The billionaire owner has dubbed his mansion “enormously grand”
The billionaire Foxtons founder, who is rumoured to live on the world’s most expensive street, also owns a vast 17th century estate, which stretches almost as far as Buckingham Palace.
Jon Hunt acquired Heveningham Hall, the Grade I listed property in 1994 after it had fallen into decline in 1981 following troubles faced by its original proprietors, the Vanneck family. Artist Royston Jones, 77, was adopted by the Honourable Lady Aitken, and spent his childhood years in the opulent hall.
So captivated by the Athenian-style décor, Jones has now transformed the interior of his terraced home to replicate the soaring, high-ceilinged chambers of his first residence. He continues to speak warmly of the building today, reports the Express.
“It’s enormously grand. It’s longer than Buckingham Palace and it stands in the middle of the countryside with a great lake in the valley,” Jones told the BBC.
Heveningham is actually 79 metres long, according to Country Houses of the UK, just shy of Buckingham Palace’s 108 metres. Jones said his love for art and interiors originates from his trips to magnificent estates throughout west Wales and to Heveningham Hall in Suffolk.
Five years after purchasing the ordinary looking terraced house in Swansea, he and his partner Fiona Gray have redesigned it room by room using their own plasterwork and decorative art. However, it is Hunt who will now determine Hevingham’s destiny.
Hunt, who flogged Foxtons for £375million in 2007, is currently valued at approximately £1.4billion. Back in 2005, he was reportedly set to snap up another palatial residence on London’s “Billionaires’ Row” — the globe’s priciest street, Kensington Gardens.
His neighbours include Formula One heiress Tamara Ecclestone alongside numerous ambassadors. The 1846, Grade II-listed property set him back £15.75million, with the initial planning application submitted in 2008. At the heart of his scheme lies an enormous basement designed for his vintage motor collection.
Now, in what appears to be a peace offering to locals, the original 51,129 sq ft basement — equivalent to 55 times the floor area of a typical dwelling – has been reduced from four levels to two.
Heveningham Hall, which 77-year-old Jones describes as the “finest neo classical interior in Europe” and his “spiritual home”, sits in Suffolk, playing host to numerous summer events to maintain its upkeep.
Following his acquisition, Hunt has poured substantial sums into the property and estate, with portions of the grassland and waterways now forming part of the adjacent 5000-acre Wilderness Reserve. The majority of the house was designed in 1778 by Sir Robert Taylor for Sir Gerard Vanneck, transforming a red brick Queen Anne house into a grand mansion.
Christopher Hussey, in his book “English Country Houses: Mid Georgian, 1760-1800,” suggests that “Taylor’s work is, in essence, an exaggeration of Chambers’s contemporary treatment of the north front of Somerset House, like it, deriving from Inigo Jones. But hints from the garden front of Versailles may have contributed to this device for centering an over-long façade.”