Homes gossip

The dream for Denise is North London

Following their beachside wedding in the Seychelles last April, that luvved-up couple Denise van Outen and Lee Mead have begun hunting for a north London pad.

“Lee visited us recently looking for a large two-bedroom flat around Belsize Park and Primrose Hill for up to £500,000,” reports estate agent Parkheath.

The Basildon blonde docker’s daughter recently spent £1.25 million buying a haunted four-bedroom detached cottage near Ashford. She has proved a shrewd property investor, with a portfolio that includes a Hampstead garden flat, a Hove weekend retreat and a Los Angeles apartment.

She met fellow Essexian Mead, seven years her junior, in 2007 when she was a judge on BBC1’s talent show Any Dream Will Do.

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Parkhill Road is fast replacing Steele’s Road as the smartest address in Belsize Park. This follows the arrival of Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Coldplay singer Chris Martin.

First they paid actress Kate Winslet £2.4 million for her five-bedroom Victorian house, then in August they spent £3.1 million buying the adjoining house and are now building a large extension to create a 33-room mansion.

“The street now has this incredible cachet,” say estate agent Parkheath. “We’ve just sold three properties there within a month - a two-bedroom garden flat for £670,000, a three-bedroom maisonette for £650,000 and a coach house for £530,000.”

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Fans of best-selling children’s author Dick King-Smith will have relished the idyllic West Country setting of his 1983 novel The Sheep-Pig, which became the Hollywood hit movie Babe starring James Cromwell.

Now, Boyd Farm, the medieval six-bedroom converted millhouse, which inspired him, is for sale for £2.25 million through Knight Frank.

The Golden Valley property between Bath and Bristol includes three barns with permission for holiday lets and a river frontage with fishing rights. The octogenarian Bitton-born former farmer was raised in this “paradise” in the Twenties and Thirties.

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Keep-fit tycoon Vivian Imerman, dubbed the Man From Del Monte, when he owned the US fruit-juice brand, is selling his six-bedroom Grade II-listed Belgravia mansion for £30 million.

The Regency house overlooking Eaton Square has already attracted “serious interest” from Hong Kong-based billionaire Joseph Lau, according to an insider.

South African-born Imerman faces losing a chunk of his £375 million fortune after his divorce from second wife Lisa Tchenguiz, film producer sister of financiers Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz.