Epic Real-Estate Legal Feuds: Led Zepplin's Jimmy Page Saves His Landmark London House

British music legend Jimmy Page, founder of the legendary rock band Led Zepplin.  (Photo by Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance via Getty Images)Getty

There are rock stars, and there are pop stars.  Jimmy Page is a rock star.  Robbie Williams, formerly of the boy band Take That, is a rather glitzier, and much less meaningful, pop star.   But that rank on the cool-ness meter doesn't mean that Mr. Williams doesn't also make money by the long ton.  The two Londoners, Page and Williams, are also, improbably, close neighbors in London's mansion-strewn Holland Park neighborhood of Kensington and Chelsea.  In fact, their mansions are next door to one another.  And therein lies the rub.

To his credit, Page got there first, buying the iconic Tower House at 29 Melbury Road, a beautiful Grade 1 listed Victorian brick mansion by William Burges, an intellectual architect-luminary of the day who was friends with Oscar Wilde and William Whistler. He built Tower House as his home from 1875-81, done in the French Gothic style, from brick, with stone trim.  It's a fanciful old place, generous and warm, and had after Burges' death a list of well-known owners, including, latterly, the actor Richard Harris, from whom Jimmy Page bought it.

The trend in London when you have a townhouse, or a mansion, with what you believe to be insufficient room, is to expand your real estate footprint downward, into what's being derogatorily called a 'mega-basement.' The mega-basement trend is based on the desire for home gyms, screening rooms, and swimming pools, in other words, spa and other luxe-life fixtures for which no normal house would have room.   And the mega-basement trend is also based on the landmark status of much of central London's structures and ground -- you can't put in an above-ground swimming pool and spa in Kensington and Chelsea.  The planning boards would laugh you out the door.

And so, a glorious multi-million-dollar mega-basement with all the trimmings, including the pool and the gym, was what Robbie Williams and his wife desperately wanted to put in next to Jimmy Page's built-by-hand Tower House.  The problem was, and is, since construction has not begun, that the Williams' proposed mega-basement is so deep and so big that the vibrations from the earth moving and subsequent concrete trucks run the risk of undermining the landmark Tower House foundations, as well as damaging its 150 year-old stained glass and other fittings.  Whoops.  How big is too big?  In Kensington, that may be a mite too big.

 

Epic Real-Estate Legal Feuds: Led Zepplin's Jimmy Page Saves His Landmark London House curated from Forbes - Real Estate