Fantasy lifestyles of the rich and famous
A new TV series lifts the lid on what celebrities look for in a dream home but CHERYL MARKOSKY discovers that they are not as exotic as you might think in these credit crunch times...
WHAT COULD be better than a spicy mix of poking around dream homes with the stars while hearing their showbiz gossip?
In Celebrity Fantasy Homes on UKTV Style presenter Gaby Roslin relishes both. Best known for hosting The Big Breakfast with Chris Evans and Children In Need with Terry Wogan, Gaby believes she has created a new genre.
Not only do the likes of singer Mica Paris, socialite Lady Victoria Hervey and ex-footballer Lee Sharpe spill the beans about their fellow celebrities but they also reveal a great deal about themselves when hunting for their ideal home.
“Your home says a lot about you,” says Gaby, 44. “I feel like a therapist with the celebrities saying: ‘This is not to my taste and I would do this and that with it.’ Then they talk about their lives.”
This gossip-column-meets-house-hunting approach throws up some interesting moments.
Liza Minnelli’s ex-husband and I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! contestant David Gest reveals that he wants a quintessentially English house in Cambridge but balks at our practice of installing sinks in the bedrooms (“I would be the cleanest person in the world”) and longs for a proper en-suite off the master bedroom.
Gest, 56, sold his mansion in Memphis, Tennessee and auctioned his rock memorabilia to put in an offer on a five-bedroom Victorian townhouse in Cambridge two years ago but the owners took the house off the market and since then he has been renting a three-bedroom house in St John’s Wood, north London.
Recently, however, he has put an offer in on a £3.5million house in Cambridge.
“The most surprising revelation is about his sexuality,” says Gaby.
“He says that because he married a gay icon, a lot of people assume he’s gay but he says if a man can come forward and say he had a relationship with him, fi ne, but no one has.”
Most of us imagine that famous people can splash the cash on any home they fancy but this is not always the case.
Even VIPs are being careful in the downturn. Gest says he will negotiate for his English retreat and Brendan Cole, the bad boy of ballroom dancing, talks about raising a mortgage for a swanky pad in west London for himself and fiancée Zoe Hobbs.
RIGHT Said Fred brothers Richard and Fred Fairbrass even refl ect a new trend in the market where more than one generation live together to help each other out and save a bit of money.
The pop star siblings plan to sell their homes and move in with their mother.
“They found it very hard to find the perfect country manor house they could all share in Sussex,” says Gaby.
“Instead of getting their dream home, it remains a fantasy. They need to rethink the whole plan.”
Despite their public persona, many of the stars show great vulnerability when looking for a spot they can call home.
Gaby says she wants to mother Lady Victoria Hervey. “Her life is a bit fragmented, with her sister Isabella in rehab.
“Although she speaks about George Clooney trying to pick her up and attending Dustin Hoffman’s parties, the National Trust now owns her family home, Ickworth in Suffolk.
She is keen to get a ‘lock up and leave’ place near Windsor where she can ‘keep horses and commute easily to Los Angeles’.”
And what about Gaby? Does she live in her fantasy home? She says she is “the happiest she has ever been” living in a west London Victorian terrace with her second husband, publisher David Osman, and two children Libbi-Jack, seven, and Amelie, two.
She fell for the area when visiting a friend so when a neighbouring house came on the market three years ago Gaby snapped it up.
“It’s only two minutes from the park where I go every day. There is a gym and cafés nearby and I can walk to Soho in 90 minutes,” she says.
However, Gaby’s fantasies are more prosaic than her celebrities’ and more in tune with our modest daydreams.
“We would love to sort out the tiniest kitchen on the planet but we can’t afford to.
“My dream is to take away the double doors to make the living room bigger but spending money on the kids is more important.”
Our intuitive “therapist” says she knows when a house just isn’t right. When house-hunting a few years ago she found herself bursting into tears and shaking when she reached a back room in one house.
“The estate agent admitted that someone had hanged himself there,” she says.
An equally peculiar incident took place when Gaby took Brendan Cole around a multi-million-pound house off the King’s Road in London’s Chelsea.
“One of the rooms was dedicated to death, which completely freaked me out,” she recounts.
“There were real skulls and eyeballs and the desk calendar stopped on the date the owner died.”
Was Brendan strictly spooked? “He divulged that he goes to fancy dress parties as the Grim Reaper,” says Gaby.
More a case of Celebrity Haunted Homes – the subject of another series perhaps.
Live the dream with Gaby Roslin on Celebrity Fantasy Homes from Thursday, April 30 at 9pm.
