International Real Estate rumor has it that Russian oligarch and globe-trotting trophy property collector Roman
Abramovichmay have purchased a humongous house on Kensington Palace Gardens, the most expensive and security conscious gated enclave in all of hyper-pricey London.
Did y'all get that? This is just rumor and gossip at this point. Your Mama did not find any reports on the
interweb that provide or claim definitive proof Mister
Abramovich actually bought the house in question, a gleaming white, civic-looking
Neo-Georgian limestone edifice owned by Belgian hedge hogger Pierre
LaGrange and his wife Christina.
At least one report from mid-August
relayed whispers that the wildly wealthy lover of
�ber-luxurious living was interested in Mister and Missus
LaGrange's behemoth house on
KensingtonPalace Gardens. Those property gossips heard through the real estate grapevine the LaGrange's mansion was quietly available for around �30,000,000. More recent reports, such as in the
Daily Mail, suggest Mister
Abramovich may have paid somewhere in the neighborhood of �90,000,000 for the house that reportedly has upwards of 12 to 15 bedrooms. We have no idea why there's such a wild discrepancy between the gossiped-about price tag and reported sale price. Make of that what you will children.
Most discussions of the matter indicate the
LaGrange mansion is currently under construction with a massive subterranean extension to include an a "health centre," private museum, and indoor tennis court. Whaaaat? Do these reports mean that an indoor underground tennis court is planned? That sounds awfully odd, doesn't it? Would this be the first and only private residence in London with an indoor
and underground tennis court?
Listen chickens, despite our daily intake of the devil's water Your Mama has been known to scoot our fat backside out on to the tennis court every now and then. That's why we know of what we speak when we tell the children y'all need a very high ceiling to accommodate an indoor tennis court. Do the children understand just how far a person would have to dig down in to the firmament below London to allow for a ceiling sufficiently high for the wild, top-spinning arches for which our boozy b.f.f. Fiona
Trambeau is famous? Yes, puppies, she may be a walking, talking and often drunk disaster but when ol' Fiona steps on to the tennis court in her high-heeled platform sneaker-shoes
beehotch does it down something fierce like that shrieker Maria
Sharapova.
Anyhoo, Your Mama can't claim any intimate or actual knowledge of what goes on in Mister
Abramovich's multi-billionaire brain but most reports suggest he and his art loving heiress baby momma Daria
Zhukova have grown weary of the planned expansion and renovation of a decidedly decadent double-wide townhouse on
Lowndes Square in London's
hoity-
toity Knightsbridge neighborhood.
When and if
completed as planned, Mister
Abramovich'sLowndes Square residence would measure an epic 30,000 square feet and include�according to the 2009 floor plans Your Mama had the pleasure to peep�multiple elevators, 8 bedrooms plus several staff apartments, a drawing room that spans the full width of the two townhouses, a swimming pool in the basement, and a sprawling full-floor master suite comprised of bedroom, two large bathrooms, two large windowed dressing rooms�one with walk-in safe�and a service kitchen/pantry connected to the subterranean main kitchen via a dumbwaiter.
In mid-March 2011 Your Mama discussed a rambling 13,000 square foot mansion on London's bohemian-chic
Cheyne Walk that Mister
Abramovich reportedly purchased for around $40,000,000. This house was to be a temporary residential weigh station until the work on the yacht-loving jet setter's house on
Lowndes Square is finished.
If these newest reports are true�and we really don't know if they are or are not�it appears that Mister
Abramovich would scrap the planned expansion of his mansion in ritzy
Knightsbridge, bail out of his house on Cheyne Walk and high-tail it to the even more exclusive and expensive
Kensington Palace Gardens where other residents include
bajillionaire industrialists like Lakshmi
Mittal,
Foxtons founder Jon Hunt, a Saudi royal or two and a long list of international ambassadors. We shall see, puppies, we shall see.
In addition to his London property holdings�whatever exactly they may be�Mister
Abramovich's property portfolio bulges with
more than a dozen homes in far-flung and
exorbitantlyhigh-priced locales that include Moscow, the
C�te d'Azur,
St.Barts in the
Carribbean, and Aspen, CO.
photo: Chris Eades via The Daily Mail 
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In the comedy �Her Alibi,� Tom Selleck plays a murder-mystery writer who falls in love with the beautiful Paulina Porizkova, who may or may not be a murderer. I loved it when it came out in 1989, and his house in Connecticut was a big reason why.
The first shot of the interior of the house is a long, lingering pan across the stone-walled great room and up the open staircase to the front door as Phil Blackwood (Selleck) and Nina (Porizkova) walk in:
As I was researching this post, I thought it was interesting to learn that the Production Designer was Henry Bumstead and the Set Decoration was done by James W. Payne, the same team that worked on another one of my favorite movie houses�Funny Farm. (You can see my post about that one here.)
Tom Selleck was 44 when he made this movie. �Magnum, P.I.� had just come to an end of its 8-year run, and he�d had a hit with �3 Men and a Baby� two years before (1987).
Paulina Porizkova, one of the original Supermodel Celebrities of the �80s, was born in Czechoslovakia. She was 24 when she made this movie and married Ric Ocasekthat same year. They�re still together and have two sons.
The kitchen doesn�t look too outdated, really�which is surprising considering that this was the �80s, and �80s decorating doesn�t always age well:
There�s a windowseat in the kitchen:
From this angle you can see the arched window above the kitchen cabinets:
The Guest Room that Nina stays in has an arched window, too:
Phil�s Bedroom:
When Phil has a dream about Nina coming into his bedroom to kill him in the middle of the night, we get to see all of the rafters and what appears to be a loft above his bed:
Phil�s Writing Study has a desk in the dormer:
Did you know Tom Selleck was �thisclose� to being Indiana Jones instead of Harrison Ford? To take the role he would have had to break his �Magnum, P.I.�contract, and he didn�t think it was right to do that.
Phil talks on the phone in the lower-level family room, moments before Nina accidentally shoots him with an arrow from the backyard:
Nina takes a late-night swim in the pool:
Moments later, the house blows up, and suspicious minds think Nina might have had something to do with it:
But never fear�the house appears to be completely intactand undamaged in the scenes that follow (that�s the kind of movie this is�you can�t think about any of the plot points too hard!).
Nina practices her archery skills in the backyard, giving us a look at the back of the house:
Does anyone else remember seeing this movie in the �80s and falling in love with the house? Do you still like it after all these years?
International Real Estate rumor has it that Russian oligarch and globe-trotting trophy property collector Roman Abramovichmay have purchased a humongous house on Kensington Palace Gardens, the most expensive and security conscious gated enclave in all of hyper-pricey London.
