King Property tycoon Nick Candy has sold himself his own penthouse in One Hyde Park for £160m – smashing records for Britain’s most expensive home ever sold.
Candy, who developed One Hyde Park with his brother Christian, has owned the two-storey B.10.01 penthouse since the luxury Knightsbridge development was completed in 2009. It can now be revealed that Candy sold the property this summer to offshore companies he controls in Guernsey in order to remortgage it with an £80m loan from Credit Suisse.
Candy, 45, who previously lived in the apartment with his wife, the singer and actress Holly Valance, sold the apartment to PHB London Holdings Ltd in Guernsey.
The transaction was recorded by the Land Registry as a sale, making it by far the most expensive property ever sold in the UK. But a spokesman for Candy explained that the tycoon owned PHB London and therefore still owned the B.10.01 penthouse. “I can confirm that this is indeed a refinancing rather than a sale,” the spokesman told the Times.
The apartment, which occupies the top two floors of block B of the famous development has two wine cellars, two underground parking spaces and balconies overlooking the park.
The £160m recorded price exceeds the previous UK house price sale record of £140m for Park Place, a stately home near Henley-on-Thames, which was bought by Russian exile billionaire Andrey Borodin in 2011. Russian authorities have accused Borodin of overseeing a 13bn rouble (£150m) fraud while he was running the Bank of Moscow.
The previous One Hyde Park record selling price was £140m for the penthouse in block A in 2014, and the £137m sale of a triple-storey penthouse sold to Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov in 2011.
