Homes gossip

A Maharaja’s palace for loved-up Liz and Arun

Expect an announcement soon that Liz Hurley’s Indian husband, Arun Nayar, has bought a pad in historic Rajasthan. The loved-up couple spent the Christmas/New Year period inspecting run-down maharajas’ palaces and havelis (mansions) around Jodhpur where they were married in 2007, and in the desert kingdoms of Jaisalmer and Bikaner.

The Mumbai dandy is keen to remain free financially from his wife, who owns a £3.5 million Chelsea house and a 400-acre, £3 million Cotswolds farm. Also, though he runs a Mumbai software-design company, he appreciates the generosity of his German textile tycoon mother, Gunnar.

“Rajasthan real estate has shot up in price during the past five years,” says an insider. “Arun and his family could expect to pay anything from £300,000 to several millions for a decent property that they could do up and perhaps run as a hotel.”

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Strictly Come Dancing champ Camilla Dallerup and her fiancé, Hollyoaks actor Kevin Sacre, have begun house-hunting in Buckinghamshire. She currently lives in a one-bedroom Walton-on-Thames flat, while he is based in Liverpool near the C4 soap’s studios.

The Danish car salesman’s daughter bought her bachelor pad for £230,000 three years ago after splitting with Brendan Cole, her former fiancé and dance partner. The parting followed rumours that Cole had a fling — strongly denied on both sides — with his Strictly partner, newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky. Canny Camilla also spent £195,000 on a buy-to-let, two-bedroom house in Reading in 2007.

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Zillionaire publisher Felix Dennis started a trend in 2001 when he began planting the “Forest of Dennis”, which he hopes will eventually cover 30,000 Warwickshire acres.

Now Notting Hill make-up artist Jemma Kidd says her ambition is also “to buy land and plant a forest”. As wife of the Earl of Mornington, she will eventually become Duchess of Wellington and chatelaine of Stratfield Saye House, the family’s 17th-century Berkshire home since the Battle of Waterloo.

With cash no object, this gangling great-granddaughter of press baron Lord Beaverbrook and sister of model and TV presenter Jodie Kidd should have no difficulty fulfilling this eco-friendly dream.

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Brixton seems a long way from Arles or St Rémy-de-Provence, the French haunts of Vincent Van Gogh, whose exhibition, The Real Van Gogh, is at the Royal Academy. But long before he started painting cornfields and irises, he lodged for two years at 87 Hackford Road, SW9 and fell in love with landlady, Ursula Loyer.

The tragic Dutch dauber described this period as the happiest in his life and a pencil sketch still survives of his old home. A few doors away, at number 47, Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward is selling a two-bedroom maisonette for £335,000. “It needs a bit of work,” reports the agent.