Inside the eight-bedroom mansion in London’s Belgravia sold for £38m

London’s super-prime residential market is off to a strong start after a turbulent 2024, with a £38m eight-bedroom mansion, Belgravia, the first residential property to be sold in the new year.

Complete with a private health spa, swimming pool, and rear and front gardens, the 840sqm property has been sold to a UK buyer – an increasing rarity in the London market, which sold just one in ten of its houses to domestic buyers last year.

Originally one of the London homes of the Ponsonby family, the house has served as the home of residents ranging from diplomats and billionaires for the last two hundred years.

Features include an inner hall, entrance area, a restored original cantilevered, quasi-floating main staircase, and a newly-installed passenger lift.

The mansion has three large reception rooms and a family kitchen on the ground and first floor floors, with five “VIP” bedroom en-suites on the upper floors.

The Regency-era property, which includes a mews house on Kinnerton Street, was acquired by Fairway Capital in 2021. The fund then undertook major refurbishment works on the property, including the reconstruction of a Grade-II listed neo-classical façade.

Fairway Capital said the buyer had waited until the UK general election and Autumn Budget had passed before starting discussions over the purchase, a trend noted throughout the market last year.

The market was further disrupted last year by stamp duty rises to second homes, changes to the non-dom regime and Labour’s decision to remove VAT on private schools.

Overall, London’s ultra-prime housing market for multi-millionaire and billionaire buyers dropped by a quarter in terms of sales and a third in terms of the value of property sold during 2024, according to Beauchamp Estates.

With only a third of super-prime deals – 14 – made last year for properties over £25m, the sale of Wilton Crescent’s mansion is a particularly good sign for the market in the new year.

CEO of Fairway Capital, George Brooksbank, said that there has been a “noticeable return to the prime central London market” in recent months as “buyer confidence has returned”.

He added that the majority of buyers in the latter months of the year have been in their early 30s to early 50s. These buyers – often international – tend to prefer turnkey homes and often purchase either newly built lateral apartments or houses that have had a major refurbishment.

Beauchamp has predicted that the market in 2025 will be driven by buyers from the United States and Middle East, in particular purchasers from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.