Wellington Kicks the Candy Brothers off the Number One Spot

Nick and Christian Candy are landlords of London’s most exclusive residence.  The most expensive penthouse apartment in this most expensive block of flats has just been sold for £140,000,000. The address? One Hyde Park.

It has been four years in the building. A four year traffic jam from Hyde Park Corner to the Cromwell Road while the Candys' exclusive drills and acclaimed cranes assembled the legendary girders and struts of this iconic residence. (You must visit the website: it’s a marketing masterpiece.)

From where I sit (on the unfashionable side of the park) I cannot fathom the appeal of living above a tube station, in a building that will be empty for much of the year (too many nights in the penthouse will attract the attention of the Revenue,) with only despots, oligarchs and arms traders for company.

Besides, it’s only the second best address in the capital. Five minutes up the road is Apsley House which trumps the Candys in the postcode lottery with the address 'Number One, London.'

It is a beautiful and under-visited house. Originally built in the 1770s by architect-entrepreneur Robert Adam for Henry Bathurst, 1^st Baron Apsley, it was sold to the Wellesley family in 1807. In 1817, feeling flush after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington bought the house from his brother and set about renovating and enlarging the property with the help of architect Benjamin Dean Wyatt.

Wyatt ripped out much of the original Adam decoration and replaced Adam’s delicate vines and painted medallions with a bolder, brasher scheme: lots of gold and cream, lots of silk and velvet, and a superabundance of mirrors, crystal and general glitter. As a final mark of victory over the French, Wellington appropriated the decorative style of Versailles and Napoleon’s Malmaison for his London town house.

Mementoes of Wellington’s success hang on every wall and much of the collection is post-battle booty. There’s an ugly portrait of Napoleon, looking tubby and toad-faced, by Robert Lefevre on the first floor and Canova’s larger-than-life statue of the Emperor (with its smaller-than-life fig leaf) glowers in the stair-well. 

The Waterloo Gallery houses 165 paintings from the Spanish Royal Collection, discovered in the luggage of Joseph Bonaparte, as he tried to make a run for it after the Battle of Vitoria.

Robert and John Adam were the Candy Brothers of their day. They built big, they built expensive and they built for the super rich. But will One Hyde Park one day be preserved for a grateful nation by English Heritage? I don’t suppose so. There can only be one number one.