PrimeLocation recently paid a visit to Rosedale Abbey in North Yorkshire and was surprised to discover a hornet’s nest of unhappy home owners rather than the genteel moorland community one might expect.

Publican sought? The Milburn Arms in Rosedale Abbey within the North York Moors.

Tempers are getting frayed over proposals to turn a defunct pub into a boarding house for wayward youth from nearby Grimsby. But why would this interest a wider audience?

Firstly, The Milburn Arms, as it was known until closing in 2008, is owned by multimillionaire and Tory party donor David Ross, best known as founder of mobile phone firm Carphone Warehouse. But what’s really stirring up local passions is their fight for a place to gather, something that touches a raw nerve in the thousands of small communities across the UK facing reduced services.  For example, last year 1,300 pubs closed down and this year 1,000 village stores face closure as the recession bites.

The Milburn Arms story started when Ross, flush with the millions he made from Carphone Warehouse, bought the Rosedale Estate, a shooting estate that once belonged to one of the North East’s richest mining and shipping families, the Milburns – and after which the pub is named.

The pub is part of the estate but the business had been going badly for its landlord, who had paid £100,000 for it in 1983 and coughed up £27,500 a year in rent, Land Registry enquiries reveal.

David Ross pictured with (from LtoR) former wife Shelly, David and Samantha Camera at the 2006 Conservative Party Summer Party in London.

In the 2008 The Milburn Arms closed down and this is when the fun started. The estbalishment, which is really a hotel, pub and restaurant rolled into one, was then mooted by Ross as an extension of the Havelock Academy, a school in Grimsby he helps fund. The hotel would have then become the residential block for children from the academy attending outward-bound style courses in the surrounding North York Moors.

Locals, including celebrity glass blower Gillies Jones, believe Ross isn’t keen to find another landlord for the pub while a change of use application for an educational establishment is prepared for the local council – something that Ross, who is said to have a ‘personal interest’ in The Milburn Arms, denies.

In the meantime, one of Yorkshire’s most famous villages favoured by walkers, mountain bikers and tourists has only two small tea shops, no pub and, ironically, PrimeLocation noticed while there, very little mobile phone coverage.

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.

Ahead of Grand Designs Live at the end of this month, Primelocation went to see the star of the show, Kevin McCloud, during which he held court about his eco-homes development called The Triangle, in Swindon, nearing completion – and his vindication following its unexpected success.

At the moment, your company Hab is involved in building 42 eco homes in Swindon. What’s the response been like?

The response has been extremely good. We’ve now allocated our social housing tenants, they are in 21 of the homes and the other 21 homes are going not to open market sale but we’ve done sort of open market rent-to-buy and open market home shared ownership. We’ve had a fantastic, overwhelming response. Which after five years of work on the scheme is a wonderful vindication.

Kevin McCloud's eco-homes project, The Triangle in Swindon

So were people sceptical about the project?

One property developer said to me, you’ll never sell temporary housing, you’ll never sell terraced housing, people want detached and they want traditional with little lead porches. I said, really? They said, yeah, it’s safe. People like the idea of safety, they like the idea of a building which will never age. I said well what about the fact that all the interior layouts are useless and that you’ve got huge amounts of circulation space in tiny rooms? He said, no, that’s not right, people don’t want it. And I honestly thought at that point, no you’re wrong, people do respond to good design.

What is it you think people want?

Five million people watch Grand Designs, they’ve come to understand the principle of compression and release, what a big white window will do for you, what a high ceiling will do for you, what a view of the sky will do for you. They’ve come to understand that to be given a tiny, low ceiling hutch isn’t good enough and it’s lovely to be vindicated in a very quiet way.

What are the properties in the development like?

We’re building terraced houses, really, really affordable, standard housing association budget stuff with small gardens, but lots of shared space. With small bedrooms, but with a larger sitting room. With small parking spaces, but a big shared garden and playground area. And so we give, we take; we try and play tricks.

Do you think this way of living will be successful?

In a way the big moment of judgement will not be the day that everyone moves in at all, it will be a period over the following year, as we see people, we hope, form their own community, it may not work, we don’t know, but pray God it does and pray God that they don’t decide collectively, because they can, to tarmac over the vegetable garden and turn it in to a car park.

Read more of our exclusive Kevin McCloud interview and get half price tickets to Grand Designs Live.

The hype around Britain’s most expensive apartment, One Hyde Park, has clearly been designed to appeal to the world’s elite but despite the super prime prices and the cache of the location, its real address is more pedestrian.

Despite being called One Hyde Park in reality the area’s humble posties, white van men and upmarket pizza joints will be delivering to ‘The Residence at Mandarin Oriental, 68- 114 Knightsbridge’. Which doesn’t roll off the tongue as expensively as One Hyde Park – as some purchasers have been remarking on, Primelocation has heard.

This sort of promotional wheeze is not unusual. Property developers often give their bricks and mortar a chic name to draw in buyers (such as Bezier, Fusion Heights or Octagon Park) but, once the properties are sold, revert to their more humble address.

And One Hyde Park is no different. Numbered properties around Hyde Park in London SW1 don’t exist so the only way the Middle Eastern bigwigs and Kazakhstani oil barons who’ve bought within the development will get a ‘Hyde Park’ on their gas bill is to consider a move to nearby roads. These include Hyde Park Street, Hyde Park Crescent, Hyde Park Gardens and Hyde Park Gate.

One Hyde Park is not the only made-up address in London; just down the road there’s Aspley House, No. 1, London.  This Grade 1 listed mansion in Knightsbridge was once the home of the Duke of Wellington. However like One Hyde Park, the real address is 149 Piccadilly, W1J 7NT; No. 1 London might not be recognised by the Royal Mail as a delivery address.

Similarly, if One Hyde Park is going to be used as an address, the site’s developers will either have to ask Royal Mail to have One Hyde Park added (which so far they haven’t) or petition The London Borough of Westminster to rename the road; otherwise it won’t be recognised by the postal or emergency services.

This is unlikely because a suffix added to an existing road such as ‘Hill’ or ‘Way’ is the usually the only way a new road can be created. So far all this hasn’t put off potential buyers, as one of the penthouses was recently purchased and broke the world record for a property of its size at £120m, bought by a tycoon from Kazakhstan.

This is now the most expensive penthouse in London as the previous record holder was 8 St James Square. And why wouldn’t you want to live there when the building offers residents exclusive access to a cinema, 21m swimming pool, saunas, a gym, a virtual games room and a golf simulator; as well as a private underground passage to the Mandarin Oriental (which will be used to deliver room service) plus a 60-strong army of staff at your beck-and-call, 24 hours a day?

Maybe you want to swap your small flat in London for a cottage in the country, or cash in your urban semi for a farmhouse. Because if you yearn for a rural idyll then the ideal opportunity has arrived to find it.

All tomorrow (April 14th) a clutch of leading country agents are gathering at Battersea Arts Centre for the Move To The Country Show. Now in its fifth year, it is open to anyone who fancies trading in their Oyster Card for walking boots and a life of locally sourced food and home grown vegetables. The good thing about the show is you don’t have to grind out of London to go visit the estate agents – because instead they’ve come to you.

The show features 33 hand picked country agents and relocation agents; ready to sell Londoners the advantages of living in the country.

Held in The Grand Hall at the Battersea Arts Centre (pictured, below), the show attracts young families and retirees who are tired of the high cost of living and the growing crime rate in London. So the show is a boon for those looking to buying property as an investment or people who are just interested in a lifestyle change and “looking for a better quality of life for their family”.

There will be a wide array of properties for sale or to rent from cottages and country estates to castles. Agents will be present to sell you on the benefits of all local services; shops, schools, pubs, and the joys of commuting,

The Move to the Country Show is on April the 14th in the Battersea Arts Centre; from 1pm to 7pm.

Journalist Liz Jones has made a career of upsetting people and no more so than when she move three years ago to Devon from central London to take up a more bucolic lifestyle.

Liz Jones: Moved to Devon to escape to the country, but ended up annoying the locals

Regularly pictured with her horses for newspaper and magazine columns, Jones did her best to be waspish about the locals and wrote a book about her new life managing a 46-acre farm near Brushford, called The Exmoor Files: How I Lost A Husband And Nearly Found Rural Bliss.

But by last summer Liz Jones had tired of the area after someone took a pot shot at her mail box late one night, and she later put the property on the market for £1.9 million – saying she wanted to live somewhere smaller, with more land for her growing menagerie of animals, and more remote.

For sale: Upcott Farm near Brushford in Devon, home to Liz Jones

But eight months down the line and her lack of popularity with the locals may have come home to roost – Upcott Farm remains unsold thus far and Jones has dropped the price by £150,000 to £1.75 million to help push through a sale.

Kelly Hoppen, stepmum of Sienna Miller, has just put her £6 million Notting Hill townhouse and one of Primelocation’s regular writers Cheryl Markosky has been to see it. So what does the inside of an internationally-famous designer’s London bolthole look like?

Apparently it’s no surprise that flame-haired designer Kelly Hoppen is selling her four-storey house on a pretty crescent near Portobello Road. The ‘Queen of Cream’ is known for buying a ‘fixer-upper’ every few years, remodelling it, snapping it for photo-shoots and then moving on. Much like her famous boyfriends (Guy Ritchie, Nicky Clarke, Sol Campbell), who have come and gone in quick succession too.

Yet, the 51-year-old South African-born, MBE holder has ‘lure-in-the-guys’ masculine tones in the Georgian terrace, which she bought in 2008. Think dark grey Boffi kitchen, arty picture of Mohammed Ali sparring on the beach and industrial grey resin flooring.

Cheryl says it’s also unashamedly Sex in the City girly. Velvet cushions, antique mirrors, and sparkly crystal Spina light chains show the softer side of this cool-headed customer.

The layout is a bit weird, though. To get to the frothy party frocks you have to traipse down to the basement. There they are – next to the gym. With the master bedroom and en suite way up on the top storey, who needs the workout?

“It’s a problem not having the dressing room on the same floor as my bedroom, and it’s not big enough,” Hoppen told Cheryl. “In my last home (a New York loft-style Battersea apartment), the dressing room was the size of the kitchen.”

As well as the misplaced gym, there’s that other Hoppen sport: the much-mocked taupe, which is lay terms means a grayish brown colour. Her ‘perfectly neutral’ paints range from Kelly’s Taupe to The Perfect Taupe, and even In Love With Taupe. Although, Cheryl says it’s hard to tell which is which.

Still, you have to admire the woman’s organisation. In the time it takes us to hunt down the missing screw in an IKEA flat-pack, Kelly has renovated the house. In five months she has rewired, re-plumbed and dug under the garden to unearth a basement.  But, is it worth a colourful  £6 million? Perhaps the price needs to be a bit more beige to match La Hoppen’s walls.

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.

Last week Primelocation spent half an hour in the presence of the ever-quirky Kevin McCloud, presenter of Channel 4′s Grand Designs; we were there to discuss his role at Grand Designs Live, the show version of the TV series which, if you haven’t been yet, is a cross between a home renovation-cum-self-build event and a green festival which, this year, is at Excel in London from 30th April to 8th May.

Whether on TV or sat in front of you, it’s obvious McCloud has not been manufactured by the TV machine and is a rare example of a heavyweight thinker who’s successfully brought a subject alive that in the hands of other presenters can often seem glib and/or mechanical. Face to face McCloud sweats excitement and enthusiasm for his subject and his favourite words are ‘fabulous’, ‘insulation’, ‘beautiful’, ‘special’, ‘quirky’,’ individual’ and ‘lovely’. But he’s not annoying to listen to – simply because McCloud has real passion for his subject by the rainwater butt load.

Nevertheless McCloud has a harder side too. Rumour has it he requires the exhibition organiser to attain the same green building standards he admires in so many of the houses featured on the programme. For example, exhibitions tend to use acres of cheap but garish carpeting that is only used once but McCloud is said to have requested that the flooring for the Grand Designs Live show was recyclable.

But the point he was keenest to make during his almost speed-dating style interview with us at London’s fashionable Charlotte Street Hotel in Fitzrovia, is that building your own home shouldn’t just be for the well off and that one day soon it will be a natural choice for all and sundry to build their own eco homes. And he’s putting his money where his mouth is. McCloud’s design firm Hab is backing a string of green, affordable and community-based housing developments in the SW, which includes The Triangle in Swindon but with more coming to fluition soon.

And if you want to find out about Hab’s schemes and see McCloud in the flesh then we’ve got 3,000 tickets to give away for the next Grand Designs Live. To find out more visit Primelocation.com or go direct to the show’s ticket ordering page and quote ‘PRIME9′.

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’.