But, a friend says, Jamie is 'a very lucky man'. He wooed her and won her. They married in and have two children, Araminta, seven, and Caspar, six. Edla is 'good news', says an ex-girlfriend, 'I really like her. And she's 'down-to-earth, pleasant, normal - not at all marchionessy', according to one social observer who met her before her elevation.
He had a wild ride in , clocking up a raft of motoring and road-rage offences that saw him jailed for six months. Edla is said to have put her foot down: it was her or the drink and drugs. Gone is the Jamie who'd rampage through the streets of Verbier, where he often spent two to three months a year, 'shooting out the streetlights with a shotgun', as one night club owner told The Sunday Times.
In his place is the 'sweet, kind' Jamie who chanced on a lost Christopher Sykes and his then year-old son and helped them across a treacherous snow trail. Gone is the Jamie accused of racially abusing a Sikh taxi driver.
Instead, there's the Jamie who holidays at the Peponi Hotel in Lamu; the Jamie who, says Patrick Holford, the well-known nutritionist and part-time Lamu resident, is known to all as 'a well-liked, generous, amiable' fellow. I can believe it: one recent dinner companion reports that he's 'a gag-a-minute.
Dog jokes, fart jokes - quite hilarious. Quite rotund, a bit red-faced, but a jolly, avuncular figure. The jolliness was always there, but John Bird, the founder of The Big Issue and himself a man who once slept on the streets, saw a different Jamie when, in , the then marquess took part in a reality TV series called Famous, Rich and Homeless.
The conceit was that rich and famous folk be given a sleeping bag and dumped, penniless, on the streets of London to experience exactly what homelessness was; Bird was one of the presenters.
Jamie made a blustering speech to camera, invoking the Churchill name as a talisman with which he'd face the horrors ahead - despite showing Rosie Boycott, another participant, the bulging wallet he'd secreted amongst the charity clothes all had been given. He promptly slunk off to a Chelsea hotel and spent the night there, leaving his alas, unused sleeping bag in the hotel car park and claiming to have slept in it.
He left the show and was vilified - but not by John Bird, who takes a more nuanced view. It was, Bird told me, 'strange to meet a man so marinated in privilege who was so like the people I worked with and knew from the streets - there is a kind of vulnerability, a desire to be acceptable, having been harmed by others and self-harmed oneself.
If any one man was a walking advertisement that you can be laid low by circumstances, irrespective of how high up the pecking order you may have been born, then it was Jamie.
That he played around and left played into their hands. It is a pity there was no one looking for it. It can be argued that there was. Jamie moved back to the Blenheim estate in and devoted himself to estate duties and the polo team. He won the affection and support of Sunny's fourth wife, Lily Mahtani.
With her encouragement, the late duke performed a volte-face and made it clear, on TV, that Jamie was not only to inherit the title but also to have control of Blenheim - insofar as the trustees let him do so. There had, in Patrick Forbes's film, been glimpses of a combative Jamie, shrugging off the possibility of sharing responsibilities with his half-brother. But when Forbes wondered if Jamie had spoken to his father about giving money to the polo team, he waggishly replied: 'Charity doesn't start at home.
People on the estate liked him, Forbes told me, and were protective of him: 'He's an errant sheep, but he's their errant sheep. And now he's their duke. To John Bird, Jamie is, in retrospect, 'a Prince Hal figure who, on assuming the title, will become a new man.
Because once weight for others than yourself passes onto your shoulders, you become different. I speak from experience. How prepared is he?
It contains an impressive 1, rooms that collectively comprise , square feet of floor space. The Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg which was Leningrad for a time that is now thankfully past was the official home of the Russian Emperors from to The current Winter Palace is actually the fourth of that name. Today the palace and its grounds form the Hermitage Museum. Peter the Great and his family occupied the first imperial residence on the current site of the Winter Palace in It was a wooden home built in the Dutch style , but replaced in by a stone structure, which was the second Winter Palace.
The remains of the latter building form the foundations for the Hermitage Theater today, and parts of the original palace have been restored for the public to see. This third Winter Palace was completed in , but had this form for just 17 years before Rastrelli was commissioned by Empress Elizaveta Petrovna to expand the structure.
After two years of playing around with ideas to adapt the third palace, Rastrelli finally proposed totally rebuilding it, and the Empress approved his new design in The fourth Winter Palace was almost complete when Catherine the Great ascended to the throne in Catherine removed the aging Rastrelli from the project, but his exterior design remains virtually unaltered even today.
The front of the palace rises to a height of 73 feet and city regulations to this day prevent any building in downtown St. Petersburg from exceeding this height. Interior additions and improvements continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Giacomo Quarenghi and Ivan Starov created a new enfilade of state rooms overlooking the Neva River in the s and s. The architect Carlo Rossi was commissioned by Emperor Nicholas I in to add a gallery commemorating the War of As Christmas approached, a fire broke out inside the palace and spread rapidly, destroying much of the interior. The priceless art collections of the Hermitage were saved by the quick thinking of Nicholas I, who ordered the destruction of the three passages between the two buildings.
Nicholas then ordered that the palace be reconstructed within one year, a nearly impossible feat given the construction techniques of the day, but accomplished under the direction of architects Vasily Stasov , who restored the luxurious interior, and Alexander Brullov , who added new and more contemporary designs.
Alexander II , who was assassinated in , was the last of the Russian Tsars to use the Winter Palace as his main residence. It became clear that the building was too large to secure against attack an assassination attempt through bomb detonation in had damaged several rooms and killed eleven guards.
The Winter Palace was still used for ceremonies and receptions, however. The last major event hosted by the Imperial Family was held there in Thousands of striking workers gathered to protest their conditions to the Tsar, whose security forces were given orders by their leaders to fire at will. Nicholas II was not responsible for this tragedy, but it marked the beginning of the end of imperial power in Russia. Nicholas II abdicated in after the February revolution, and the Winter Palace became the seat of the provisional governmen t under Alexander Krenskiy.
The Bolshevik Revolution , when the Winter Palace was stormed in October , was actually against this provisional power rather than the Imperial family. The Winter Palace was declared part of the Hermitage Museum on October 17, , and even though the Bolsheviks removed all imperial symbols from the palace and used it as a museum of the Revolution, the restoration project in the late s and early s to remedy the extensive damage done to the building during the Siege of Leningrad , began the process of restoring the splendor of the palace to the days of Imperial Russia.
The Winter Palace draws around 4 million visitors each year to see its treasures and enjoy the artworks in the Hermitage Museum. The palace itself contains 1, rooms that cover , square feet of floor space.
The mansions of the ultra-wealthy of today, especially those of the nouveau riche , do not have the long history and distinction of royal palaces, so the interest they hold, apart from the opulence they exemplify, is mostly due to the celebrity of their occupants. The structure has 27 storeys, but each floor has the height of two in a normal building, so it stands feet tall, more like a building that is at least 54 storeys high.
It can withstand an earthquake measuring 8 on the Richter Scale. Antilia is the epitome of opulent excess, featuring a variety of luxuries, like a car garage, a ballroom, nine high-speed elevators, terrace gardens, a seat theater, a swimming pool, a spa and health center, a Hindu temple, three helipads, its own air-traffic control, a salon, an ice-cream parlor, several guest suites, and a snow-room that spits out man-made snowflakes from the walls if the heat in Mumbai is too much for its pampered residents.
The top six floors are reserved as private space for the Ambani family. The land on which Antilia is built has a controversial history.
It was originally the property of an orphanage called Currimbhoy Ebrahim Khoja Yateemkhana and the home for 60 orphans. In , the trust that owned the property requested permission to sell the land, and this permission was granted by the charity commissioner three months later. The problem was that the land was allocated for the purpose of educating underprivileged Khoja children, yet it was sold to a commercial entity controlled by Mukesh Ambani. The sale was further in direct contravention of the Wakf Act and this led to a series of court cases, the last of which was dismissed in In any case, there remains a widespread public perception that Antilia is emblematic of the lack of empathy that rich Indians have for the poor in their country.
While Antilia is by far the largest , most expensive, and lavish private residence on the planet considered as a whole structure, it nonetheless is not the most expensive per square foot. The Biltmore House , located on an 8, acre estate in Asheville, North Carolina , is the largest private home in America. Built by George and Edith Vanderbilt between and , it is one of the most ostentatious examples of the mansions of the Gilded Age.
The property still belongs to the Vanderbilt family , but the estate is overseen by The Biltmore Company , a trust that was set up by the family, and it has become a public attraction with restaurants, gift shops, a winery, and a luxury hotel. The interior of the mansion has four floors, not including the basement.
It is equipped with an Otis elevator, centrally-controlled clocks, fire alarms, a call bell system for attendants, and forced-air heating. Its rooms include 35 bedrooms for family and guests, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, and 3 kitchens.
The main rooms of the house are located on the ground first floor. There is a marbled entrance hall, to the right of which is an octagonal sunken winter garden room surrounded by archways and having a ceiling of sculptured wood and multifaceted glass. The Banquet Hall is 72 feet long and 42 feet wide, with a 70 foot barrel-vaulted ceiling, making it the largest room in the house. It contains a dining table that seats 64 guests. At the far end of the Banquet Hall is the Music Room, which houses an organ gallery.
To the left of the entrance hall is a foot-long tapestry gallery that leads to the Library, which is two storeys high and contains 10, volumes in eight languages. The second floor is accessed by a cantilevered Grand Staircase consisting of steps that spiral around a four-storey wrought-iron chandelier requiring 72 light bulbs. The Living Hall on the second floor is a portrait gallery displaying a variety of large-scale masterpieces.
The third and fourth floors have a variety of guest rooms that are named after the furniture designers or artists featured in them, as well as 21 bedrooms that were occupied by housemaids, laundresses, and other female attendants.
Male attendants did not live in the house, but rather in rooms above the horse stables. The fourth floor of the mansion has an Observatory with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the estate. The basement level was home to a variety of activity rooms, including a gymnasium with fitness equipment, a 70, gallon swimming pool with underwater lighting, and a bowling alley.
It also housed the service area where many attendants worked: the main kitchen for food preparation, a pastry kitchen, a rotisserie kitchen, large walk-in refrigerators, laundry rooms, the staff dining hall, and additional bedrooms for the attendants paid to run the estate. Construction of the house began in and was completed in The house was built in an Italian Renaissance style that imitated the 16th-century palazzi and the villas of Genoa, which in turn sought to revive the architecture of ancient Rome.
Characteristic of the style were loggias, that is, covered exterior corridors with outer walls supported by columns and arches. The Breakers has these on the first and second floors, with the second floor having Ionic columns with volutes scrolled ornamentation at the top.
The interior of the mansion has 70 rooms on five floors, including the basement and the attic. The rooms on the ground floor and the second and third floors are arranged around a vaulted central room, the Great Hall.
The third floor has eight more bedrooms as well as a sitting room decorated with walnut paneling in the style of Louis XVI. The north wing of the third floor was reserved for thirty smaller bedrooms that quartered domestic attendants.
The attic contained more staff quarters and general storage, and the basement housed the laundry and staff restrooms.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was a workaholic, died prematurely of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 55 in His wife, Alice, outlived him by 35 years, passing in The Breakers is now the most-visited tourist attraction in Rhode Island, receiving about half a million visitors each year.
When she passed in , she left the property to the National Park Service in the hope that it might be used for state visits or as a Winter White House. Unfortunately, the cost of maintaining the property, as well as the difficulty of making it secure for the President and for foreign dignitaries, led Congress to return the property to the Marjorie Merriweather Post Foundation in Since they expected it to be sold right away, they did not maintain it, and the lack of interest in the property led to it languishing and decaying.
Designed in the s by architect Paul Williams, it sits squarely in what folks in the L. Though I had never heard of Mount Nicholson, Hong Kong before compiling this list, I know I'll be hearing much more about it from now on. This state-of-the-art home is part of the larger Mount Nicholson development which people are gobbling up properties on like hot cakes.
But, the neighborhood is swanky and the building is elite so let me mind my business. People often complain about New York real estate being out of control, but this might take the cake. Located on the Upper East Side and spanning over 15, square feet, it features such ritzy delights as a makeup refrigerator! Located smack-dab in the center of the French Riviera is this estate with many quaint properties. From The Web Ads by Revcontent.
The content you see here is paid for by the advertiser or content provider whose link you click on, and is recommended to you by Revcontent. As the leading platform for native advertising and content recommendation, Revcontent uses interest based targeting to select content that we think will be of particular interest to you. We encourage you to view your opt out options in Revcontent's Privacy Policy. Want your content to appear on sites like this?
Increase Your Engagement Now! Want to report this publisher's content as misinformation? Submit a Report. Much of the grandeur of the Great Hall is attributable to its soaring, Flanked by tiers of marble pillars and archways to lead your gaze upward, the impressive hall epitomizes the triumphal spirit in which Blenheim Palace was built.
State Rooms where the intricate detail of stunning portraits, tapestries and furniture is set against the scale and ambition of the interior architecture.
Originally the master bedroom, the Third State Room is a treasure trove of gilded moldings and masterpieces depicting the glories of the first Duke of Marlborough. The collection of portraits and furniture housed within the Red Drawing Room is one of the most historic in the Palace. Wall paintings by 18th-century French artist Louis Laguerre depict figures from around the world and include a sneakily placed self-portrait of the artist.
Converted from a picture gallery to a library by the eighth duke, the nave-like room stretches 55 meters feet long and reaches almost 10 meters 32 feet high. The Long Library is thought to be the second longest room in any house in England.
It is home to over 10, books collected by the 9th Duke of Marlborough.
0コメント