A Victory to savour
If you like a small pricetag, Kensington is not the place to buy. The average sale price for a property in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea over the last year is £2.15m, with detached houses averaging £6.94m; this is a place where flats average £1.3m.
However, even in such exalted company, some places command a cost eliciting a low whistle, or perhaps whimper, of awe. Such a place is Victory House, currently rocking a £22.5m pricetag which pops it near the top of the list at Sotheby’s International Realty – no bad neighbourhood itself.
Victory House is named after the road upon which it resplendently rests: Victoria Road, running south from the south-west corner of Hyde Park. Kensington Palace is 600m away, and Victoria Road –formerly known as Love Lane – has often attracted its own elite, from politically-varied aristos the Mitfords to the former king of Malaysia via Dustin Hoffman and Rudolf Nureyev. No wonder it’s frequently calculated to be the most expensive street in the country.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Victory House doesn’t drag down the neighbourhood. The 40-foot wide exterior of the double-fronted, triple-aspect freehold villa speaks quietly of restrained taste, with its classically proportioned windows and a grand but subtle staircase sweeping up to its double front door.
Safely inside, you can take a right into the 23ft dining room, which leads via stairs into a south-facing 24ft reception room. Or you could hang a left into the 23ft kitchen and breakfast room, fitted with a specialist Cormier design from France. Either way, the kitchen and reception both give onto a 21ft outside terrace with fireplace – one of several exterior spaces you’ll find on your wander around.
One is the even bigger roof terrace – in excess of 29ft x 22ft – off the principal en-suite bedroom, itself a sizeable 24ft. This terrace, this time equipped with not just a fireplace but also a TV screen, is on the first floor along with two further bedrooms, served by a family bathroom, and there are another two bedrooms on the lower ground floor; each of these is en-suite, and one has its own kitchen and entrance if that’s where you want to billet a servant or two.
Also on the lower ground is a library giving on to a patio, plus a whacking great cinema room – at more than 28ft, it’s thought to be one of the biggest private cinema rooms in central London, and it’s certainly big enough to have its own bar. That’s not a figure of speech: it really does have its own Parisian-style bar, partly served by the adjacent temperature-controlled wine vault.
If you thought that was the last word in luxury, you want to dig down into the basement spa. Here you’ll find a 39ft x 23ft gym, complete with steam room and changing room, giving on through double sliding doors to a mosaic pool with a projector so you can choose your background to swim against. And when that’s tired you out, you can tiptoe through to yet another patio for some Zen in Ken, musing on your beautiful life.
A house like this isn’t shoddily appointed – for example, the joinery throughout was carried out by yacht makers – so you can expect Italian chandeliers and French fireplaces, furnishings from Fendi and Ralph Lauren, underfloor heating and Lutron-controlled smart-house technology. You can also relax, thanks to the electric gates, off-street parking, Banham alarm systems, CCTV and bomb-proof windows.
Victory House was first listed last year for £24m, almost thrice the price it last sold for – £8.15m in February 2013, per the Land Registry. In Kensington, those days seem a long time ago.
Originally published by Metro newspaper, 14 Feb 2022, then online
