corridor connects the living room to the crisply tailored modern take on a farmhouse kitchen. Housed in a minimalist volume, walls of floor-to-ceiling glass allow the light-filled space to function as one with dining terrace and rear gardens.
Other highlights include a windowless mezzanine-level snug in which the TV is set on a marble platform in the massive fireplace, a ground-floor laundry room gussied up with bright yellow paint, and a primary bedroom suite that boasts a glass ceiling over the enormous, subway-tiled bathroom along with a spacious dressing room where all the clothes and clutter are concealed behind wooden doors.
George, who surprise released his most recent album (“Cool Karaoke Vol 1“) last year on YouTube, will presumably find himself an interesting new house in to call home in London but when in Los Angeles, the creative powerhouse typically shacks up with his manager, PK Kemsley, and his wife, “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Dorit Kemsley.
