As Caroline Quentin struggles to impress the viewers of her Tuesday night BBC2 TV show ‘Restoration Home’, we spoke to a couple who have radically restored an apartment on one of Britain’s most famous squares, Brunswick Square in Brighton.

Flashy kitchens or the latest home entertainment gadgets are what tempt most buyers when looking for their ideal home. Few have the vision to see beyond a grimy bathroom, stained pea green carpet or rotting ceilings – but Ricky Paugh and girlfriend Jemma took a leap of faith when they bought a flat in Hove near Brighton, especially the agent told them “I don’t know why anyone would buy this property”.

The ulgly duckling

Ricky, 34, and Jemma say they like unsightly properties. “The uglier the better because we like to add value”, he says. When they bought their one bedroom first floor flat in Brighton’s historic Brunswick Square they were appalled by how disgusting it was. The reception room had been carved up into three small rooms, there was a foul smell and the bathroom was “caked in grime”.

But what attracted them to the run down regency home were the tell-tale signs of its former grandeur in the bedroom, which would have been the main receiving room for guests before the homes were broken up into flats. It had a 14 foot high ceiling with original cornicing and coving yet next door, the lounge had only an eight foot high ceiling.

They “bought it on a whim”, believing that behind the suspended lounge ceiling would also be hidden grandeur. And they weren’t disappointed. Ricky says it was the “greatest find by far” during their ten month renovation. They uncovered completely intact cornicing as well as a centre ceiling rose. There was also ornate Victorian gold-leaf wallpaper still on the ceiling.

A victim of the times

Ricky thinks the ceiling was lowered in the oil crisis of the 70s when people couldn’t afford fuel to keep large rooms warm. The fireplace was also filled in to prevent drafts and the sash windows stuffed with newspaper dating back to the 70s.

The couple have spent £33,000 on the flat and have created a hallway, taken the bathroom out of the bedroom and turned the front room into a large open plan space. As well as revealing the original ceiling, they’ve also unblocked the fireplace and made the windows wind-tight.

Restored coastal home for sale in Brighton

Now, the property is for sale and, being on the beach, would make a seaside bolthole for someone working in London during the week or someone looking for a coastal home which seamlessly blends modern life with traditional features.

Ricky hopes whoever buys it will appreciate its history – the square dates back to the 1800s and the property was once lived in by Sir Horatio George Walpole (the great nephew of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole). And, of course whoever buys it now will be tempted by the flashy new kitchen and gadget-filled bathroom – which includes a plasma TV in the shower.

7, Brunswick Square is for sale with Sawyer and Co for £280,000

So you’ve got a supercar in your garage. Maybe it’s a Ferrari, perhaps an Aston Martin and if you are a fully fledged Clarksonite, possibly a Bugatti Veyron.

It’s a massive asset sitting in your garage slowly gathering dust and depreciating in value. So if cash flow is a problem in your life and you don’t have the £50,000 required to put a deposit down on your yearned-for holiday home in somewhere like Sandbanks, for example, then a specialist and upmarket pawnbroker has set up shop to help out.

Supercars lined the street in London's Mayfair

London based firm TGS suggests that, rather than sell your beloved lean machine to finance the deal, why not just pawn it? More sensitive souls might call it asset-based short term lending, but TGS says it’s just a way to get your hands on cash quickly without involving a bank.

The credit crunch has seen business expand rapidly for the firm as banks have become reluctant to lend on property transactions, even when their clients are wealthy.

Paul Zimbler, who runs TGS and has 14 shops across the capital, says he spotted this gap in the lending market by mistake. Customers had been coming to him for ‘title’ lending – which is when the borrower keeps the car but takes out a small, short-term loan against its value – but notice clients looking to borrow larger sums.

Paul says he then offered to keep the car in return for a larger loan. TGS will lend up to 70% of a vehicle’s value and loans can be for up to seven months – although typically they last one to three.

Recent deals Paul says he’s completed include £60,000 leant against an Aston Martin, £40,000 against a Porsche 911 and £100,000 against a new Bentley, all of which were used to finance property purchases. Most people use the service to pay unexpected bridging loans, finance the costs of moving home including stamp duty, or put down deposits.

PrimeLocation has admired Wayne Hemingway from afar for some time. His career has been extraordinarily diverse starting with a ‘vintage’ clothing stall at Camden Market, London during the 1980s which he developed into fasion giant Red or Dead, and which he and wife Gerardine sold in 1999 reportedly for multi millions.

He then set up a general design practice offering urban (i.e. housing) design, landscaping, garden sheds (sold in B&Q) and much more.

Wayne is also a keen cyclist and is patron of the Sustrans National Cycle Network which he helped win a £50m National Lottery grant a few years back, and has designed an affordable folding bike. Also, he ensures that any of the housing developments he designs (13 so far all over the UK) have full-on cycling facilities.

So given this interesting track record and his almost cult status as a quirky spokesperson for design, we chased him down for an interview. Wayne is not an easy man to catch, nevertheless.

His schedule is manic to say the least plus he’s not prone to smiling in front of cameras, we’ve noticed – no exception in our video – although a member of the team here says a snap they took at an exhibition recently disproves this rule.

Nevertheless Wayne gave us an hour of his time down at his gorgeous, self-built house in near Chichester in West Sussex – and we’ve turned it into a six-minute or so video.

The lavish interior and unusual layout of 120 Kensington Park Road would make it an iconic Notting Hill home even if Robbie hadn’t lived there between 1998 and 2002 after he’d left Take That and moved down to London from Manchester.

It must have seen some life whilst he was there, especially as this was during his ‘wild’ times. He was dating Nicole Appleton, singer with All Saints, whom he got engaged to but was unceremoniously dumped outside the address when they broke up.

Robbie also let Geri Halliwell move into to his home after the Spice Girls split up so she could get away from the paparazzi. But it probably wasn’t the best place for privacy, as it’s over the Paul Smith shop on the corner of Westbourne Grove and right in the heart of Notting Hill with all the shops, restaurants and antique shops just around the corner.

The house is on four floors with a great little sun trap of a roof terrace designed by the vendor’s brother – landscape gardener, Caspar Gabb, a gold award winner of the Chelsea Flower Show in 2006. The current owner completely revamped the property when he bought it four years ago, putting the living room on the top floor and opening it up to the rafters and turning one of the bedrooms into the kitchen.

Now the V-shaped 30 foot long living room has a vaulted ceiling with sky lights and a pale wooden floor. At one end is a section of solid wood with a very real looking contemporary fireplace at the bottom, breaking up the otherwise large expanse of white walls. There are stunning views from this floor and the terrace, with its teak decking and bench, over the roofscape of London and also the very pretty Kensington Park Gardens.

On the second floor is a large kitchen with central work station and dining area. Stretching above this into the reception room above is a curved double height gallery. This feature really makes a difference to both rooms with a glass balustrade set around the top and a stunning light installation hanging down, created by Irish designer, Niamh Barry. There’s also a small bedroom and smart little bathroom with dark grey granite tiling on the second floor.

On the floor below are two en-suite bedrooms, one of which is the master bedroom with large bathroom tiled in marble and a large walk-in shower. The bedroom is very light with four sash windows including the curved corner one and has plenty of fitted wooden wardrobes.

Throughout, the property is very high tech – with Lutron lighting, a Bose integrated music system so you can listen to different music on each floor and pop-up TVs in the living room and at the end of the bed in the master bedroom. The 2,040 square feet property has its own entrance and is for sale through Domus Nova for £3.45 million.

He was famous for his fast driving and even faster personal life and now the former home of James Hunt – the 1970s sex symbol, F1 champion and all round racing legend, is up for sale.

It’s a four bedroom mews house in Normand Mews, West Kensington, London W14 and yours for £2.75 million.

Ok so the smell of petrol smeared racing outfits and Brut after shave has long gone – Hunt left three years after buying in 1980 – but the changes he made to the house linger.

The current owners, Peter and Carol Harrison, say Hunt bought the house (which is in fact two mews homes put together) because the garage had space for his beloved Ferraris and classic car collection.

The property, which is within a gated mews community, witnessed some of his rocky personal life including a marriage to Suzy Miller (who left him for Richard Burton) and also happier times with Sarah Lomax, with whom he had two sons but also later split from.

Changes Hunt made to the addresss – No. 7 & No.8 – during his three year stint there included adding new bedrooms, a 19th century spiral staircase, a domed ceiling in the master bedroom and a Jacuzzi, some of which remain.

But Hunt may not recognise much else now. Recently, the house has been refurbished with state of the art, luxury amenities including an Italian Valcucine glass kitchen and Basalt worktops, an in-wall gas fireplace, a home cinema and a hidden wine cellar with space for 1,060 bottles.

The master bedroom has sliding doors opening on to an astro-turfed sundeck and each room comes equipped with TVs and Sonos Music systems.

Despite these modern-day embellishments, the Harrisons were nevertheless keen that Hunt’s time at the property isn’t forgotten. Several years ago the couple asked English Heritage to put up a ‘lived here’ blue plaque but the rules are clear – only 20 years after someone’s death or 100 years after their birth can it be added. So the couple, keen not to hang around, had their own plaque made instead.

There are several ‘real’ ones in the area, too. Including one for one for Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mahatma Gandi.  There are some less deceased famous faces in the area though, including singer Estelle and TV presenter Konnie Huq.

So where did Hunt after shipping out of the house in 1982? To Wimbledon, and a spell in suburbia before he sadly succumbed to a heart attack in 1993, soon after proposing to what sadly wouldn’t be the third Mrs Hunt.

Mews properties like this have become popular in recent years; they’re quirky, have bags of personality and character compared to the huge houses they’re usually behind.

A pregnant Kate Hudson recently purchased a £4 million Mews house in North London which she will share with boyfriend Matt Bellamy (lead vocalist in Muse) when she stays in London.

This is a guest blog by writer Roger Hunt.

When a plastic window salesman comes to my door I like to keep them talking. Why? Well, it gives me a tiny crumb of satisfaction that I’m wasting their time and maybe stopping them calling on someone who’s going to fall for their sales patter. It’s petty I know but few things upset me more than seeing perfectly good wood windows being replaced with ugly, unsustainable and far from cheap unplasticised polyvinyl choloride or uPVC as its better known.

Windows make up the face of a home and contribute hugely to its character. Estate agents agree. In a survey by English Heritage 82% of them felt that original features such as sash windows tend to add financial value to properties and 78% believed they helped to sell a property more quickly. 

© Boris Baggs, courtesy of English Heritage -an original timber door (left) that compliments the characters of a terrace row of Victorian homes, an effect destroyed by the plastic replacement on the right © Boris Baggs, courtesy of English Heritage

Replacing original windows is incredibly wasteful and it’s worth remembering that the timber used to make them was usually of very high quality. In fact, it’s not uncommon to find wooden windows that are 100 or even 200 years old and still going strong. If they are damaged it’s possible to make relatively inexpensive repairs which is something that’s virtually impossible to do with plastic windows – they invariably get shipped off to landfill.    

 Modern wood windows made from sustainably sourced timber by reputable firms are of a high standard and are expected to last at least 60 years. With plastic windows it’s not unusual to see signs of deterioration quite early in their life despite claims they’re ‘maintenance free’. That’s why there’s now special paint to “transform weathered and discolored uPVC”.

 The common argument for replacing wood windows is energy efficiency but this is largely down to the glazing within the window rather than what the frame is made of. Wood itself is extremely thermally efficient and there’s lots you can do in terms of draught proofing and adding secondary or double glazing – specialist companies can help with this.  
 When it comes to sustainability, wood is naturally renewable and as trees grow they soak up CO2 from the atmosphere. uPVC is a product of the petrochemical industry. 

 Then there’s that all important question of price. High performance, double-glazed timber windows need cost no more than their PVC-U equivalents: research for the Wood Window Alliance reveals that wood windows work out between 2-7% cheaper than uPVC over their lifetime.

 So what are you going to do next time the plastic window salesman comes calling? I’m going to carry on talking!

Roger Hunt is one of the UK’s leading architectural, environmental and property writers. Follow him on Twitter at @huntwriter.

If you’ve ever looked at the stars of BBC TV show Dragon’s Den and wondered how much they have made during their time at the top, then recent comments by the suavest of them all, James Caan, shed some light on the subject.

After quitting the show recently saying his was too busy to continue being on camera, Caan has now said he wants to become a banker to anyone seeking to invest in central London’s still-hot super prime property market. The idea, he revealed in an interview this week, is that he wants to step in and offer financing to developers to buy, do up and then sell on properties in London’s central billionaire belt – Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Chelsea.

Nothing too unusual in that – there are dozens of people involved in similar upmarket property development partnerships all over Britain – but the interesting aspect of this is that Caan is taking advantage of the banking sector’s reluctance to lend at the moment particularly as his idea is, although very creative, too risky for instituional investors at the moment and so Caan hopes to mop up in this niche but potentially very profitable mini-market.

At the centre of the plan is the idea to employ ‘celebrity designers’ to create ‘four star hotel’ homes and Caan name dropped the Candy Brothers, the duo behind the recent launch of the world’s most expesnive apartment block in Knightsbridge, One Hyde Park. This is a relatively new concept in British design, and is one borne out of the huge increase in the number of high net worth individuals. Interior designers such as Kelly Hoppen, Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen and Linda Barker might be famous for their appearances on TV and in the papers, but their bread and butter is designing homes for the wealthy, following in the footsteps of Robert Adam, Charles Rennie Macintosh, Corbusier and Frank LLoyd Wright. But the Candy Brothers, and now James Caan, are among the first to put sumptious and expensive interior design so publicly at the centre of a business idea.

But what Caan’s announcement also reveals is that, despite a cooling property market in most areas of the UK, central London is a booming oasis of super prime properties – for example one-bedroom flats for under £500,000 are rare in many areas. But unless you walk around these postcodes on a Saturday, then you probably won’t quite know how cosmopolitan they have become. Central London is now the preferred address for a variety of wealthy international business people – far outstripping Milan, Tokyo or New York in the popularity polls. The customers Caan and his co-investors will be selling their refurbished homes to will be the Singaporean, Russian, Middle Eastern and Chinese millionaires and billionaires who yearn to call our capital’s richer postcodes their first or second homes. They’re  attracted by our wide range of industries, the City, our famous name public schools and the huge choice of properties in London – from super-modern riverside apartments groaning with glass, steel and Philippe Starck to faux-Victorian mansions in Hampstead.

And if you are wondering where Caan got the idea for his venture then a close look at the guest list for the launch of One Hye Park reveals that he was there tucking into the fabulously upmarket canapes and no doubt asked the Candy Brothers ”can we have a minute to discuss this’ after which all parties said ‘I’m in’.

Prince William and Kate Middleton

We know about the engagement ring, the proposal and that the wedding itself is happening sometime next summer, but what we’re all still waiting to find out is where Prince William and Kate Middleton will make their marital home.

So far, it seems most likely the royal couple will put down roots in a house that the Prince of Wales has been building on his Harewood Park estate in Herefordshire, a farm he bought back in 2000 in border countryside between Monmouth and Ross-on-Wye.

William’s father is reportedly in the process of spending between eight and nine million pounds turning the once run-down estate into an eco-farm, including the creation of a ‘green mansion’ in an undisclosed location within its 900 acres of rolling countryside that is said to be earmarked for William’s – and now Kate’s – use.

The property – which is under construction – is a restored and enlarged six-bedroom farmhouse that’s also a model of environmental friendliness and will include a reed-bed sewage system, wood chip boiler, solar panels and walls lined with insulating sheep’s wool.

The really good news is that Ross-on-Wye locals are likely to welcome their new royal neighbours with open arms, according to Richard Butler, owner of the local Richard Butler Estate Agents, who says the property is worth in excess of two million pounds and is of a “phenomenal size”.

“It would be very good news for the area,” Butler says.

“Once it’s finished, it will probably be one of the better, if not the best properties of its style in the whole of Herefordshire.”

For the past year or so during their ‘extended courtship’ William and Kate have been living in a secret location on the island of Anglesey while William does a three-year stint as a search and rescue helicopter pilot at RAF Valley. The property, which is a whitewashed farmhouse, is being rented for £750 a month and very much off the beaten track and has access to a private beach.
 
Melfyn Williams, chairman of the Wales-based estate agent The Property People, says the island’s locals would also dearly love to the see the couple make their permanent home in Anglesey.

“It’s a lovely part of the country, it’s got sandy beaches and rugged mountains and is close to where Prince William is currently working.”
 
The Harewood Park estate won’t be the couple’s only likely address. When staying in London William and Kate will have an apartment in Clarence House to use as well, not to mention Kate’s parents’ place in Bucklebury, Berkshire, where until recently a bedroom had been set aside for her use.

George Clarke is a busy man; TV’s pin up architect has just finished starring at this year’s Grand Designs Live at the NEC but our reporter Cheryl Markosky tracked him down before he went to get the low down on ‘Gorgeous George’ – who turns out to be much more than just a pretty face.

George has some interesting political views about the recession, the banking industry and the housing industry. Read our exclusive interview.

I’ll admit to having Wimbledon fever. It happens every year. I get giddy for two weeks.

So if you ask me to leave my prime viewing position on the sofa, you had better make sure the match has finished. Otherwise I’m going to be very late indeed (those five set matches are always an issue).

This time of year, everyone will be swarming the area to watch Andy Murray as he battles to win the title. But Wimbledon is actually a very lovely place to live all year round.

It’s in the quieter part of London and, frankly, is all the better for it.  Plus, you’re close to Richmond, and that, in my eyes, can only be a good thing.

Let’s have a look at some homes in the area.

Ace – £7,750,000

I love this property. There’s something so old-fashioned about it. It’s an Edwardian building and I can imagine there being wonderful Brideshead Revisited style parties here.

There would be nothing but fun in this home. Garden parties, champagne cocktails before dinner and all sorts of entertainment (yes, I think it would be fun to live in aristocratic England. Is that weird?)

But what do you get for your millions? Well aside from the stunning gardens, you’ll get nine bedrooms and seven bathrooms (and those bathrooms are amazing).

You’ll also get five reception rooms for all of your swanky soirees. I’ll expect my invite in the post.

Advantage – £1,150,000

If you’re looking for somewhere right by the All England Tennis Club, this home will be perfect.

Very handy after playing a couple of sets before dinner. You get the benefit of an indoor pool and some lovely looking gardens as well.

There’s a games room and five bedrooms too. Not bad for just over a million. If you happen to have that lying around, of course.

Maybe Andy Murray could buy this with his potential winnings?

Deuce – £309,950

This flat has many things going for it, not least off-street parking, which is pretty important in London.

The flat has one bedroom with en-suite and really spacious rooms. You get a balcony as well.

It’s a great option for a professional couple looking for a home to settle in, but still within easy reach of central London.

Love-Fifteen – £145,000

If you’re looking for a small flat in the area, you could do a lot worse than this property. It’s near both mainline stations and the underground, and it has everything you need.

Best of all, there’s no stamp duty. This is an expensive area of London so it’s nice to know that you can still find somewhere that’s good value, but has all the perks of living in this much sought after area.