Filed under: Celebrity Homes
Certainly with Salma Hayek standing in it, the room -- any room -- looks better. But when her father-in-law, Francois Pinault of Gucci fame, dropped a whopping $32 million for an historic brick mansion in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, eyebrows were raised. Why? The unit only has two bedrooms, and spending $32 million on anything against the backdrop of the European debt crisis seems, well, excessive.
Pinault, founder of the luxury conglomerate PPR, is expected to totally remodel the unit, which was featured as Uncle Monty's bachelor pad in the 1987 cult comedy film, "Withnail and I," according to the Telegraph, which broke the story.
The idea of a renovation to the triple-height ceiling Queen Anne revival property (pictured left) probably has the seller, the famed designer Prof. Bernard Nevill, twitching all the way to the bank. Nevill, the father of "shabby chic," spent decades redoing the interior. Much of the contents were auctioned this summer through Christie's, South Kensington.PPR, now run by Hayek's hubbo Francois-Henri, owns the luxury brands Gucci, Stella McCartney and Yves Saint Laurent. The company's annual revenues last year were around $20 billion.
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