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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Business
Ruth Bloomfield

'Absolutely exquisite' giant house built on Grand Designs hits the market with a £4 million price tag

Fancy an elaborate Grand Designs-style house but don’t want to go through the pain of building it yourself?

The solution could be Pavello, a modernist £4 million home that presenter Kevin McCloud described as “absolutely exquisite” when its build was featured on the show in 2015.

It is a grand design in every sense of the word — the largest house to have been featured on the programme at 5,533 square feet and seven times the size of an average UK home.

As well as five bedrooms the minimalist, open plan house features a gym, spa, swimming pool, and is nestled in some five acres of gardens and woodland in the village of Colgate, near Horsham, West Sussex.

The house has a swimming pool set in five acres of gardens (Zoopla)

The scale of the project prompted McCloud to warn at the outset that its owner Clinton Dall, a self-made millionaire who runs a cleaning business, faced  “financial ruin” by taking on a quest to build an “exquisite, perfect gem of a house”.

Indeed the building plot alone cost Dall a cool £850,000 and he estimated the cost of building the single storey white-tiled house, with a 197ft front façade, ended up at around £1.5 million.

The plot of land alone cost £850,000 (Zoopla)

Although scandalised by the cost McCloud was eventually won over by the house’s “glamour and luxury”. 

Initially concerned that it could look more like a museum or a public building than a home for Dall and his four children, his final verdict was that the property, now on sale with estate agent Fine & Country, was close to perfect.

“Despite its huge cost this is modernist architecture at the top of its game… an absolutely exquisite experience,” McCloud concluded.

The house has five bedrooms and floor-to-ceiling glass (Zoopla)

Mr Dall lived at the house and showed off his investment by renting the house out for launches and filming, including a Peter Andre music video and the Ryan Reynolds BT advertisements and, reportedly, a lesbian porn film.

He decided to sell his Grand Design in 2017 and listed it for £3.75 million. The asking price was dropped to £3.5 million the following year. 

Land Registry records show it sold for £3.45 million at the start of 2019. The house is now listed for offers over £4 million, which would represent a 16 per cent profit for its current owner.

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