Homes gossip

Sting sells house number 8

Pop star and eco-warrior Sting should soon have one less address to worry about - but not for long. He has reduced the price of his four-bedroom New York duplex overlooking Central Park from $26 million to a more competitive $19 million.

“You may be able to negotiate an ever lower price,” reports a neighbour. “Sting is keen to offload it as he has spent $26.5 million buying a 16th-17th floor four-bedroom duplex in the same Central Park West complex with an orangery and state-of-the-art gym.”

The acquisitive Geordie milkman’s son and his second wife, film producer Trudie Styler, also own two Grade II-listed London mansions (in Highgate Village and St James’s), plus homes in Malibu, the Lake District, Tuscany and Wiltshire. Meanwhile, the Stings tirelessly campaign to save the Amazon rainforest and provide shelter for the homeless.

---

House-hunting is temporarily molto pianissimo for opera heart-throb Jonathan Ansell and his fiancée, TV presenter Debbie King.

Last January they put their two-bedroom Thames-side Battersea penthouse on the market at £499,950. “But they have now decided to stay put until the market improves,” say Featherstone Leigh. “They bought two years ago at the top of the market for £45,000 more than they’re asking and are not prepared to take a further hit.”

The Bognor Regis-born tenor, dubbed “the Justin Timberlake of opera”, originally planned to upsize to a family house in Surrey or Hertfordshire where Debbie has family. In 2003 he co-founded the classical boy band G4 with three fellow Guildhall School of Music and Drama students, which then came second in ITV’s The X Factor.

---

For 10 years, theatre tycoon Lord Lloyd-Webber’s right-hand-man, Andre Ptaszynski, has escaped the West End maelstrom for long weekends and holidays at his Cornish retreat near Wadebridge.

But now he has decided to sell his five-bedroom former Victorian vicarage for £1.2 million through local agent Lillicrap Chilcott. It overlooks the sea near Port Isaac, the picture-postcard fishing village featured in the ITV drama series The Shell Seekers, starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Neighbours include Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, TV presenter Lorne Spicer and former Emmerdale actress Julie Peasgood. As an independent producer, Ptaszynski launched award-winning musicals such as Tommy and Chicago, and is now chief executive of Lloyd-Webber’s Really Useful Group.

---

Icons of fashion, such as Victoria Beckham, Heidi Klum and Madonna (right), may drool over Paris fashion label Louis Vuitton, but Xavier-Louis Vuitton, a scion of this très snob dynasty, is more hooked on Scotland’s grouse shooting, red-deer stalking and trout fishing.

He is selling his eight-bedroom Inverness-shire shooting lodge for £4.25 million through local agent John Clegg & Co, which describes it as “a sporting man’s heaven on earth”.

The canny French entrepreneur bought the 5,000-acre Dalchully estate near Laggan for £1.9 million in 2002 and spent around £1 million transforming it into a commercial sporting estate. He still owns two similar Highland properties, the nearby 18,000-acre Gaick estate and the 6,000-acre Fordie estate near Comrie, Perthshire.