SELLER: Jamie Oliver
LOCATION: London, U.K.
PRICE: £11,950,000
SIZE: 6,284 square feet, 8 bedrooms, 4 full and 2 half bathrooms plus two self-contained apartments with a combined 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Internationally renowned chef, restaurateur, TV personality and unusually prolific cookbook author Jamie Oliver has his canary yellow doublewide London townhouse available for purchase with an asking price of £11,950,000, a figure our digital currency conversion contraption shows equals US$16,919,800 at today’s rates. The likable and well-meaning if occasionally pedantic chap who rocketed to culinary fame and fortune in the late 1990s and early Aughts with his “Naked Chef” TV series reportedly acquired one of the townhouses — plumly situated directly across from the park in the fashionable Primrose Hill ‘hood — in the mid-2000s for about £3 million and scooped up the other sometime in 2008 for somewhere around £3.5 million.
Mister Oliver, the author of a couple of dozen cookbooks that all together have sold in the tens of millions, subsequently spent considerable effort and a small fortune to renovate and combine the two townhouses into what floor plans included with marketing materials reveal to be a three-unit micro-compound of 6,284-square-feet. The upper four floors house the owner’s residence and offers 8 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms as well as a 30-foot long combination living/dining room, small library, and a not at all unexpectedly spacious and no doubt extensively outfitted eat-in kitchen that opens to a small deck that overlooks the terraced rear garden. The master suite, which occupies an entire floor and opens to a slender, park-view balcony that runs the full width of the townhouses, luxuriously provides a bedroom with fireplace and a huge bathroom with side-by-side soaking tubs along with two custom fitted dressing rooms, “hers” with private half bathroom and “his” with itty-bitty adjoining study. Three guest/family bedrooms on the third floor share one roomy hall bathroom while four more bedrooms on the uppermost floor share an additional two bathrooms. On the partially subterranean lower ground floor, two separate and self-contained apartments each have a private entrance, living room with fireplace, and full kitchen. One unit has two bedrooms and one bathroom and the other one bedroom and one bathroom.
Last year Mister Oliver, now in his early 40s with his fifth child on the way, shelled out about $15 million for a meticulously restored and sensitively updated Georgian residence that dates to the late 17th-century. The house sits along a picturesquely leafy and remarkably celeb-lined street in North London’s posh Highgate Village where some of the other homes are owned by Jude Law, George Michael, Kate Moss, and Sting.
Listing photos and floor plan: Knight Frank
