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Inside Dame Barbara Cartland's £40m Mayfair mansion – the house that inspired hundreds of love stories
The prolific romance novelist's former home in Mayfair is on the market for a cool £40 million
It’s the house that inspired hundreds of love stories. So it's fitting that the Mayfair mansion once home to Dame Barbara Cartland, the most prolific romance novelist of all time, has been put up for sale on Valentine’s Day.
The 8,000 sq ft, five-storey townhouse on South Street is available for a cool £40 million – a price tag reflective of modern-day Mayfair that might have made even the racy writer blush.
Dame Barbara was the rom-trash world’s Queen of Hearts so often pictured dressed head-to-toe in her signature pink and trailing chiffon. In her Telegraph obituary in 2000 she was described as a “formidable fairy queen”, with “extravagant, almost clown-like, make-up – her cheeks pulled back with sadly visible bits of sticking plaster”.
A dedicated socialite, she was known to frequent glamorous venues such as The Cavendish Hotel owned by Rosa Lewis, the original celebrity chef who was romantically linked to Edward VII. Tina Brown recalls how “posses of small, yapping poodles in rhinestone collars followed her everywhere she went”.
But behind this eccentric vision of fuchsia and tulle was a razor sharp mind. She published 723 novels and is thought to have sold more than a billion copies in her illustrious 77-year long career. She wrote about feigning damsels and dashing heroes in the post-Victorian era with many a yarn set in her milieu, central London.
She wrote 17 novels in the Forties, most likely in the mansion in South Street; in her later years in the Seventies and Eighties, the speed of her output increased dramatically.
Dame Barbara’s former five-bedroom arts and crafts townhouse sits between Park Lane and Grosvenor Square, in the heart of her old stamping ground. The family moved in before the Second World War started, her son Ian McCorquodale told The Telegraph – although he was vague on dates. Dame Barbara bought the house with her second husband Hugh McCorquodale. He was the cousin of her first spouse Captain Alexander “Sachie” McCorquodale, who she divorced in 1933.
The couple lived there with her daughter from her first marriage, Raine (1929-2016), and their two sons Ian (born 1937) and Glenn (1939).
“It was a lovely home to grow up in and we were very happy there as a family. It was right in the middle of Mayfair and we took long walks in Hyde Park,” says McCorquodale. “We were there for the duration of the war, and it was a long war.”
An 18-year-old Raine was introduced to London high society as a debutante from the South Street house in 1947 and was named “deb of the year”. She was quickly engaged to the Hon Gerald Humphrey Legge, who became the 9th Earl of Dartmoor.
In the Seventies she married John Spencer, the 8th Earl Spencer, becoming a countess and stepmother to Diana, Princess of Wales. According to Tina Brown’s book on the Princess, Dame Barbara once remarked: “The only books Diana ever read were mine, and they weren’t awfully good for her.”
In a case of life imitating art, Countess Spencer’s coming out into society from the grand townhouse nods to her mother’s novel A Virgin in Mayfair, published in 1932. In the story Maxine, the young heroine, is raised in a convent before her sophisticated aunt takes her under her wing to introduce her as a London debutante. Maxine takes up residence in Grosvenor Square before falling for an aristocrat.
In 1950, the McCorquodale family sold up and moved to a country estate called Camfield Place in Hertfordshire. Once the home of Beatrix Potter, the 10-bedroom mansion is nestled in 400 acres of farmland and woods near Hatfield. Dame Barbara died in her sleep at Camfield in 2000 and it remains the family home to this day. Unlike South Street, and despite the upkeep “it’s not for sale”, says McCorquodale.
His was not the first family of standing and fame to live in the prestigious Mayfair mansion. The house was built in 1902 from the shell of a crumbling mid-18th century property. It was designed by Detmar Blow, a starchitect of his day whose clients were chiefly aristocracy. He went on to become estates manager to the Duke of Westminster. It was his first project in Mayfair, commissioned by the stockbroker, art collector and politician Sir Cuthbert Quilter, who lived on South Audley Street.
As soon as it was completed, Sir Cuthbert let it to the Douglas-Home family. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a future prime minister, moved into the new South Street mansion in 1903 as a baby. His premiership was the second-shortest in the 20th century (from 1963 to 1964). However, the highlight of his political career was as foreign secretary (1960 to 1963), when he supported the US in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This property spans many distinct eras. The original red-brick, stone-dressed facade from 1902 is intact, with quoins and modillion cornices, a nod to the style of the late 17th century. The heavy front door is set in a striking stone architrave, behind elaborate French-inspired iron railings.
After Dame Barbara moved out, the property was converted into offices before becoming a home once again decades later. Although the interiors have changed, Blow’s main timber staircase has been preserved, as have the ceilings in the ground floor dining room and first floor drawing room.
There is a Robert Adam marble fireplace in the drawing room that was added to the property in a renovation in the mid-Nineties. The courtyard in the centre of the L-shaped building was glassed over, allowing light to flood all the way down into the lower ground floor.
The current vendors, who wish to remain anonymous, have added the usual luxury mod cons, carving out a wellness suite in the basement. There’s a swimming pool, sauna, a bar and even a double bed suspended over the end of the pool. French doors in the second-floor master bedroom open on to a curved terrace. There’s a larger planted terrace on the first floor and a roof terrace (which McCorquodale recalls fondly) with skyline views.
“The original property and newer additions work well together. From the outside it’s a piece of London heritage, while the interiors and layout offer a fantastic 21st-century lifestyle,” says Becky Fatemi of Rokstone, the agent marketing the property.
This mansion on South Street is one of a collection of illustrious properties put up for sale recently. This is a sign, Fatemi says, of growing confidence in the prime central London property market after half a decade of price falls. She launched Sir Michael Heseltine’s six-storey mansion in Belgravia in the autumn for £28 million.
Peter Wetherell, an estate agent in Mayfair, predicts a sales spike of 50 per cent this year as a result of the “Boris bounce”, boosted by young international buyers.
“Renewed optimism after an extended period of uncertainty has also resulted in a significant number of premium properties being placed on the open market,” adds Mark Pollack of agent Aston Chase. “Some [are being put on the market] for the first time in many years as vendors who were waiting to downsize now make their move.”
Wetherell is selling a 3,541 sq ft four-bedroom apartment in 18 Grosvenor Square for £18.75 million. It was once the Mayfair pied-à-terre of aviation tycoon Sir Frederick Handley Page whose factory made the Halifax bomber used in the Second World War. The Blue Plaque-adorned block was built to the designs of the Grosvenor estates manager, none other than South Street’s Detmar Blow.
It seems new chapters are about to begin for both prime central London and South Street.