09/04/2005)
A big name can work wonders for house prices – and for the people who sell them. Andrew Martin on the rules of the fame game
Property and celebrities are Britain's favourite subjects of conversation. I don't know why the BBC doesn't just make a series called Celebrities and Their Houses, and show it round the clock. A whole episode could be devoted to Madonna, recently seen viewing a house in Belsize Park, north London. "Madonna will be able to pop around the corner," babbled the Hampstead and Highgate Express, "to visit celebrity pal Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who recently moved into Kate Winslet's old house."
But there are so many stars owning so much property in London that Madonna might almost fade into anonymity. The effect of celebrities in the provinces is more telling. They are name-checked almost immediately in any town's promotional literature. Look at any website for Bridport, in Dorset, and you sense a certain impatience prior to the mention of the famous local: there'll be brief reference to the "ninth- century origins", a cursory acknowledgement of the Georgian Town Hall, then it's… Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall! Celebrities illuminate a locality, and are capable of affecting its housing market. They are the modern Lords of the Manor.
Peter Lane, of Savills' Wimborne office, covers the territory that includes the home, near Padstock in Dorset, of comedy actor Martin Clunes. He reports that Clunes "is very big on opening fetes, and he's always going on about West Dorset in interviews. His presence is a sort of vote of confidence for the area, and I think you could say it has affected prices, if only quite marginally."
Mr Lane believes that when Madonna bought her country estate on the Wiltshire/Dorset border, she "did a great deal to help the cause of the nearby village of Ashmore". Before Madonna, Ashmore had been known as the highest village in Dorset - a tenuous claim to fame given that Dorset is not a particularly high county. Now, it is "the nearest village to Madonna".
Mr Lane has a barn conversion for sale in the village: two receptions, four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garden for £525,000. But will its buyer be moving into the shadow of Madonna? Does the presence of a celebrity introduce into a rural vision an unwelcome taint of metropolitan glitz? Claudia Schiffer lives outside Lavenham in Suffolk, a fact that prompts Nick Tatum-Rowe, of John D Wood's Chelmsford office, to admit: "I might be more likely to mention that to any buyer from London."
Addressing Kate Moss's impending move to the Oxfordshire village of Little Faringdon, Anthony Coaker, of Savills' Cirencester office, says: "People may well think: 'There's a famous person here, I'd rather live somewhere else.' Certainly, anyone moving to the vicinity of Little Faringdon may face the depressing question: 'So you chose it because Kate Moss lives there, did you?' " A celebrity who mucks in is likely to be less of a deterrent. Ronnie Barker, for example, pursued the traditional calling of Chipping Norton residents by running - and serving in - an antique shop in the town. And a celebrity is more likely to be admired in some places than in others. According to Robert Tancred of Capital Lettors in Bromley (0208 313 0010), the fact that
Kate Lawler, who beat Jade Goody in the definitive Big Brother stand-off, lives in a luxury flat at the Langley Waterside development near Beckenham is a big draw.
"It impresses the young Gucci guys and girls, you know, your four by four drivers."
Rest of article .
Telegraph
