His beginnings were humble enough, but from living in a council flat in Warrington, in Cheshire, the multimillionaire Chris Evans has turned into a serial property buyer. He has homes in London, Los Angeles, Surrey and Portugal, his passion for property financed by the fortune he made from selling his media company, which has left him worth an estimated £52m. Some of the properties he sold on without even moving into, such as the Buckinghamshire house he’d planned to use as the ultimate lad’s party pad, now for sale at £1.1m Four Gables in Denham — where the neighbours include Sir John Mills and Cilla Black — was a modest bungalow until Evans bought it just before meeting his teenage bride, the singer Billie Piper, two years ago. He spent a fortune stripping it of its conventional fittings, extended into the loft to make two extra guest bedrooms and created a 39ft x 22ft entertaining room with high vaulted ceiling, impressive English oak beams and a wooden floor. Floor-to-ceiling doors fold back to give access to the garden and swimming pool. Coils of heavy-duty cables intended to power sound and vision into every room sprout unconnected from the walls and ceilings.
The house has been on the market for more than a year, having been originally marketed at an optimistic £1.5m. A drop to £1.35m didn’t impress buyers either.
“It is a great house but it was overpriced to begin with,” says Gordon MacGeachy, Evans’s new Los Angeles-based property manager. Glasgow-born MacGeachy is a celebrity real-estate agent, with not a trace of Bearsden in his now pure Beverly Hills spiel. His firm, Hilton & Hyland — Rick Hilton is a member of the hotel-owning family — does not, says MacGeachy, deal with anything worth less than a million dollars.
“When Chris built the house, he wasn’t married to Billie, he wanted to play golf every day,” says MacGeachy. What the members at the local Denham Golf Club — notoriously cliquey, with a tightly controlled waiting list and sticklers for correct attire — would have made of Evans, we’ll now never know.
Evans and MacGeachy met over tea by the swimming pool of a mutual friend, author Helen Fielding of Bridget Jones’s Diary fame, in Los Angeles.
“I sold him his house there; he bought it from Lionel Richie,” MacGeachy adds. “It’s for sale now, typically Californian, which is all about being in the Hills and having a Sunset Strip jetliner view. They’re selling because they’ll be doing a lot in England, so it didn’t make sense to keep it. It’s on the market at £5.5m. If we play our cards right with this house we’ll make some money on it. When you get to this point, what’s a million dollars here or there?” It’s the story of Evans’s property-owning career. Restless and rootless, he has bought and sold a house almost every year over the past 10 years, and has mostly made a decent profit along the way.
At 26, when he married his first wife, Carol McGiffen — they were divorced in 1997 — Evans owned a two-bedroom garden flat in London’s Haverstock Hill. In 1993, he sold it for £80,000 and bought a modern £350,000 house in Highgate.
By the next year he was renting in Docklands, but was reported to be interested in buying a £1.25m house in Clapham. It didn’t come off. Instead he knocked on the door of a house in Belsize Park, in London’s NW3, and offered to buy the £350,000 property from the surprised owners.
In 1995, he bought a £500,000 old rectory in a village near Maidstone, in Kent, selling it on 10 months later without ever having even moved in, for a reported £150,000 profit. He then went on to buy a £1.5m house in Arundel Gardens, in Notting Hill. Three years later he said he owned four properties in London, three of them empty because he hadn’t had time to find tenants.
By this time, estate agents were desperate to offer him properties, but he turned down more than he bought. An £800,000, 40-room manor house in Somerset was rejected and he was said to have made an offer on a £2.5m house in Surrey, but then changed his mind and backed out, according to the aggrieved owner. The paparazzi eventually tracked him down to a three-bedroom, £750,000 apartment in Belgravia, bought in 1999.
In 2000, he was the new owner of a four-storey, £10.5m house in Belgravia. Then he met Billie Piper, who at 18 was almost half his age. Still looking for his ideal country home, he arrived by helicopter to view Hascombe Court, a handsome Edwardian estate near Godalming, with a library, eight bedrooms, staff cottages, tennis courts, gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll, a swimming pool and indoor and outdoor international-standard dressage riding arenas.
When he bought it, for a reported £6m, he was derided as a Bobo — the acronym for some of the well-heeled local residents, “burnt out but opulent”.
Some complained he was “wrecking” the period details in the house, but planning officers were impressed by the standard of work — said to amount to about £500,000 — overseen by his architect (the same one he used to renovate the Denham house).
But having spent all that money on his dream home, the word is that he’s thinking about selling and has just had it valued. “He may have had it valued, but it’s definitely not for sale,” claims MacGeachy, adding cautiously: “Everything is for sale at a price. If someone offered you $30m for your house, you’d sell.”
Last year, Evans spent £7.5m on a Victorian six-bedroom house near the Boltons in Chelsea, where the neighbours included the rock star David Bowie and the playwright Tom Stoppard. He sold it on, without moving in, to the singer George Michael at a reported profit of £500,000.
And this year (so far) Evans has bought two neighbouring villas in Quinta do Lago on the Algarve — close to several golf courses — which he has had made into one large home connected by a covered walkway. In two acres of landscaped gardens and with a newly installed recording studio, the building costs have been estimated at £1m.
He’s likely to be too busy to see it much, having set up his new television production company, UMTV, which produces Live with Chris Moyles on Channel 5.
But if Evans does decide to sell Hascombe Court to raise cash, he might find his Midas touch has deserted him. Prices in this part of Surrey are dropping.
Serena Brown, of the local estate agency Browns, says: “Although property in the area rose this year by 15%, by the time we get to Christmas it will have dropped. If anyone wants to sell now they’ll have to take off 10%.”
Hamptons, 01753 886 464, www.hamptons.co.uk; Hilton & Hyland, 001 310 858 5470
