After more than a year, prices have finally levelled out in prime central London, while outer London saw a small uptick in high-end prices from the previous quarter
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The first quarter of the year brought some long-awaited signs of recovery in London’s luxury housing market, offering the first positive quarterly price growth since September 2022, according to a report from Savills on Wednesday.
After six consecutive quarterly price falls, luxury home prices in central London leveled out in the first three months of the year, with a 0.1% quarterly uptick in prices. The £3 million to £5 million (US$3.79 million to US$6.32 million) market saw a slightly larger increase of 0.3%.
Outer London’s luxury market saw greater quarterly price growth, with home prices up 0.8%, as some stability returned to mortgage costs and lured more buyers back to the market, according to the report.
All of this is evidence that the market is “in early stages of recovery,” according to Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills.
“The outlook for the housing market has certainly improved, partly because the mortgage market has recovered more quickly than expected,” Cook said in the report. “With the first rate cut rapidly coming into view and recessionary risks easing, greater stability has returned to the cost of mortgage debt, which has positively impacted domestic prime markets, where many buyers rely on borrowing, most notably in leafy outer prime South and West London, as well as the commuter belt.”
Outside of London, prices across the U.K. saw no quarterly growth heading into the beginning of the spring market, which is expected to bring higher levels of buyer activity in many regions.
Suburban regions saw prices dip just 0.1%, while urban areas—like Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, and Bath and Oxford in England—saw prices increase by 0.6%.
Cook said regional buyers are more likely to be concerned about market uncertainty than London buyers in the leadup to the general election.
“As a result, buyers are still expected to be less committed until the dust has settled,” he said.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
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A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
