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One of the most expensive homes in the world has 45 rooms, four elevators, an indoor pool and sweeping views of London’s Hyde Park.It has not had a real resident in years.What it does have is Anders Fernstedt, a bearded, cheerful Swedish homeless man who has pitched a tent on the front porch and called the mansion home for the past three years.The property at 2-8A Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge sold for roughly $280 million in 2020, making it the priciest residential sale in British history at the time — and one of the most expensive houses in the world. Its 24 marble bathrooms were once encrusted with semi-precious stones.
Its wastepaper bins were coated in 24-karat gold leaf. Now Fernstedt, who has no running water, relieves himself into a plastic bottle at night. “Everest base camp problems,” he told the Guardian.“One has to be clever enough so as not to get out of the bloody tent every time.”The contrast is almost too on-the-nose to be real.
But it is very real, and it is a warning sign that should resonate far beyond London.The property’s history reads like an international thriller.It was assembled in the early 1980s by Lebanese billionaire and future prime minister Rafik Hariri, who knocked together a row of Knightsbridge townhouses to build himself a London palace. After his assassination by a truck bomb in Beirut in 2005, the property passed to a Saudi crown prince, who died in 2011.
Its entire contents, including the jewel-encrusted fixtures and Murano glass chandeliers, were auctioned off in 2015.The 2020 sale appeared to be to a Hong Kong-based billionaire, but was later traced to Hui Ka Yan, founder of the Chinese property giant Evergrande. The purchase was made through a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands.Evergrande began defaulting on its debts in 2021.
The house went back on the market in 2022 for roughly $268 million and did not sell. When transparency laws forced disclosure of the company’s true benefici...