Sweden — £1.9 million

'Welcome to the Remarkable World of Concrete' reads the listing for this remarkable (and perhaps Lego-inspired?) home, which bravely shuns any sort of soft design touches, instead being a simple series of rectangular blocks. I suppose even an absence of design is a design choice? Anyhow, the critics see things differently, for the man responsible — Jonas Lindvall — has won awards for his architecture.

In any case, the setting more than makes up for the house's rather odd look: it's on a three-acre private peninsula 'surrounded by the shimmering waters of Lake Vittsjön and majestic beech forests', in the words of the agent.

For sale via Residence Fastighetsmäkleri Christie’s International Real Estate — see more details and pictures.

Italy — £1.65 million

Portofino, the Italian harbourside town nicknamed 'The Pearl of the World', is as pricey as it is beautiful. At this budget, in this corner of north-west Italy, you'll get a modest two-bedroom flat — but you will be at the very heart of a place that's been beloved by A-listers for decades.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

South Africa — £1.9 million

On the sheltered Bantry Bay, and 'located on one of the most prestigious streets in Cape Town' according to the agents, this home has outstanding ocean views, three bedrooms, and a location right next to Clifton Beach and beneath the striking Lion's Head mountain.

For sale via Chas Everitt International Property Group — see more details and pictures.

St Lucia — £2 million

At the top end of the budget, but worth the extra, Colibri Cottage sits right on the beach on the south-west corner of St Lucia.

Six bedrooms, infinity pool, and perfect views of Petit Piton, the island's UNESCO World Heritage site.

For sale via Christie's International Real Estate Caribbean — see more details and pictures.

France — £1.7 million

We couldn't go without a chateau on this list — and this one is an 11-bedroom beauty, sitting atop a remote hilltop in the countryside near Toulouse.

Château de Marquein sits in just under 30 acres, has been entirely refurbished, and comes with a string of outbuildings, heated pool, a four-bedroom cottage and much more. Amazing value.

For sale via Poncet & Poncet Christie's International Real Estate — see more details and pictures.

'Châteaux owners don’t need to sell, and buyers don’t have to buy,' French property expert Stewart Cook told Country Life back in 2008. Stewart was speaking in generalities, but the point stands even today.

Bruno de Saint-Exupery, also quoted in the article and still in the business all these years later, made a similar point, adding that buying a chateau 'is about the fulfillment of dreams.

'It’s often influenced by intuition, different way of life, dreams, or even emotions,' he continued. 'A place to escape, lay back and enjoy the peaceful way of life of the French countryside.'

If it's a classic, dreamy château you're after, they don't come much more classic or dreamy — or châteauy, for that matter — than the wonderful Château de Domblans, for sale through Arriere-Cour and Belles Demeures at €1.3 million (£1.12 million).

It's an absolute picture book of a place, so entirely on-the-nose for a medieval castle, that you can almost imagine some warrior king of centuries gone by riding in to the place at the head of his retinue. And if you did imagine such a thing, you'd be closer to the truth that you could realise: the Bourbon King Henry IV apparently stayed here in 1595 while on his epic (and successful) quest to reunite and bring peace to France.

Even by Henry's time, Château de Domblans was old. A fortified manor is thought to have stood here since the 12th century, but the present building dates to 1446, when the whole place was substantially rebuilt following damage caused during the Hundred Years' War.

The intervening years saw the place go through all manner of ups and downs. It was bought, restored, sold, restored and changed down the centuries until, in the late 20th century, a nightclub called Le Babylone was opened on the premises.

Le Babylone was apparently quite a hit, since when it was forced to close in 2012 the local press lamented the death of 'one of the most famous nightclubs in Franche-Comté... the biggest, the wildest, and for a long time the most frequented.'

What we wouldn't give to see what Henry IV would have made of people dancing to 1990s techno in the halls where he once planned his next move in the Wars of Religion. And if we were able to resurrect Henry, we'd be able to show him this video and this Facebbook post to help him make up his mind.

Château de Domblans has been a private home since Le Babylone closed, and it's huge: there's around 9,500 square feet of floorspace, and over 17 acres of grounds — quite a chunk considering it's located on the edge of the town.

The character of the place is everywhere you look, with the ancient stonework and beams left exposed in many of the rooms to make the most of the atmosphere.

The agents note that there are seven bedrooms and 15 habitable rooms, with the house working well 'for family life or entertaining... the whole retains a warm, almost timeless atmosphere, where every detail contributes to a sense of belonging and continuity'.

Beyond the main castle itself, as you'll see in the pictures, a plethora of newer buildings have gone up over the centuries, including a barn, orangery, workshops and even a former stables, which could presumably be refurbished and returned to operation should you so desire.

There's also a series of cellars beneath the castle itself, which aren't pictured in the agent's details, which leaves us free to imagine turning them into a cinema room, wine storage, or anything else which takes your fancy.

Château de Domblans is for sale at €1.3 million — see more details.

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s childhood home in Virginia is on the market with Frank Hardy and Sotheby’s International Realty. The five-bedroom home — which comes with 557 acres, including agricultural land and equestrian facilities — will set you back $17 million (about £12 million).

As well as serious historical significance, the estate comes with formal gardens, a series of outbuildings and an original, one-room schoolhouse — perhaps for the private tutoring of future presidents, if you have ambitious offspring.

This is where America’s third president, who was also an architect, was educated, and where he first encountered a classically domed ceiling. Jefferson (1743-1826), who went on to become the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, lived here from 1745 to 1752, during which time his father managed the estate.

The unique H-frame house was constructed by William Randolph III (1712-45) — whose first cousin was Jane Randolph Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s mother — in two stages. A lot of its original architecture remains, including full-height walnut wall panelling and period windows.

Available for sale for the first time in almost a century, Tuckahoe’s new owners will need to make peace with the darker side of its history — it operated mainly as a tobacco plantation and relied heavily on enslaved labour.

One of the most complete early 18th-century plantation layouts in North America, largely unchanged for generations, and a crucial window into an exploitative and complicated part of America’s history, Tuckahoe, which sits alongside the James River, is a designated National History Landmark.

Tuckahoe is for sale at $17 million through Frank Hardy Sotheby's International Realty — see more details and pictures.

As the traditional season of going on holiday draws sadly to a close, all we're left with are our memories, our dreams, and 800 new photos on our phones which we will definitely, absolutely get around to organising properly next week. Or maybe the week after. October at a push.

Let's forget that post-holiday legwork, though, and instead focusing on the dreams: what would life be like, we imagine, if only we had an Italian villa of our own?

If the villa in question were anything like this villa in Monguzzo, for sale at €1.5 million through Italy Sotheby's International Realty, the answer would be 'very wonderful indeed'.

The three-bedroom villa has plenty of relaxed charm: while not particularly pretty, it's a fine three-bedroom home that was totally refurbished in the 1990s, with three bathrooms, spacious living areas and a hobby room.

It also comes with a two-bedroom guest house within the grounds, plus a Scandinavian-style timber house that the agents suggest is ideal as anything from guest accommodation to an artist's studio.

As fine as the villa is, the main attraction here is the garden, named Il Giardino di Poggio Castello. Just under two acres, and ringed by mature trees to create a cool, elegant, secluded setting, it was created as a true labour of love by the photographer Piero Sierra.

Sierra took the house and garden on in 1991, working on the project with landscape architect Giulio Crespi — and while the villa may be a classic Italian home, the garden is not. Sierra and Crespi created the outdoor space in the tradition of English garden design, with the landscape arranged as a sequence of interconnected garden rooms.

Each part of the garden has its own character, planting scheme and atmosphere. There's a border garden, a woodland garden and pond garden, a garden dedicated to plants that thrive on acidic soil, a gravel garden, architectural garden, cottage garden, rose garden, entrance garden, and a space described as the 'Rustic Cottage Mini-Park'.

To find outdoor space with such variety is nothing short of staggering, and as you can see from the images it's all been thriving in the temperate northern Italian climate, in between Lake Como and Lake Lecco.

Sierra's background as a photographer is also key to understand why the gardens have been created this way: the villa has an ever-changing sequence of views, perspectives and seasonal blooms that transform throughout the year to make sure that no two garden strolls are the same. The owner has spoken in the past about photographing the landscape repeatedly across seasons and from different viewpoints, using the images to refine sightlines and the overall experience of moving through the space.

It's truly something else, and a key selling point. As agent Luigi Aliverti puts it, this is 'a property of rare distinction and virtually impossible to replicate, where the garden is not merely a setting for the residence, but a genuine work of landscape art.'

For sale via Italy Sotheby's International Realty — see more details.

There are horse farms, and then there is Castleton Lyons. Spread across 951 acres of Kentucky’s famously fertile Bluegrass country, this extraordinary estate has been breeding horses for more than two centuries — and is now being offered for sale for the first time in 25 years, for $57.5 million with Sotheby's.

Its story begins in 1793, when the farm was established as a breeding operation. Since then, it has passed through the hands of some of Kentucky’s great horsemen and become something of an institution in the equestrian world.

The Castleman family’s Greek Revival mansion, built in 1840, remains the historic centrepiece — and its interiors wouldn’t look out of place in a grand English countryside manor house. There are ornate mouldings, Victorian-style wall panelling and a sweeping staircase with carved wooden bannister.

The horses, however, are very much the stars. Over the years Castleton has bred and stood thoroughbred, standardbred and saddlebred champions — establishing a reputation that stretches far beyond the Bluegrass. Think 1896 Kentucky Derby winner Ben Brush, and Speedy Scot. Today, its scale is almost difficult to comprehend. There are 16 barns, ranging from four-stall buildings to a substantial 30-stall facility, with 268 stalls in total. A true self-contained equine operation, there are ten homes scattered across the land, including several managers’ houses. There are ponds and water views, too, along with sweeping scenery and the privacy that comes with nearly 1,000 acres.

In 2001, Castleton was acquired by Thomas Ryan (1936-2007), the Irish billionaire businessman and philanthropist who co-founded Ryanair in 1984, from the Van Lennep Family Trust. (Frederick Van Lennep (1911-1987) was an American advertising executive and harness racing figure who founded Pompano Park.) Ryan changed its name from Castleton Farm to Castleton Lyons after his Irish estate and renovated large parts in order to return it to its original roots as a thoroughbred operation.

The challenge for its next custodian will be less about deciding what to do with Castleton than deciding how best to continue its remarkable story.

Castleton is for sale with Sotheby's — see more details here.

Property listings are often pretty functional affairs. How many bedrooms does it have? Is it near the station? What is the kitchen like?

Every so often, though, you'll come across a rare outbreak of poetry, and it's all the more delightful for being unexpected. And that's what we have today in the case of Argyronisos, a private island for sale at €35 million (about £30 million) through Engel & Völkers:

'60 acres of rolling hills, ancient olive trees, cypress groves, wildflowers, and small, idyllic private coves surrounded by shimmering azure waters,' reads the blurb supplied by agent George Ioannou. 'Here, the journey begins long before you step ashore; it starts as the mainland recedes and the rhythm of life slows down to match the whispering tide.'

I can feel my blood pressure lowering just re-reading this paragraph. If this is what Greek islands are like, no wonder Odysseus raised heaven and earth to get back to his.

This dot on the map sits in the northern Aegean, between the northern tip of Euboea — also known as Evia, the second-largest island in Greece — and the mainland itself. It's a breathtaking slice of paradise, with woodland and olive groves running across the island down to the craggy cliffs, and an impossibly romantic lighthouse at one end.

There is also a deep water dock and a handful of small beaches dotted about the island, all of which arae unspoilt, natural and rocky rather than open and spacious.

That's the vibe here: this is not a place for those who love great expanses of sand, but instead a calm retreat from the world, a place of seclusion and privacy, a happy little enclave where you can sit back and feel the spinning of the earth beneath your feet.

Argyronisos has been in the same family since 1961, spending much of that time as a family home, but more recently it's been run as a luxurious retreat which has, according to the agents, 'welcomed globally renowned entrepreneurs, artists, and prominent figures who sought out Argyronisos not for ostentatious display, but for the rarest luxury in the modern world: absolute, uninterrupted privacy.'

What happens next here will be for the new owners to decide, but there's plenty of scope for all sorts of uses. The island has 11 separate stone buildings across its space, including a main residence and separate villa which are modest and tasteful both in size and appearance, with the whitewashed walls highlighted by classic Greek blue-framed windows and shutters.

Elsewhere on the island you'll find stone cottages, an olive house and an ancient chapel, as well as a that looks like the sort of yoga studio you'd see in an episode of The White Lotus.

The island is also largely self-sufficient. Solar panel installations provide all the power needs for the island, though there is also a back-up generator

Argyronisos is for sale at €35 million through Engel & Völkers — see more details:

There are few towns of any significant size in the middle of the deserts of southern California. But there's one in particular that you'll have heard of, tucked in between the San Jacinto mountains and the Joshua Tree National Park.

Its name is Palm Springs, and it became one of the greatest A-lister hotspots of the 20th century. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Cary Grant, Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are among those who flocked here at the height of their fame, and its reputation still rides high today.

It was Hollywood's stars that started the influx, in large part because Palm Springs promised endless sunshine, a refuge from press photographers, and (crucially) was close enough to Los Angeles to meet the requirements of the Two-Hour Rule, which required film stars to ensure they always stayed close enough to Hollywood to get back for re-shoots within a couple of hours. The movie stars may have started it, but the rest of the A-list came with them: anyone who was anyone in show business in the 1950s and 60s made Palm Springs part of their life.

With a list of former residents like that, it's pretty much impossible to pick out a name worthy of top billing. But what we can say for definite is that only one of Palm Springs's illustrious former residents has a 26ft statue in the town, and only one of those names recently had over 1,000 impersonators hit the streets of the town to celebrate what would have been their 100th birthday. That person is Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe's career was tied to Palm Springs almost since the start. She first came here in the late 1940s as a down-on-her-luck wannabe, with early promise turning into disappointment as a couple of her contracts were cancelled. And it was here that her luck changed, beginning her rise to become the biggest movie star in the world.

She didn't stop once she made it, coming back again and again, going to parties, rubbing shoulders with movie stars and presidents. And one of the homes she's said to have lived in, known locally as the Marilyn Monroe Doll House, is currently on the market at $3.3 million.

Palm Springs is full of interesting modern architecture, and while The Doll House isn't celebrated as the likes of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann house, or Frank Sinatra's house withs its legendary piano-shaped swimming pool, it's still a fine example of a classic mid-century home in this desert enclave.

It's generously-sized for a four-bedroom house, at just under 3,000 square feet, and the whole place seems flooded with light, thanks to a clean white interior scheme and the huge windows, which afford wonderful views of the nearby mountains.

Those features and its location in the sought-after Vista Las Palmas neighbourhood give the place an asking price of $3.3 million — around £2.5 million — which from what we can see looks entirely in keeping with similarly-sized hopes nearby. You can consider the Marilyn Monroe connection an added bonus, rather than something that has impacted the price.

As for the strength of that connection? Well, stories of Monroe's days in Palm Springs are the stuff of legend. It's here that her career took off, thanks to a photoshoot by Bruno Bernard — the man dubbed 'Bernard of Hollywood' — at the legendary Palm Springs Racquet Club, which led to Monroe's career taking off just when it looked like it had stalled. The agent Johnny Hyde and the legendary film director Howard Hawks both met Monroe at the club, ending up with her breakthrough role in The Asphalt Jungle, and her iconic turn in Gentleman Prefer Blondes which made her the biggest female lead in Hollywood.

As ever with Monroe, however, unpicking fact from fiction isn't always easy. One of the tales told about the town is that it was here the actress had her fling with President John F. Kennedy — but it's a story that's hard to pin down, requiring a couple of big leaps of logic, timing and faith to extrapolate an illicit tryst from a phone call asking about a back massage. Did she have an affair with JFK, and for that matter his brother, Bobby Kennedy? Quite possibly, indeed quite probably, but nobody can prove it one way or the other, and nobody is worried about questioning it either way in 2026.

The same could be said for Monroe's life at the Doll House itself. An article in the Desert Sun in 2016 argued that Monroe never lived here, and couldn't possibly have done so while married to Joe DiMaggio (as several of the stories suggest) because the house wasn't even built until 1961. That's six years after Monroe had split from the her baseball-playing second husband, and just a year or so before her death.

None of that proves that Monroe didn't stay in the house, but the fascinating question is whether or not it really matters if she did or not. A decade on from what was a pretty well-sourced debunking of several Monroe-related myths, you'll still find plenty of sources referring to 1326 N Rose Avenue as Marilyn Monroe's Palm Springs home. One person who doesn't is David Emerson, the agent handling the sale, whose listing cleverly refers to it only as the 'internationally recognized [sic] architectural residence known as the Marilyn Monroe Doll House'.

The questions that swirl around Marilyn Monroe's life put me in mind of another iconic figure we recently featured in Country Life whose life entwines truth and fiction: Lawrence of Arabia. The celebrated soldier undoubtedly performed many heroic deeds, but — equally undoubtedly — much of what he's credited with is bolstered, embellished or entirely made up. Yet despite the fact that his more far-fetched claims have been repeatedly debunked for a century or so, Lawrence's star never really seems to fall.

One of the first writers to make Lawrence famous, the American reporter Lowell Thomas, once asked his subject outright about the veracity of some of his more fantastical exploits. Lawrence apparently 'laughed with glee', according to Richard Adlington's 1955 biography, 'and replied, "History isn't made up of truth anyway, so why worry?"'

The Marilyn Monroe Doll House at 1326 N. Rose Avenue, Palm Springs, is for sale through Coldwell Banker — see more details.

The name's La Gaeta. Villa La Gaeta. But you'll know it better as the house where James Bond finished his Casino Royale adventure, a glorious palace perched above the impossibly blue waters of Lake Como. This was the house used for the final scenes of the 2006 film, which marked Daniel Craig's debut as James Bond — and thus it was the house that subverted one of the great 007 traditions. Instead of sailing off into the post-film credits with the latest Bond Girl® on his arm, the grim-faced super-spy instead smirks his name at a dying villain. Classic stuff, and no wonder Craig would go on to become the longest-serving actor to play Ian Fleming's hero.

Villa La Gaeta itself proved just as unforgettable as Craig's performance, instantly becoming one of the most recognisable locations used in the entire series — along with the likes of James Bond Island in Thailand. And a chance to live in the villa has now come along through Sotheby's International Realty at a guide price range of €1.2-1.4 million, or roughly £1.1 million.

Before you get on the phone to your mortgage broker, bear in mind that the purchase price isn't for the entire villa. This iconic building, built in 1921 and demonstrating a mix of Gothic Revival and Art Nouveau elements, was split in to five apartments in 2011, and the property that's up for sale at the moment is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom place.

The apartment entrance is on the ground floor of the villa's annexe, and split over two levels. Upon entering you'll find a living area which opens onto a magnificent terrace that has a panoramic view of the lake, while there's also a fully-equipped kitchen, double bedroom and a bathroom.

The lower level has French doors opening directly onto the villa's marina, as well as a further double bedroom with bathroom, and an additional space that could be used as a dressing room or study.

It's also a home where, in true James Bond style, you can bring your Aston Martin, your Ferrari, and your speedboat. A couple of parking spaces are included, while you also have access to the jetty and your own designated boat mooring within the villa's small marina.

Needless to say you'll also enjoy use of the spectacular communal gardens and swimming pool. As well as the views of the lake and mountains that surround it, this is a beautiful natural oasis with plenty of rare, exotic plants, and there are steps down to the villa's private beach.

For sale via Italy Sotheby's International Realty — see more details.

It's easy nowadays to laugh at the 1960s television adaptation of Batman. Seen through a 2020s lens, it's easy to take the kitsch, colourful, wildly overacted show at face value — something I did as a kid, as did all my friends — and poke fun at the whole thing.

The show's creators and stars, though, were in on the joke right from the start. Ludicrous plotlines. Farcical pseudo-science. Adam West's unflinchingly deadpan delivery. This was a classic piece of 1960s satire that delighted in making every joke possible — at the expense of its comic book source material, the very notion of superheroes, TV detective shows, and indeed 1960s society as a whole.

Subsequent incarnations of Batman, and in particular the films helmed by Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, have darkened the mood and played things straight. In a world full of bleakness and wannabe-strongmen political leaders who convince themselves (and, depressingly, others) of their own legends, I'm not sure that Burton, Nolan et al have done us much good.

One thing about Batman's world has remained unchanged, though: the stately home where his alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, lives. Wayne Manor has been played by plenty of different country houses over the years, including a couple (Knebworth and Wollatton) that are in England. Neither of those will be up for sale any time soon, but the original Wayne Manor from the 1960s show is up for sale right now — and it's priced at $32 million, or around £24 million.

'Wayne Manor' may not have the aristocratic ring of 'Wollaton Hall', but it's a considerably more romantic name than the house's real-life moniker, 380 S San Rafael Avenue, in Pasadena, a northern suburb of Los Angeles. The name may not have the ring of an English country home, but an awful lot else about the place hits the spot.

This really is quite the place: 18,655 sq ft, seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and just under five acres of land — enough to almost convince you that you're out in the countryside.

In a sense, you are: the house actually backs on to the Arroyo Seco park, the largest green space in the area, which has several hundred acres set up for hiking, running, cycling, picnicking, golf and more — not something that you'll find in many LA neighbourhoods.

The house itself is just as much of a pleasant surprise: it's absolutely extraordinary, built in the 1920s in mock Tudor style, with leaded, stone-mullioned windows, the same mix of brick and stone walls you'd find at Hampton Court, and even castellations on parts of the roof.

There's intricate carved timber, marble flooring, wood-panelling, open fires and gothic touches. The interiors weren't used for the filming — and thus, sadly, there is no Batcave in the cellar — but it's a shame, for they're even more impressive than the ones put together in the studio back in the day. Like the television show that was once made here, this house is pure pastiche — yet it's irresistible.

All this comes at a cost, naturally: it's the most expensive house for sale in Pasadena at the moment by an order of magnitude, and should it achieve the asking price it'll beat its own record as the most expensive ever to be sold in this suburb. Batman may have been made with tongues firmly in cheeks, but selling agent Peter Owens is deadly serious: 'This singular estate is more than a home,' he says. It is 'one of the most extraordinary residential offerings in Southern California... and an exceptionally rare opportunity to acquire what many would consider the finest legacy property in the city.'

380 S San Rafael Street is for sale through Peter Owens of Christie's Internaional Real Estate — see more details.

New York — $3,100,000

This dairy farm in upstate New York dates back to 1759, sits in 12 acres of gorgeous woodland — which is as old, or older than the building — and has been beautifully updated throughout.

It's close to the Appalachian Trail, has a gorgeous DeVol kitchen, and is just 90 minutes from Manhattan on the train.

For sale @buyingupstate and The Lillie K Team at Four Seasons Sotheby's International Realty.

South Carolina — $4,295,000

In the magical old city of Charleston, this 1743-built home pre-dates the Boston Tea Party by thirty years.

It's an architectural gem on South Lamboll Street, one of the prettiest in the city, and as well as its charming original features it also has double piazzas and verandas to provide the quintessential Charleston outdoor living lifestyle.

For sale via Daniel Ravenel Sotheby’s International Realty — see more details and pictures.

Pennsylvania — $999,000

Looking for all the world like the sort of cottage you'd find in Cumbria, this glorious little stone-built home dates back to 1753.

It's been updated sensitively, though, with a fine kitchen, a swimming pool and grounds of just over half an acre.

For sale via Kurfiss Sotheby's International Realty — see more details and pictures.

Massachusetts — $1,489,000

You'll find eight fireplaces, original wide-plank wood floors, and preserved period detail throughout a house that was originally the Cushing Tavern, built in 1746 in the town of Hingham, where you'll find some of the oldest homes in America.

It's had modern updates — heating system, roof, and central air conditioning — but is in many ways a blank canvas looking for an owner to bring their own personality to this 18th century home.

For sale via William Raveis — see more details and pictures.

Connecticut — $7,250,000

As rude as it might be to play favourites, we've left the best til last: this utterly magical house is described by the agents as having 'one of the most breathtaking private settings on the Connecticut River' — and it's not hard to believe.

Built in 1750, with almost 4,500sq ft of space and just under 10 acres, it's an irresistibly pretty house that has been remarkably well cared for — and the cool, wooded grounds and pool are sumptuous.

For sale via William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty — see more details and pictures.

It's that time of every-four-years again: football's World Cup has kicked off.

Who will win? Speaking as a former sports journalist I'm happy to admit that I have absolutely no idea, and am sceptical of anyone who says otherwise. There will be enough matches played at both very high temperatures and very high altitudes to suggest that it probably won't be a team from a cool, temperate climates.

So while things don't look too promising on the pitch, let's instead focus on who might win if this was a World Cup of property. We've pitted the top seven nations in FIFA's world rankings, plus Scotland (ranked 41st), looking at the finest homes in each country currently for sale through our UK and international property search pages to see who'd come up on top.

This piece is the quarter-final stage — the semi-finals and final will come next week.

The Property World Cup quarter-final draw (seeding in brackets)

Argentina (1) vs Scotland (8)

Spain (2) vs Morocco (7)

France (3) vs Brazil (6)

England (4) vs Portugal (5)

Quarter-finals

Match 1: Scotland vs Argentina

Scotland might have come in to this as wildcards, but their lowly seeding belies the wonderful homes you find in this magical part of the world. The Portmore Estate is one such slice of perfection: £15 million, almost 3,500 acres and a 10-bedroom house, for sale in Peebles through Galbraith.

Argentina has plenty to offer too, however — this house on Lake Nahuel Huapi, with the Andes as a backdrop, is undeniably breathtaking.

That said, this new-build cabin on an Andean lake has a bit of a drawback: it's a 20-hour drive from the capital, Buenos Aires. Peebles, meanwhile, is about an hour's drive from Edinburgh, and 1hr 15mins from Glasgow.

Winner: Scotland

Match 2: Spain vs Morocco

A fascinating match-up, not least because the geographical and historical links between the two countries. Indeed, Andalucia only becamse part of Spain in 1492, having previously been part of the Muslim empire; even the name itself was originally the Arabic, Al-Andalus.

In terms of football, though, the powerhouse cities of Spain are Madrid and Barcelona, so we've chosen a house near the latter: a century-old, 10-bedroom, 10,000sq ft mansion dating to 1925 in Capellades, an hour's drive from Barcelona itself. It's for sale at €1.2 million through Amat Luxury, and it's grand and impressive inside and out.

Morocco's equivalent luxury properties tend to be newer-style rural homes or traditional riads in cities such as Marrakech. The latter offer all the drama and exotic beauty you'd hope to see — and the €2.37 million Riad Damanos is a perfect example, with nine bedrooms, a roof terrace and a location in the medina, just minutes from Bahia Palace itself. It's actually run as a guest house at the moment.

A tempting prospect, but Spain gets the win this time. Being In the middle of Marrakech is a lot, while a Catalan escape in a town in the hills, an hour from one of the world's greatest cities, feels like a better mix.

Winner: Spain

Match 3: France vs Brazil

France pull out the big guns for this clash of two great footballing nations: a €28,900,000 house in Cannes that is both traditional chateau and exquisite Cote d'Azur home. There are eight bedrooms, magnificent views and a pool to die for.

But Brazil have plenty of game too, and pull out a surprise in the shape of a house that is a sort of dream jungle lodge. This £2.2 million house in Bahia is the sort of place where you could forget about the world.

It's far harder to get to (it's a two-hour flight just to get as far as Rio), but the journey is surely worth it.

Winner: Brazil

Match 4: England vs Portugal

Portugal have been something of a bogey team for England at World Cups and European Championships; who can forget a winking Ronaldo badgering the referee as he tried to get his then-team-mate Wayne Rooney sent off in Germany in 2006? And it looks like it could be more of the same in the World Cup of Property, as they step up with a truly beautiful home in the iconic mega-resort that is Quinta do Lago.

The €24.5 million home has six bedrooms, a cinema and a yoga courtyard (that's a new one on us), and it's close enough to the golf course to have fine views, but not so close that you'll end up with a few stray Titleists in the pool.

Yet what is sun and golf when compared to the charm of a great Cotswolds home? The wonderful St Catherine's Court in Somerset, within easy striking distance of Bath, is a magnificent, Grade I-listed house that is the former home of the actress (and iconic Bond girl) Jane Seymour.

At £12.5 million, it's basically half the price of the Portugal house, and far, far prettier. This is the equivalent of an easy 3-0 win.

Winner: England

After all that, here's the draw for the Property World Cup semi-finals next week:

Scotland vs Spain

Brazil vs England

The abolition of the UK’s 200-year-old ‘non-dom’ status — first established to ensure colonialists didn’t pay tax on their overseas holdings — in April 2025 triggered what Mark Parkinson and Tom Hudson of Middleton Advisors, a buying agency, call ‘the biggest structural shift in prime London [property] in a generation’. They add that this pillar of prime-central London demand, which had stood for decades, has now gone. As well as destinations in the Middle East, the team cites Milan, Geneva and Monaco as receiving the bulk of these wealthy relocators.

‘Countries offering stable tax regimes and predictable governance continue to draw the most interest,’ says Mark Harvey, head of Knight Frank’s International Department. Although the Italian government has changed its flat tax regime for high-net-worth individuals relocating to Italy this year, the Monegasque system is stable. It charges no inheritance, wealth or capital gains taxes on residents. ‘In the 33 years that I’ve lived here, the system has remained untouched — the Principality is so small, there’s no need to raise more taxes,’ observes Irene Luke, co-head of Savills Monaco. ‘That proves extremely reassuring for the ultra-wealthy.’

The demographic make-up of the Principality has changed noticeably in recent years. ‘Today’s market is largely driven either by wealthy families with children looking for large apartments or by older couples whose children have already grown up,’ says Christoph Aversano of Magrey Monaco, an affiliate of John D. Wood & Co.

The nationality mix has changed, too, he adds. ‘Russian buyers, who were previously a major force in the Monaco market, have largely disappeared in recent years. At the same time, there has been increased interest from British buyers.’

Although many purchasers would have previously weighed up Dubai against Monaco — the former has much lower entry prices — some are now choosing Monaco for long-term stability, security and safety. ‘At the same time, Nice airport is becoming increasingly well connected; Monaco has evolved into a place to live rather than a fiscal base,’ says Luke.

Higher demand means pressure on prices. Monaco has long had some of the most expensive in the world, but prices reached new heights in 2025 — especially for new-builds, which can be more than five times more expensive than existing properties. In the Larvotto district, values exceeded €70,000 per sq m for the first time, according to figures from Savills.

Across the Principality, there was a 5.8% increase in transactions. In the recent Knight Frank Wealth Report, analysis revealed that a budget of US$1 million buys only 16 sq m (172 sq ft) of prime property compared with 33 sq m (355 sq ft) in London, according to figures from the last quarter of 2025.

The combination of high prices and a limited supply of large or new-build properties leaves families looking to relocate to Monaco with two options. Some buyers are securing a bolt-hole in Monaco and also searching for a larger property along the French Riviera. According to Knight Frank, Roquebrune-Cap-Marin recorded several transactions between $30 million and $70 million, largely to Monaco-based buyers seeking turn-key homes. Les Parcs de St Tropez, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and select addresses in Cannes also saw high-value sales.

Others are choosing to rent, explains James Davies, head of Knight Frank’s super-prime sales. Rental pricing remains resilient, with a limited supply of apartments in either good or very good condition. ‘There is plenty of demand. The rental market between €30,000 and €75,000 per month is probably the most active segment, but there is still a lot of interest in those that are available for more than €100,000 per month. Some deals have recently been agreed far in excess of this, too,’ he says.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 3, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

35, Sagg Road doesn't sound like the most auspicious of locations (sag: 'to drop down to a lower level in the middle'), but it's located in one of the it in the heart of one the Hamptons' most exclusive post codes (11962). Addresses, it seems, can be deceiving.

The house at number 35 is one of only sixteen designated historic structures in the village of Sagaponack, on Long Island's South Fork, and it was built nearly three decades before the first Independence Day celebrations were held (July 4, 1777). It's for sale with Douglas Elliman for $3,995,000 (about £3 million).

Properties from this period are hard to come by in America — in fact only about 12% of all homes were built before 1940. The oldest indigenous building on mainland USA is Ocmulgee Earth Lodge, built in around 1015AD, but the oldest colonial buildings are the Palace of Governors, New Mexico (1610) and Fairbanks House, Massachusetts (1641).

35, Sagg Road has just remerged from an extensive programme of restoration works and poke around behind the historic façade and you'll find new plumbing, high-efficiency heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), Nest smart systems and full soundproofing between floors. Thankfully, plenty of 35's character has been preserved, including the original 18th century beams, and the sellers, and the sellers spared little expense when it came to the new fittings. Think custom millwork, period-style paneling, solid oak doors with brass rim locks and unlacquered brass hardware. It shows.

There are three bedrooms and three bathrooms, a study, den and garage — and a landscaped garden with a swimming pool and a a 1,500‑square‑foot barn that's ripe for future development. The total plot measures nearly one acre.

Our favourite room is the kitchen with its Michelangelo marble, a Shaw farmhouse sink and premium appliances.

Sagaponack has around 450 year-round residents and, until the 20th century, was dominated by massive potato farms (it takes its name from a Shinnecock phrase meaning 'the land of the big ground nuts', referring to wild potatoes). Acres of Sagaponack’s original potato farms are protected as agricultural reserves which means that the area has a myriad unobstructed views out to the ocean.

It's something that hasn't gone unnoticed by second home owners who have transformed the area and driven prices up by so much that the village has ranked among the three most expensive post codes in the USA for more than a decade (and the single most expensive one in New York State).

In 2025, PropertyShark placed the median sale price at just under $6 million — which, if you think about it, means 35, Sagg Road is a bit of a bargain.

35, Sagg Road is for sale via Douglas Elliman — see more details.

There’s an argument to be made that many little boys, if they grew up to be men with more money than sense, would build their own Batman-style lair. And that, I presume, is what happened to the Anglo-Russian tech billionaire Sergey Frolovichev. His London mansion, now on the market with Draper London, has its very own secret ‘Batcave’ in the basement.

The £29.95 million mansion's basement was inspired by Frolovichev’s favourite film, The Dark Night. Previously instrumental in the inner workings of dating apps Bumble and Badoo, the business man’s property is located in Greenaway Gardens in Hampstead. It was designed by architects and interior designers at SHH.

The 1,347 square metre property has seven bedrooms, a media room and health spa, in addition to its superhero selling point. A secret entrance concealed by retracting floorboards welcomes you to the former, just for more pizazz. There is also a swimming pool that drains to become a dance floor, wonderfully convenient for if you ever intended on having a paddle. but suddenly find the urge to break out into a paso doble mid-stroke.

The house was originally built by English architect Chalres Henry Bourne Quennell in around 1934. The majority of his original Arts and Crafts-style design details have since been lost.

Craig Draper of Draper London calls the property a ‘unique trophy mansion… that will appeal to an ultra-high-net-worth individual.'

If you are not a The Dark Night fan, however, no bother. May I, instead, propose a different tech millionaire mansion on the other side of the pond. In California, 600, Moore Road, Woodside, is on the market for a guide price of $14.9 million (about £11.08 million) — and it has no connection to Batman at all.

Instead it has been inspired by the French sense of art de vivre, a nod to its owner’s heritage — not a natural bedfellow to the global epicentre of technology and venture capital, but there you have it.

Global tech investor Jeff Clavier and his wife Bernadette, formerly a director from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, have taken an anti-Frolovichev approach, choosing to restore the hidden grandeur from the property’s past. Featuring a stone villa, cottage, guest house, detached fitness center and ample gardens, there’s not much this property doesn’t have (except a Batcave, the couple instead chose to convert the basement into a 3,000-bottle temperature controlled cellar. Much more chic, in my humble opinion). It also has a pool, tennis court and, from the look's of the listing, a golf course.

Set across 3.2 acres, former residents of Woodside include Steve Jobs and Michelle Pfeiffer — but not Bruce Wayne. Bernadette describes the property ‘a magical and sophisticated family heaven.’

If you can’t decide between the two, may I suggest purchasing both? Sunny French-inspired days in the tech hub of the world when visiting California, and rainy weeks nerding out in the Batcave in London. You really can have it all, for a price.

I suppose my issue is that even when the sun is out, I’m still thinking about the snow. I started skiing at the age of four, and have never really gotten over it. I learned in the USA, honed my craft in Austria, and have spent the past decade terrorising ski resorts across France, Italy and Switzerland. It’s nice to have hobbies, but I think my mother regrets introducing me to one that features quite a few broken bones.

Norway has always been my white whale. The birthplace of the sport as we know it, mastered by Sondre Norheim, and something of a mecca for those who dream about mountains and how to get down them quickly. Top of the Winter Olympics medal table in Milano/Cortina, the Norwegians know their way around the snow, and I was keen to try something new. I was also fed up with paying too much money for bad French food and being ignored by uninterested waiting staff. Growing up is realising you don’t have to hand over €25 for the worst spaghetti carbonara of your life just because Claude tells you to.

And so it was that I found myself in Geilo (‘yay-low’), in the Hol municipality, halfway between Oslo and Bergen. It was January, the temperature was -18ºC, and the snow was a fine powder, metres deep. At 750m above sea level, the lights of the town twinkled up and down the valley as the snow fell.

The resort is Norway’s oldest and one of its largest, with 20 lifts and 35km of pistes spread across two mountains. Geilo itself sits in between, and there is a free bus that transports you between the two pisted areas. The resort is ideal for beginners or families, featuring mostly blues, greens and reds, and four black runs. Situated in a National Park, there are also more than 230km of cross country tracks.

At 750m, Geilo itself pales in comparison to the grand heights of the French resorts, but due to its northerly position, the snow is easily as good, if not better, than what you might find in the Alps. The resort manages an average snowfall of more than 100in per year, and most crucially, because it’s cold, that snow remains and is in perfect condition. Forget about uncovered ice patches and bask in smooth white powder wherever you go.

It’s also easy to reach. Flights from London to Oslo or Bergen are about two hours, and a train from either is about three hours directly into the centre of town. Driving from either airport is again only about three hours, with glorious views to keep you entertained.

I often wonder what I would do with myself if I won the EuroMillions. There’s a few different probabilities, but buying a ski chalet is a near certainty. Could Geilo be the place? When it comes to luxury, it is certainly the best Norway has to offer, and as I toured various ‘cabins’ (the Norwegian parlance for chalet), I saw plenty that could compete with your Val D’iseres, your Courchevels, and your Verbiers. Many of these are masterminded by Cato Menkurud, a dry and funny developer whose previous line of work saw him reading maps for World Rally Championship racing drivers. You can watch a video of him in his former job here.

His company LHM builds and fits out some of the finest cabins in the country in Geilo and he was my gracious host for the weekend. His largest creation, at some 650sq m, featured a golf simulator, bar, gym, sauna, pool room and cinema. At almost £10 million, it is not cheap, but it is certainly cheaper than a French, Austrian, Swiss or Italian equivalent. Indeed, looking at the latest Ski Report from Savills, you’re paying about €8,500 per sq m, which is significantly less than Courchevel (€17,500), Lech (€23,100) and Val d’Isere (€32,500). Combine those prices with ever-more unreliable snowfall in the Alps, and things are starting to look quite promising for Norway.

There’s plenty to do in Geilo that doesn’t involve skiing, from snow shoeing, fatbiking and ice fishing, while the summer months can be even more active, with golf, water rafting, tennis, hiking and mountain biking. There are plenty of good restaurants, both on and off the piste, with a highlight being Geilo Mountain Lodge, which is a charming and traditional inn just outside of the town centre, and head to Hallingstuene for the finest wines and roast reindeer you’ll ever have.

While 35km of pistes may not set the world on fire when compared to the mega resorts of the Alps, there is plenty of will to build more, and the town as a whole is looking to grow with the expectation that those seeking perfect snow will soon be heading further north from central Europe. While visiting, I was lucky enough to be one of the first five people to ski a brand new piste, and plans are afoot for new lifts.

But most of all, what made it so special was not the great food, or the great snow, but the kindness of the local population. So much of skiing in the Alps can feel like an inconvenience, but not here. I’ll be heading back soon enough.

Been looking for a house with its own X-Ray room? Garaging for 25 cars? Have you been feeling like your place is getting a bit small, and are now looking out for something in the 70,000 sq ft bracket?

If the answer to all those questions is yes — and if you have a US$400 million budget — then the house of your dreams has just come to the market: 11201 Chalon Road, in the storied Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air. And honestly we don't think we've ever seen anything quite like it.

That is meant as a great compliment, for although this is a huge house — with 39 bedrooms and 50 bathrooms — it's not the size that makes this place stand out: it's the design, the finish, the features and the setting.

It's not even a quintessential Hollywood mansion, for the simple reason that even in the rarefied air of the 90049 postcode it's a house without comparison, unless perhaps you look at the great palaces of Europe. This is basically Bel Air's answer to Versailles.

Built between 2008 and 2018, the house was designed not by an LA architect, but by New York-based Peter Marino, a colourful character who has done everything from designing shops for Giorgio Armani to refurbishing Andy Warhol's townhouse. Marino — and the team of builders, led by Peter McCoy — created a home which demands superlatives everywhere you look. And as such, the agents handling the sale are understandably excited.

'Properties of this calibre simply do not exist,' says Jack Harris of The Beverly Hills Estates, who is handling the deal alongside his colleague Michael Fahimian (the agency is affiliated with Savills in the UK).

'This is truly a once-in-a-generation asset, one that not only stands apart in the luxury residential real estate market, but also sets an entirely new global benchmark. This is the trophy property of the United States. It could never be replicated.'

Harris isn't wrong. The size and shape of the plot alone is a real rarity, stretching to eight acres of almost completely-flat real estate, which is almost unheard of in the hills north of Los Angeles. The house sits on a promontory high above the City of Angels, offering magnificent views towards Downton, and out to the beaches. Bel Air Country Club is essentially on the doorstep: you can see in some of the pictures one of its golf holes wrapping sinuously around the grounds.

The 70,000 sq ft is spread out across three separate buildings within the grounds. Accommodation is split between the main house — 10 bedrooms, 13 staff rooms — and a guest house with six further bedrooms, and a further 10 staff rooms.

If you're wondering about the staffing ratio, we worked it out: it's just under one and a half domestic staff for each person staying in the house. That might sound a lot, but when you have 50 bathrooms — yes, five-zero — you'll want a team of cleaners to look after the place for you.

There are of course more than just rooms for sleeping and washing: the living spaces stretch on throughout the house, with formal and informal dining spaces, multiple lounge areas, a home cinema (naturally), a beauty salon, massage rooms, a full-service spa... we could go on, but the basic rule is: if you can think of it, this house has it. Sauna? Obviously. Hot and cold plunge pools? Of course. A dedicated pilates studio? Step this way.

All that pampering might make you hungry, and while you could fix yourself a snack in the family kitchen or fire up the pizza oven, there are full professional-style catering facilities, including eight butler pantries. It's essentially set up to be a five-star hotel all to yourself — and a couple of dozen of your best friends, of course.

It's a house which offers billionaire living, plain and simple. 'This estate was built with a vision that goes far beyond traditional luxury,' adds co-agent Michael Fahimian. 'Time and budget were not a factor when constructing this.

'From the positioning of the land to the level of detail in every finish, it delivers a fully self-sustained lifestyle that surpasses the finest resorts in the world, yet with complete privacy and exclusivity.'

So, then: the world's most expensive house? There's a surprising amount of competition for that accolade, as we reported on last year. And there have been homes on the market with higher initial asking prices which fail to meet the expectations: Château d’Armainvilliers in France, a former home of the Rothschild family, was on the market for £335 million in 2024, but sold for 'only' £155 million. The record holder, in terms of sales prices for homes that were advertised on the open market, sits with a house in Hong Kong which went for £240 million in 2017.

Thus, 11201 Chalon Rd has a chance to eclipse that deal, as well as the other £200-million-plus sales on record in the last few years. We're fascinated to see what happens next.

11201 Chalon Rd, Los Angeles, is for sale through The Beverley Hills Estates, an affiliate of Savills — see more details.

Capitalism, from the point of view of the normal working population, is basically one big succession of hamster wheels. And you are the hamster.

Your job is to run as fast as you can, to get that wheel spinning as quickly as it can go. If you really get it motoring, your reward is to hop across to a slightly larger wheel, which you must keep spinning faster still. Succeed again, and yet another wheel awaits.

This isn't supposed to depress you, for it could be worse. Society's most miserable people don't have a wheel at all, and tend to get themselves into all sorts of trouble — a caveat that applies equally to the idle rich as the beleaguered poor. Human beings are hard-wired to hop on to those hamster wheels, and be glad of the chance to do so.

What happens, then, when you win the game? Today's billionaires apparently like getting punched in the face, running newspapers into the ground and working until their 100th birthdays, but it wasn't always this way. Andrew Carnegie sponsored museums and concert halls, and John Paul Getty curated one of the world's great art collections, as well as buying a string of country houses. And Tony Ryan, the billionaire co-founder of Ryanair, saved one of Ireland's greatest estates: the Lyons Demesne. Today, a large part of that estate is for sale: the Village at Lyons.

Ryan bought Lyons in 1996, and quickly embarked on a lengthy restoration project, spending an estimate €100 million in the process. Much of that went on the main, whose crumbling fabric was restored and upgraded, and whose priceless works of art — including 19th century Italian-style frescoes and a rare overmantel trompe l'oeil — were saved by a team of over 100 workers.

Not that it was all for art's sake: the house also got a half-Olympic sized pool and a helipad that is believed to be the only one in Ireland with a licence to operate 24 hours a day.

As grand as the house is, the village within the estate truly captured Ryan's imagination. This collection of buildings grew up in the 18th century following the opening of Ireland's Grand Canal from Dublin to Shannon, with the double lock on the site creating a natural stopping point, and a source of power.

A four-storey water mill was built, as was a pub — the Jolly Anglers Inn — houses, a police barracks, a forge, stables, a boat repair facility, farriers, a lock keeper’s house, and even a Church of Ireland boarding school. At its peak there were 79 houses and 102 famliies who called it home, with 90 barges a day passing through the loch.

The village fell on hard times as the world changed, and by the time the canal closed to freight in 1960 just eight families were left. A couple of years later the estate was sold to University College Dublin, who based their agricultural department at the main house, while the village was left to rot.

According to the agents, that actually worked in the village's favour: 'Originally from Tipperary, Ryan was a fan of Charles Kickham, whose novel Knocknagow depicted life in a deserted village much like the one he found at Lyons,' their history of the estate reads. 'Ironically, decades of neglect had preserved the village as a near-perfect archaeological time capsule — an intact, self-contained estate industrial hamlet on which to base what architectural critics would later describe not as a restoration, but a recreation.'

Ryan poured an estimated €30 million into the twenty acres around the village: he imported a four-hundred-year-old fireplace from France, and recreated a mid-nineteenth-century conservatory originally designed by Richard Turner of Kew Gardens glasshouse fame.

All the old buildings — from the forge and the police barracks to the school, the lock keeper’s house and the mill that had burnt down in 1902 — was restored. Water features were installed: fountains, waterfalls and more.

There's even a tiny church, the San Pedro Chapel, built on a small island in the lake. When Ryan died in in October 2007, it was here that he chose to be buried.

Following Ryan's death the village was converted into a hotel, a role which it still serves today — and it's utterly wonderful. A string of cottages are set amid a landscape dotted with gardens, courtyards, orchards and Ryan's beloved water features — including the old mill itself.

Within those cottages, the furnishing and fittings are utterly beguiling: there are carved wooden staircases and four-poster beds, exquisite bathrooms and centuries-old fireplaces, leather sofas and open fires. The proximity of everything to everything else brings to mind the Welsh village of Portmeirion, but with the buildings rendered in classical Georgian rural style rather than continental fantasy.

There are also all the trappings you'd expect of a five‑star hotel: dining options, a spa and more. It could be kept operational as it is, but agent David Byrne of Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty is pitching it as a residential opportunity rather than a hospitality deal. The Village at Lyons is set to become a thriving community once again.

The Village at Lyons is for sale vis Sotheby's International Realty — see more details.

The Fustic Estate is the sort of place people fall in love with.

The present owner, Kit Braden, came here with his wife in 2011 and fell in love with it instantly. A few years before that it was the turn of William and Jan Gordon, who visited the house thanks to a chance encounter while honeymooning in Barbados in 2004, and ended up buying the place.

Even Country Life architectural editors — usually a level-headed lot — are not immune. Jeremy Musson (who writes for us still) paid a visit, and ended up writing an entire book about the place, Fustic House & Estate — A Messel Masterpiece. And that leads us to Oliver Messel himself: one of the titans of 20th century design, Messel completely remodelled the original 1740 building to create the house as it stands today.

Messel, the man often credited with 'inventing' the outdoor living lifestyle, created a home which he considered his masterpiece — and that's saying something, considering the number of magnificent villas he designed across the Caribbean's smartest spots.

Today, it's the turn of a new owner to fall in love with the place. The Bradens have reluctantly decided that now is the time to step aside, and it's for sale through Knight Frank with a guide price of $22.5 million.

Bare numbers rarely do much to illuminate a house's charms, but in the case of Fustic House they are impressive: 13,000sq ft of space within an 11-acre plot that stretches from it's secluded spot in the hills down to the sea.

Big as it is, though, it's a house which has a hugely flexible floorplan arranged around a main home and a couple of wings, making it 'as comfortable for two people as it is for 14,' says Knight Frank's Andy Blandford-Newson. There are seven bedrooms, relaxed living spaces, terraces and balconies, kitchens and bathrooms. There's also a separate secondary accommodation

The garden setting appears at first glance breathtakingly natural, but it's actually the result of outstanding work over many years. Messel started the work rolling with his designs for Vivien and Charles Graves — the latter the brother of the poet Robert Graves — who owned the house in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 2000 the surroundings were years the much-lauded landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (a multiple gold medallist at the Chelsea Flower Show) was hired by then-owner Sigrid Rausing to revamp and revitalise the grounds.

If you're not already sold, we've yet to discuss one of the undisputed jewels of the property: the pool.

Blasted from the coral by Messel, and considered by the designer to be the defining feature of the property, it's like a Barbadian Garden of Eden: a plunging pool tucked into the hillside, overhung by vegetation and with a deck that overhangs the ravine. It's been here for six decades, but has recently been re-engineered to make sure it remains as usable as it is beautiful.

The pool, just like the rest of the property, is tucked in amid the greenery, earning it a long-standing reputation as 'paparazzi-proof'. Little surprise, then, to hear that it's long been a popular place for high-end fashion shoots and A-lister's weddings.

We'll leave the last word, though, to Jeremy Musson, who called it 'quite simply one of the jewels of the Caribbean. 'It's like something out of a dream,' added Jeremy. 'One of those rare places, which once seen, is never forgotten.'

The Fustic Estate is for sale via Knight Frank — see more details.

Bing Crosby's White Christmas is the best-selling song of all time. He won an Oscar for Best Actor, for 1944's Going My Way. He had a love affair with Grace Kelly. His 'Road To' movies with Bob Hope are some of the best-loved comedy films of the 20th century. He made music with everyone from Bix Beiderbecke to David Bowie.

He even died in style: his last words were 'Great game of golf, fellas. Now let's go and have a Coca-Cola,' spoken immediately after walking off the 18th of a beautiful course in Spain, and immediately before the massive heart attack which brought his 74 years to a painlessly instantaneous close.

He even had cool nicknames: known simply as 'Bing' to most around the world, he was dubbed 'Der Bingle' in Germany and (this is my favourite) 'El Bingo' in Spanish-speaking nations.

In the words of another 20th century music legend, 'some guys have all the luck'.

At the end of a day in his charmed life — perhaps after shooting the breeze with Louis Armstrong, having lunch with Frank Sinatra or playing golf with Clint Eastwood — Crosby would come back to his house at 1200 Armsby Drive, in the Bay Area city of Hillsborough, just south of San Francisco. That house is now for sale.

The ultimate crooner moved here in 1965 and lived here for the rest of his life; his wife, Kathryn, called it home until her own death in 2024.

The Crosby family sold the house, The Crosby Estate, for $25 million in the summer of 2025. But if you're sore at missing out back then, the good news is that it's back on the market, after a $3 million refurbishment, at $28.995 million via Jennifer Gilson of Golden Gate Sotheby's International Realty.

It's a huge place, with 11 bedrooms, 15 bathrooms and over 18,500sq ft of space — but it's the style of the house that really wins us over. There are obvious elements borrowed from French chateaux (not least the grey slate roof turrets), but also an arched colonnade to lend an Italian flavour, and wood-panelled rooms and plasterwork which wouldn't look out of place in and English country house. Fittingly, it all feels like it could be a film set created in the heyday of Hollywood's Golden Age.

All this was the work of architects John Bakewell Jr. and Ernest Weihe, who built the house in 1929, creating a home which — in the words of the agent — blends 'grand architectural presence with a warm, liveable layout... designed for both intimate daily living and elegant entertaining'.

There's a string of beautiful reception rooms, including a strikingly pretty oval dining room with charming trompe-l'oeil to make the space feeel like a garden in springtime.

We also particularly love the home office, in one corner of the house and with lovely views of the gardens of just under two and a half acres — one of the largest plots in this neighbourhood.

It's unusual for a house to come back on the market so quickly, and for a relatively small price uplift in percentage terms, considering the scale of the work done. As a look at the San Francisco Chronicle's story about the original listing shows, the wonderful swimming pool and several thousand square feet have been added to the house. On the other hand, the the original listing from last January was for the house in a five-acre plot, while the latest listing is for 2.4 acres of land — no doubt that is the developer's real prize here. It'll be fascinating to see what happens next to this storied home.

The Crosby Estate is for sale at US$28.995 million — see more details and pictures.

Alfred Hellerström came from nothing. Born in 1863 as the seventh son of a carpenter, who was himself the illegitimate son of a land owner in the tip of Sweden's rural south, he was bright enough to earn a place studying at the local grammar school, but left while barely more than a child to start working in construction in Stockholm.

His passion for learning continued to fire him — he alternated working with study — but his limited formal education almost stopped this promising career from taking place. Eventually, thanks at one point to a friend of his brother, and at another to special dispensation granted by the Swedish royal family, he came through two of the most prestigious institutions in Scandinavia, the KTH and KKH (in English the Royal Institute of Technology and Royal Academy of Fine Arts respectively).

A glittering architectural career thus came to fruition, and Hellerström ended up designing dozens of wonderful buildings in his homeland — not least the exquisite Lund University Library, recently voted the most beautiful building in Sweden.

A ripple of excitement has gone through the property market in Sweden, then, with an apartment in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood designed by Hellerström coming on to the market via Sotheby's International Realty Sweden.

The excitement is all the greater when you see inside the Grand residence at Kungsholmen, for in 2010 the property underwent restoration, with four of the grandest rooms — all protected under Sweden's listing system — being returned to their original condition.

Officially listed as 'price on application' — though you can expect to pay around £4.5 million — the Grand residence at Kungsholmen has four great salons which are the centrepiece of the property.

There are also three bedrooms, a kitchen-dining room and two bathrooms. The kitchen and one of the bedrooms have outdoor terraces.

The apartment was originally built for Carl Becker — a chemist-turned-industrialist whose company still bears his name today — and his wife Elisabeth Becker, who lived here from the time it was completed for the rest of their lives.

And indeed, why would you leave? This house, as the agents put it, 'sits at the intersection of architectural history and artistic significance'. As well as the architecture — huge ceilings, impressive stucco work, tiling, and mirrors — the furniture and fittings have been magnificently curated.

The ceiling paintings are a particular highlight, and the work of Vicke Andrén, an artist celebrated for his work at the Royal Swedish Opera house. Unsurprisingly, the restoration carried out here has won awards: the apartment received the Stockholm Heritage Association’s Building Prize in 2012.

For sale via Sotheby's International Realty Sweden — see more details.

This article was commissioned before events in the Middle East. Please check the Government's 'Foreign travel advice' webpage before travelling.

You’ve got bags of money and you don’t wish to give a major chunk of it to Rachel Reeves. That’s understandable. As UK fiscal policies tighten, the mobile business elite and affluent retirees are heading for new tax jurisdictions in the sun.

For more than a century, London’s allure as the home of global finance, culture and tax arbitrage rested on two pillars: the strength of the pound and the UK’s non-domicile tax regime, which allowed foreigners and British citizens who had a permanent home abroad to live in Blighty without paying UK tax on their worldwide income. That regime – a messy product of imperial legal history – was abolished by the Labour government in April 2025. It has been replaced by a residence-based system that taxes global income, capital gains and inheritance more aggressively than ever. Henley & Partners, which is a leading consultancy in residence and citizenship by investment, estimates that the UK had a net loss of 16,500 millionaires last year. And with them, art gallerists, jewellers, private bankers and concierges are leaving London for where the money is.

High net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are being drawn to states and cities that offer lower taxes, better climates, or both. They all have pros and cons, because for every sunset-lit infinity pool and spontaneous Allen & Co conference is, potentially, a network of vapid influencers and wide boys, ladies of the night trying to catch your eye, a postage stamp-sized flat that cost millions, and the threat of hurricanes and tsunamis.

So let us explore what’s the best fit for you and your money…

Monaco

• Income tax: 0%
• Capital gains tax: 0%
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax: 0% (with some exceptions)
• Property tax: None ongoing, though there are transaction costs
• Residency requirement: A minimum €500,000 deposit in a Monegasque bank. Clean criminal record for the past five years
• Who you will meet: Tennis players and Formula One (F1) drivers, international bankers, yacht brokers, gold diggers, Sir Philip Green
• Pros: Good if you like F1; the Mediterranean climate; rarified social scene. CCTV and police presence means you won’t get mugged for your Richard Mille. A convenient heliport, and easy connections to Milan, Paris, the Alps and London
• Cons: Bad if you’re claustrophobic. Most apartments are small and you’re living in tower blocks cheek-by-jowl. Property approaches nearly £50,000 per square metre, which means £1 million buys you no more than a generous bathroom. Plus, Monaco has leant into Somerset Maugham’s wry and observant quote about it being a sunny place for shady people

‘We’ve seen an increase in enquiries from UK-based clients considering a move to Monaco. Most are interested in renting as a first stage,' says Irene Luke from Savills Monaco.

'The waiting list to obtain the appointments necessary for a residence card has grown. It should be noted that non-EU nations (i.e British nationals) require a French visa before they can apply for a Monaco residence card, so the process is longer.

'Many new apartments have been built recently, but this hasn’t stretched services or infrastructure. The only area where supply is perhaps tight is on the international schooling front.

'The profile of clients is definitely younger than was once the case. Many come from the fintech world, are still active in business, and have school-age children.'

Switzerland

• Income tax: Federal tax is up to 11.5% plus cantonal and municipal tax, which vary widely. Zug is the most tax-friendly option, totalling 11.9%

• Capital gains tax: 0% in most cases

• Wealth tax: Depends on the canton. In Zug it’s around 0.25%

• Property tax: Generally under 0.3%. In Zug it’s zero

• Residency requirement: Proof of financial independence

• Who you will meet: Bankers, industrialists, adventurers, watchmakers; the ghosts of Sir Roger Moore, Peter Sellers and David Niven

• Pros: Beautiful countryside. Fresh mountain air. Skiing in winter. Exceptional cheese and Swiss wine (which they don’t export). Trains that run on time. Excellent healthcare (which you’ll have to pay for)

• Cons: Geneva and Zurich aren’t very inspiring cities. A sandwich or a taxi ride will bankrupt a mere mortal

Dubai

• Income tax: 0%
• Capital gains: tax 0%
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax: 0%
• Property tax: None, but there is a 4% transfer fee
• Residency requirement: Purchase property of more than AED 2 million (about £400,000) without a loan, start a business in the UAE with a projected value of more than AED 500,000, or deposit at least AED 2 million in a UAE investment fund
• Who you will meet: Property developers, oil men, hospitality executives, Russian, Chinese and Indian billionaires, boxers, influencers, Katie Price
• Pros: Sleek modern homes with pools and eternal sunshine. Prime real estate is just over £7,000 per square metre, so 70% less than Monaco. Water parks for the family. Long all-you-can-eat brunches. It’s eight hours to London and seven hours to Singapore aboard one of the world’s most comfortable airlines
• Cons: Every woman and her shih tzu wants to be a luxury influencer. Sharia society with significant human rights issues

‘Undoubtedly, the last three years have seen more people move to Dubai from the UK,' says James Heathcote, a British-born Dubai-based tax advisor who is a managing partner of the Sanctoras Group.

'Covid made people realise they could work and run businesses remotely. Crime in London is exaggerated, but that perception has had an impact. And the lifestyle in Dubai is attractive to many.

‘Our clients are mostly over 45 and have built businesses in a range of industries. Financial services is a big one. They want space and gardens. They’re buying large villas 40 minutes outside the city rather than apartments downtown or in Dubai Marina. They’re not living where the beach clubs and the influencers are. The expansion of Dubai is now out of town. What you see on Instagram is not representative of what Dubai is like in 2026. A decade ago, people would move here for a few years, make money and leave. Now they’re coming to stay, and bringing their families. We have British curriculum schools, and more are being built.

‘From a tax perspective, there’s some red tape. There’s quite a lot of homework to do before and after you arrive, but Dubai has developed a lot recently to make it easier. Qualifying for a ten year golden visa by purchasing a property for £400,000 is very obtainable.'

Antigua

• Income tax: 0%
• Capital gains tax: 0%
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax: 0%
• Property tax: 0.3-0.5%
• Residency requirement: A £170,000 donation or purchase of £220,000+ real estate
• Who you will meet: British rock stars, Canadian bankers, sailors, Oprah Winfrey, Lord Sainsbury
• Pros: English is the first language. Stunning white Sand beaches. Vibrant sailing and Scuba diving scenes
• Cons: High cost of imported goods. Limited specialised healthcare. Inconsistent utility services. Poor roads. Hurricane risks

Milan

• Income tax: An annual flat tax of €300,000 on global income, plus €50,000 on each family member
• Capital gains tax: 26%, but exemptions apply
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax: 0%
• Property tax: 2-9% purchase tax
• Residency requirement: A long stay or residence visa, which costs around £100
• Who you will meet: Fashionistas, engineers, architects and designers. Goldman Sachs’s Richard Gnodde and Aston Villa owner Nassef Sawiris, both of whom are recent London exiles
• Pros: Centre of fashion and Italy’s commercial and financial capital. Nirvana for opera fans. Doesn’t have the overtourism of Rome and Venice, and the infrastructure works. The lakes, Alps and beach are easily accessible. Transport links were improved ahead of the recent Winter Olympics, including a superfast railway from the city to Linate airport
• Cons: Scarcity of prime properties available (you may fare better in Florence or Rome). Italian bureaucracy is labyrinthine. Not as much of a tax haven as other options on this list (especially as that flat rate has tripled lately), nor as safe from crime, and prime square-meterage is twice the going rate of Dubai, but that’s the price you pay for a proper city with buzz

Portugal

• Income tax: 20%
• Capital gains tax: 28% on Portuguese assets
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax: 0% (with some exceptions)
• Property tax: Transfer tax of up to 7.5% (possible exemption for a primary residence), stamp duty of 0.8%, and annual municipal tax of 0.3-0.45%
• Residency requirement: A minimum €500,000 investment in a Portuguese fund, business or research project
• Who you will meet: Footballers, Irish and Brazilian ex-pats, Madonna and Princess Eugenie
• Pros: World-class golf, sailing, surfing and sports facilities. Mediterranean climate. Unrestricted Schengen zone travel with a golden visa. International schools. Relaxed yet sophisticated lifestyle
• Cons: Non-habitual resident tax scheme and golden visa property investment scheme has now closed. Property transfer tax has increased. Complex bureaucracy can require fluent Portuguese

‘In many respects, this shift began around Brexit when other European cities began to supplant London as the western gateway to the continent,' says Edward de Mallet Morgan, head of private office for realtor Douglas Elliman France.

'Many Brits sought foreign passports through familial links, with Irish passports proving particularly popular. The movement is not limited to the very wealthy; it’s professionals like doctors, teachers and skilled workers exploring opportunities abroad.

'I have friends who have left London to start new lives in Spain and Portugal. My Italian wife and I did the same, moving to the south of France after 15 years in London.

‘For HNWIs, Monaco has always been a popular low-tax jurisdiction. The British School of Monaco opened in November 2022 to ease oversubscription to the long-established International School of Monaco.

'Italy offers lifestyle and tax advantages, but fewer top-tier international schools than Switzerland or the French Riviera.

‘Some individuals who initially consider Monaco ultimately choose Dubai due to faster bank onboarding and administrative processes.

‘Perceptions of safety have become a growing factor in relocation decisions. Confidentiality is also a consideration, as the level of transparency can deter investment and residency decisions. Some business owners are relocating ahead of major liquidity events, like IPOs. They are choosing to list in the United States or other international exchanges rather than London, both to maximise valuations and manage tax exposure.'

Singapore

• Income tax: 0% on foreign-sourced income, and up to 24% on Singapore-derived income
• Capital gains tax: 0%
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax: 0%
• Property tax: Up to 32%
• Residency requirement: Global Investor Programme (GIP) grants permanent residency in return for S$10 million (about £5.85 million) investment in new or existing business, S$25 million (about £14.6 million) in an approved fund, or S$200 million (about £117 million) in a Singapore-based family office
• Who you will meet: Biotech scientists, shipping magnates, finance ex-pats from London and Hong Kong, and 55 billionaires including Sir James Dyson
• Pros: Politically stable. Safe and clean. Lively ex-pat community. Diverse culinary options. International schools. China, Japan and Australia are all easily accessible, as well as South East Asia’s beautiful beaches and rainforests
• Cons: Humidity is 90%. High cost of living (apartments are around £19,000 per square metre, property tax is high, and car ownership is among the most expensive in the world. (A Range Rover could set you back over £500,000!). It has been described as the only shopping mall with a seat at the UN. It’s eight hours ahead of the UK and a 14 hour flight

Florida

• Income tax: Progressive federal tax up to 37%, 0% state tax
• Capital gains tax: Treated the same as income
• Wealth tax/inheritance tax 0%
• Property tax: 0.75%
• Residency requirement: Need a Green Card, which is selected by lottery, or investor visa (EB-5), which requires putting $800,000 into an American business. The ‘Trump Gold Card’ is a newly-launched fast-track immigration pathway that requires a $1 million donation to the USA Treasury
• Who you will meet: Estate agents, crypto evangelists, drug dealers, MAGA-supporters, Brooklyn Beckham-Peltz
• Pros: Access to American enterprise (and politics). No language barrier (except with your gardener). High standard of living
• Cons: Gun crime. The price of healthcare and tipping culture means the cost of living isn’t as cheap as you think. Where you stand politically could influence whether you want to be there or not

‘It’s a competitive market out there, and there’s a lot of choice,’ says Paddy Dring, who is a partner at Knight Frank and its global head of prime sales. ‘Some countries, in recognising the benefits of foreign investment, have made it easier for people to move there from abroad. Tax is a consideration, but not the only one. There’s sunshine and lifestyle, there are family ties, education and health needs. London might not tick the sunshine box always, but it has scored well on the others for many years. I think people are looking at this medium term to see how it plays out; they may decide to stay where they are or to come back… Yes, we’ve seen increased traffic leaving, but people are still buying prime properties in London because they want to be here, and many have made the decision to stay.’

For all the compelling tax narratives and weather reports above, London still has a lot to offer. It remains one of the world’s most dynamic, historic, trendsetting and culturally-rich cities. A London address carries prestige few can match; its legal and financial services infrastructure remains world class; and few bases offer the same talent pool and global networking opportunities. For this reason, ultra HNIs are choosing to keep their family offices in London.

You may wish to make your primary residence elsewhere and have your accountants deal with the fall out, but you’ll still want to pop in regularly.

On paper, 35 Stuyvesant Street is nothing more, nor less, than an ordinary Manhattan townhouse for sale: four bedrooms, five storeys, and just over 3,500sq ft of space.

Pretty much everything else about this $3.895 million home makes it obvious that this townhouse is anything but ordinary.

Let's start with its origins. Built in 1861, it was designed by James Renwick Jr, an architect who, according to the Smithsonian, 'designed some of the most famous buildings in America'. Among his achievements are the iconic St Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, and 'The Castle', The Smithsonian Institution's iconic, Gothic-inspired headquarters in Washington DC. Pedigrees simply don't get any stronger.

Let's move on to the building's history. It was bought in 1958 by Lee B. Anderson, the teacher-turned-furniture collector who became the pioneer of the Gothic Revival style in America — affectionately dubbed the 'Godfather of Gothic'.

The house, in the words of agent Nick Gavin, became 'part home, part salon, and part exhibition', a hotspot for post-war culture in the City where the likes of Cher, Andy Warhol, the fashion designer Halston and Jacqueline Kennedy's sister Lee Radziwill would pop round to say hello, see what's new and hang out in among Anderson's unmatched collection of curious.

Finally, though — and arguably of most interest to the Manhattan house buyers of 2026 — is the building's present appearance. To walk past it in Spring is to visit an East Village landmark, with the wisteria flowers hanging heavy on the boughs that cover the facade, lighting up the area's revered Renwick Triangle.

Anderson loved the wisteria, tending it for decades according to the Francis York blog. But as pretty as it is outside, it's the interiors that really make the place stand out. Exposed brick and plaster, original floorboards pitted, scored and stained over the decades, peeling paint, cracking walls and chipped tiles all come together through a sort of magical alchemy to make the place what it is today.

You could dismiss it as shabby chic taken to the nth degree, but would be horribly reductive, for chic has never looked so shabby, and shabby has never looked so chic. As Matthew Sedacca put it in an article for Curbed, '35 Stuyvesant Street is a work of art'.

The house had been for sale for a while, but since Gavin took on the listing a buyer has been found and contracts are apparently signed. We can't wait to see what happens next in the story of this wonderful place.

35 Stuyvesant Street, New York, NY, is listed with Nick Gavin via Compass.

‘No other island in the Mediterranean can match it for culture, landscapes and cuisine,’ wrote Arabella Youens of Mallorca when she visited for Country Life a few years ago. This island, the largest of Spain's Balearic Islands, it was once written off as a nightmarish package holiday destination. These days, though, it’s earned a reputation as one of the smartest places in Europe. It's a home-from-home for A-listers, with everyone from Harrison Ford to King Felipe VI himself fans of the island. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones apparently spend a month here every summer.

Fittingly, then, the property on the market in Mallorca is among the most impressive in Europe. A prime example is this a 35-acre mini-estate near Algaida, with four separate houses, three pools, and its own outdoor cinema, perfect at a time of year when we all go Oscars-mad. It’s for sale via Engel & Völkers for €17.5 million — around £15 million.

Located up in the hills on the western side of Mallorca, the biggest draw is the main villa, named 'Saya'. Situated right at the heart of the plot, it's a place with five-star hotel vibes, with, light, spacious bedrooms, opulent bathrooms of smooth stone and exquisite living spaces.

All the rooms are beautiful, but it's the living spaces on the edges that catch the eye: the covered terrace, open to the sun-bleached Mallorcan countryside, the pool, and the outdoor cinema, where you can watch a film against a backdrop of stars. What a place this would be to work your way through the Oscars shortlist.

Naturally, if you're settling in to watch a movie, you'll want a glass of wine. And choosing a bottle from a cellar this stylish will make you feel like a movie star yourself.

The second house, Shai, has its own separate pool, and is intended as a guest house for family and friends. At the bottom of the hill, past a charming old windmill, is Sama, set up to work just as well as a home office, or as a second guest house (once again, it's also got its own pool. Syra is configured as staff accommodation, while the developers mention the possibility of building a fifth house, Sela, depending on the needs of the buyer.

It's quite a place, then — but then again, it needs to be since Mallorca is full of magnificent homes for those with limitless budgets. Christie's International Real Estate currently list a €75 million property in the north of the island that has comes with a herd of alpacas and its own football pitch; and von Poll Real Estate are selling a cliffside retreat at €19.5 million on the north-east coast of Mallorca that really has to be seen. A-list homes on an A-list island, in other words.

For sale via Engel & Völkers — see more details.

Until quite recently, nobody with a choice in the matter went anywhere near the Alps in winter and volunteering to do so for the sake of fun and games was a development of the late 19th century. Arthur Conan Doyle claimed (dubiously) to have invented downhill skiing during a visit to Switzerland in 1894 and predicted (correctly) that it would soon catch on.

Before then, for thousands of years, travellers had typically come to the Alps when the weather was good, and not for leisure, but for trade, transit or their health. Spa culture here goes back a long way; archaeologists working in St Moritz, Switzerland, unearthed some hollowed-out larch trunks that appear to have been used as containers for mineral-rich water, to be drunk for its curative powers. The wood was dated to 1400BC. Where wellness is concerned, what goes around comes around. Would you say that a blind faith in the beneficial properties of mineral water sounds quaintly out-of-date or oddly familiar? And will that be still or sparkling?

We’ve learned to love the Alps when they’re cold and snowy, almost to the point where we’ve forgotten that they’re just as lovable when they’re warm and flowery — in many ways even more so. As the seasonal snows melt away and the region sheds its glossy white winter coat and fur-trimmed Moon Boots, one sort of magic is replaced by another. A full spectrum of colour is restored and a gentle breeze blows through the valleys, delicately perfumed with hints of gentian, rock jasmine, bellflower, globeflower, forget-me-not, lupin, alpenrose, cranesbill, buttercup, campion, hogweed, bistort, sloes, blueberries, ripening apples and blossoming herbs.

Where best to go for a bit of all that? Country Life tells you more.

St Moritz, Switzerland

St Moritz is at the southerly, or ‘upper’, end of the Engadin Valley. This valley is, by Alpine standards, not only long but also broad — broad enough to accommodate four sizable lakes and 200 or so smaller ones. This breadth also means that you never feel like you’re trapped at the base of a steep, deep ‘V’. Instead, you feel like you’re reposing comfortably on the more expansive curve of a fat-bottomed ‘U’. There are mountains wherever you look, but they seldom loom over you in the way they generally do elsewhere in the Alps. The lakes and rivers and forests shimmer and ripple away sublimely into the distance.

The Maloja wind is a defining feature of summer in the Engadin Valley. It rises from the Maloja Pass, not far from St Moritz near the Italian border, at around midday, and blows steadily down the valley until the early evening — not so strongly as to cause trouble for gentlemen with hairpieces, but strongly enough to make life interesting for sailors, windsurfers, kitesurfers and others keen to propel themselves at speed over bodies of water. Lake Silvaplana (below), on the edge of St Moritz, is a particular hotspot, though by no means the only one.

Those born under an earth sign rather than a water sign may prefer to exhaust themselves on the nearly 600 kilometres’ worth of impeccably maintained hiking trails that crisscross the valley, and that connect with those of the Via Alpina, a 5,000-kilometre network through all eight of the Alpine countries. Though hardly a secret, this is a surprisingly little-known marvel of joined-up European thinking. With some exceptions, where walkers can go, mountain bikers can go too.

Meanwhile, the old town of St Moritz itself is as seductive today as at any point in its storied history, thick with fancy restaurants, hotels, bars and nightclubs — as well as a thriving art scene. Karsten Greve, Andrea Caratsch, Vito Schnabel, Robilant and Voena, and Hauser and Wirth are all here. Husband and wife Manuela Hauser and Iwan Wirth, both of whom are Swiss, went on their first date at Chesa Marchetta, a restaurant with rooms in nearby Sils Maria. They liked the place so much they recently bought it and did it up. It reopened to sighs of delight in late 2025.

‘What makes it special? Look around! The space! The lakes! The sun! The wind!’ says Susi Wiprächtiger, a retired local councillor turned swimming instructor and tour guide.

Hero property for sale

Eight bedrooms and a small garden just off Via Serlas, the swankiest of shopping streets in the swankiest of Alpine towns. And with no shortage of bright, pine-panelled charm. Chesa Nova is offered by Christie’s International Real Estate, price on application (never an encouraging sign).

Megève, France

It was Noémie de Rothschild who put Megève on the map in the 1920s, supposedly as France’s answer to Switzerland’s St Moritz. Why, you might ask, did France need an answer to St Moritz? St Moritz was Switzerland’s answer to Chamonix, which was and remains in France, just around the corner from Megève. And the topography and conditions of Megève are nothing like those of St Moritz. The resemblance isn’t even close. Jean Cocteau, a Megève regular, referred to it as Paris’s 21st arrondissement, which is yet another apples-and-oranges comparison, but does at least capture something of its urbane, bon chic bon genre tone.

In any case, put Megève on the map the Rothschilds did. The family still owns several properties in and around the town, including the three famous chalets of the Domaine du Mont d’Arbois. Those chalets are to wood what the Eiffel Tower is to steel, the Pan Am building is to glass and the Taj Mahal is to translucent white marble. A love letter written in lumber. The Rothschild’s architect went on to design more than 100 chalets in the neighbourhood. It’s said that Méribel (again, not terribly far away) is the woodiest of the great Alpine resorts. That may be so, but Megève surely gives it a run for its money. Its outwardly unflashy, yet stealthily sumptuous rustic charm is irresistible. Which is perhaps fortunate for the town’s longer-term future as a summertime destination, since the combination of its relatively low elevation and the remorseless effects of global warming don’t bode well for its wintertime offering.

Incidentally, Megève’s historic Mont d’Arbois golf course — also created for Baroness Rothschild in the 1920s — is the best in the Alps, with the best view of Mont Blanc. Take that, St Moritz.

Hero property for sale

As mentioned above, post-Rothschild Megève was largely the work of one architect, Henri Jacques Le Même. This six-bedroom chalet is one of his, though the interiors have been completely modernised. It occupies a covetable spot a nine iron’s chip away from the Mont d’Arbois golf course. It is for sale with Knight Frank for €8.95 million.

Bad Ischl, Austria

Picking just one resort town from the many among the sheer peaks and thickly forested valleys of the Salzkammergut region, east of Salzburg, is like picking a single stone from among the great glittering heaps of diamonds at an old De Beers sightholder sale. There’s treasure everywhere.

The best known of these towns is Hallstatt, on the lake of the same name, at the foot of the looming Dachstein massif. Thanks to its utterly off-the-scale cuteness quotient, Hallstatt has in recent years become rather too popular for its own good, its cobbled streets jam-packed with Instagramming day-trippers, the needle-fine spire of its 18th-century Evangelical church lost behind a tangle of selfie-sticks.

The spa town of Bad Ischl, 20 minutes or so away, is an excellent alternative, at the confluence of two rivers, rather than on a lake, but comparably gorgeous, less crowded, a little bigger, with more to see and do. In winter, there’s decent skiing to be had on Mount Katrien, which is directly accessible from Bad Ischl by means of an endearingly Wallace and Gromit-esque four-seat vintage cable car. The town is also an excellent gliding-off point for cross-country skiing and ice-skating.

But Bad Ischl came to international prominence as the preferred summer getaway of Emperor Franz Joseph I (who described it as ‘heaven on earth’) and his celebrated wife Elisabeth (Sisi), for whom the Kaiservilla, a wedding present to the couple from Franz Joseph’s mother, the Archduchess Sophie, was reconfigured on a vastly expanded E-for-Elisabeth shaped footprint.

Where the imperial couple went, the hangers-on and ambitious arty types followed. Bad Ischl’s musical heritage is especially rich. Bruckner, Strauss and Brahms spent summers here. The annual Lehár operetta festival in July and August has grown to become the largest of its kind in Europe.

Bad Ischl is a convenient base from which to explore the Hallstatt-Dachstein Alpine Region — the UNESCO World Heritage-listed portion of the Salzkammergut, which was awarded that designation on the basis of its outstanding natural beauty and cultural significance (salt has been mined here since the Bronze Age). Bad Ischl lies a marmot’s whisker beyond that designated area. No hard feelings, though. It’s got its very own UNESCO listing, as a spa town.

Hero property for sale

Five-bedroom, bumblebee-yellow Villa Traunkai is right on the River Traun — the clue is in the name — at once central and discreet. Not quite a fixer-upper, think of it instead as possessing a kind of shabby gentility that is wholly becoming of a resort such as Bad Ischl. Yours for €1.95 million from Mangoni Immobilien.

Breuil-Cervina, Italy

Something of a special case, this one. Breuil-Cervinia, in Italy’s Aosta Valley, isn’t, by general consent, the most architecturally remarkable of ski resorts. Nor the most socially polished. Nor the most historically rich. No matter. There are plenty of other pretty, chic and culturally fascinating Alpine towns to choose from. (See above, for starters.) Breuil-Cervinia can only play the hand nature has dealt it. And this it does with consummate skill, safe in the knowledge that it holds two or three aces up its sleeve which, for the time being, make it a surefire winner.

First and foremost, it’s one of the very, very few resorts where you can ski all year round.

Second, thanks to a cross-border cable car, it’s directly linked to one of the very, very few other resorts where you can ski all year round — Zermatt, in Switzerland. Between the two of them, and accessible from either side, is the Plateau Rosà Glacier. Here the eternal ski-bunny may forever cavort in clover, or its frozen, skiable equivalent.

Breuil-Cervinia’s third trump card is the Matterhorn, which straddles the Italy-Switzerland border. Italians know the mountain not as the Matterhorn but as Monte Cervino. It’s beautiful beyond words, whatever language you speak, and from any point of view. Something about the unique elegance of its form and the splendour of its situation contrives to make it the most mountain-like of all mountains, anywhere.

In short, Breuil-Cervinia is the summer ski resort for those who’d prefer to carry on skiing as if summer never happened.

If your skills are up to it, you can ski down from the glacier for lunch at Ristorante Alpage, a picturesque log-cabin affair on Lago Blu, a short distance from Breuil-Cervinia. Feast on traditional Aostan dishes and wines on the sun-drenched terrace while gazing in wonderment at the matchless Matterhorn. I mean Monte Cervino.

Having said all that, there are of course other things to do in the area apart from skiing. Most of the usual summer-in-the-Alps activities such as hiking, mountain-biking and climbing are on offer. But really the snow is the point. Long may it last.

Hero property for sale

As noted on the listing on the Berkshire Hathaway Home Services website, Breuil-Cervinia is a town better known for its modern, architecturally unadventurous apartments than old-fashioned (even if newly built), freestanding chalet-style villas. But here’s one of the latter sort, with four bedrooms, right in the middle of town, as convenient and as cosy as can be.

Not exactly a snip at €7.2 million euros, you could pick up an apartment around the corner for a fraction of the price, but what do you expect if you’re shopping for prime Alpine real estate offered for sale by one of Warren Buffett’s affiliate companies?

Sometimes you come across a house so instantly astonishing that it's hard not to have a purely instinctive reaction. There's no higher-consciousness involved, no processing the details of artistry, architecture or history to appreciate what's on offer. Instead, there's just a pit-of-the-stomach reaction: wow.

Eagles on Motuarohia is just such a place. Wow indeed.

This house sits on the highest point of an island known as Motuarohia Island or Roberton Island, in the seas off New Zealand's North Island. The nearest town is Russell, which is three or four hours' drive north from Auckland.

Listed via Barfoot & Thompson via the Country Life International Property portal, you can expect to pay somewhere in the £4-4.5 million bracket (NZD$10 million) . That's a lot for a three-bedroom house with a Scandinavian timber home vibe, but feels like a relative bargain for one of the most extraordinarily located properties we've ever seen.

There are just six privately-owned houses on the island, with its clear waters, sheltered lagoons and unspoilt views. It's even a wildlife haven, particularly for bird lovers: kiwis are just one of the 30-plus varieties that thrive here on an island that boasts proudly that it's been free of rats, stoats and other pests for almost two decades. There's nothing here to disturb your idyll, unless you count the occasional cry of an eagle flying overhead, or the splashing of the dolphins in the bay down below.

What more is to say of a house whose pictures and setting speak for themselves? This is a haven of nature, where you can kayak through the coves and bays, snorkel in the waters or just kick back with a glass of wine and enjoy the views.

What a place. 'Perfectly positioned and utterly private there is so much to be discovered,' write the agents, adding that it is 'the ideal retreat to create a lifetime of memories with family and friends'.

Eagles on Motuarohia is for sale through Barfoot & Thompson — see more details.

I opened my emails the other day, and found a message with a single word at the top: 'Ooooh!'

As openers go, it was a good one (certainly better than 'To Whom It May Concern', or 'Dear Country Living Team') — not for its literary elegance, of course, but for its promise of what was to come.

So, I scrolled down to see what my colleague Rosie had forwarded, and as I did a word emerged from my own mouth: 'Ooooh!'

If you've made it this far, I'm going to assume that you've already had the same reaction to the house on this page: a £9 million retreat called Casa Luna on Mexico's Caribbean coast, in a place called Tulum.

Casa Luna, or 'House of the Moon', has everything, and when I say 'everything', I'm including: 13 bedrooms; 19 bathrooms; a sculpture in the hallway; a pool with a swim-up bar; a golf simulator room; a yoga deck erected among the treetops; and an entire nightclub in the basement, complete with full bar, VIP zones, an LED dance floor and a dedicated DJ booth.

I replied to Rosie's email with even fewer words than she used: '!!!!'

Her reply came straight back: 'This could be the whole article: the pictures and then "Ooohh!!!!!"'

Dear reader, you know I'd never short-change you to quite that extent. But that said, feel free to skim lightly over the words that follow, while making 'Oooh!' noises of your own.

I actually went to Tulum once, while escaping from an all-inclusive hotel, and at the time it appeared to consist of a bus stop, a handful of small shops, and a ruined Mayan castle perching above a glorious, white-sand beach.

It was wonderful. Almost all the Mayan ruins on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula are inland, amid the shady, soaring trees of the jungle, and thus Tulum is pretty much unique in its status as a pre-Columbian beach hotspot. It couldn't have been more of a change from the package holiday chaos of Cancún and Playa del Carmen along the coast, and I loved it.

(We hope you're enjoying the pictures, incidentally. If you'd like more, the Christie's International Real Estate website has 180 of them, which is the most I have ever seen on a property listing of any kind.)

This was all some time ago, but while there's been more development in Tulum since then, it's developed a reputation as a rather upmarket, laid back, eco-chic sort of a place. And that means that having a place here is probably a great idea: the best of both words, blending the magical Caribbean climate, easy access via Cancún Airport, and the laid-back atmosphere of this part of Mexico.

So, if you are in the market for a holiday home, fancy one like this, and have a budget in the region of £9 million (or more specifically US$11.9 million) — then today is your day.

Casa Luna is for sale at $11.9 million — see more details.

His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, then Prince Edward, and the Duke of Sussex likely felt at home when they dined at grand Lancaster Great House, a sugar-pink, shuttered mansion on Barbados’s west coastline.

The colonial-era estate was constructed during the Jacobean period and later renovated to fit a Georgian aesthetic. And plenty of the original features dating back to 1674 survive, including architectural details and the entrance gates. The principal residence comprises four generously-sized bedrooms and three bathrooms; a charming one-bedroom garden cottage with a loft is perfectly set up for guests or staff.

Originally built as a plantation house, Lancaster Great House was later used as a government building and, more recently, as an art gallery and a space in which to host celebrities and royals. Cliff Richard, Helen Mirren and the aforementioned princes have all dined on site — though it’s not sure what for. Perhaps it took place during the Duke of Sussex’s highly-publicised visit to the island in 2016 to celebrate the country’s 50th independence anniversary and raise HIV/AIDS awareness on World AIDS Day, alongside Barbadian singer Rihanna.

There are multiple dining rooms that Richard, Mirren and the two princes might’ve found themselves in, featured in the listing, including a more traditional space with crimson red stripe walls, portrait paintings and an elaborate chandelier, and a chartreuse green one with contemporary art and, inexplicably, rails of fancy dress clothing. Other rooms of note include an open-sided veranda with a fairy-light strewn ceiling and fun, floral sofas, and a duck egg blue snug with what looks like a very beautiful, freestanding linen cupboard in it, covered in paintings of vervet monkeys. There are varnished wooden floors throughout.

However, the pièce de résistance is the two-acre garden. Planted with centuries-old mahogany and fruit trees and studded with more than 400 pot plants, it is a wonder to behold. Much is down to the current occupants, who have owned the property for more than a decade and added extensively to the gardens, as well as undertaking restoration work on the building itself.

Lancaster Great House is in the popular parish of St. James’s and less than 10 minutes from the beach (Paynes Bay, Sandy Lane Beach and Holetown Beach are among the more popular). The area is sometimes referred to as the ‘Platinum Coast’ because of the number of wealthy expatriates and celebrity holidaymakers milling around. This sale is a rare opportunity to join them and the property offers the flexibility to function as a private residence, an exclusive entertaining venue or legacy investment.

Lancaster Great House is for sale with One Caribbean Estates for $1.595 million (about £1.18 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

Nobody loves a Scottish castle more than we do at Country Life. Or so we thought until we came across a place called 'The Lodge at Hunters Creek'.

If you're thinking what we thought upon hearing the name, you'd be right: the name makes it sound like a log cabin in the wilderness. Instead, this is a home that's quite an extraordinary building — like a cross between a Highland mansion, a Belle Epoque apartment in Paris and a five-star resort in Thailand, all wrapped up in an exclusive enclave in Texas. It's the sort of place you could imagine Batman living; and it's currently for sale at a dollar under $60 million — or just under £45 million at the present exchange rate.

The house is built in what's called the Richardsonian Romanesque style, named for American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, which consciously draws influences from the architecture of medieval Europe. But there's much more going on here, with the Romanesque arches and Gothic touches sitting alongside beautiful ironwork, huge picture windows, wood-panelled walls and cavernous fireplaces.

All this sits within a dreamy setting: acres of quiet woodland in the city of Hunter's Creek, and affluent suburb of Houston. Very affluent suburb, I should say: Hunters Creek is reportedly the wealthiest town in Texas, with its well-heeled residents having the luxury of their own police and fire services to keep them safe and secure.

Whether you wish to live in Texas — or indeed the USA, these days — is an entirely different question. But for those looking for a corner of Texas to call their own, the setting is as much of a draw as the house: the six 'Memorial Villages' are regarded as the finest suburbs of the thriving city of Houston, and Hunter's Creek is, according to Alasdair Hedley of John D Wood, the 'crown jewel' of the lot.

'Hunters Creek Village was originally created to preserve its rural, rustic character — and that sense of space and privacy is exactly what continues to draw ultra-high net worth buyers today,' says Alasdair.

'It offers large, architecturally significant homes, excellent schools and a quiet, wooded setting, all just a short distance from central Houston — a combination that’s increasingly rare.'

There's no denying the beauty of the place — even the guesthouse, 'several acres' away from the main house, would be an incredible home in its own right. But who are the well-heeled Houston buyers looking at homes here in the $50 million-plus price range?

'We’re seeing strong interest from wealthy families relocating into Texas who want space, security and prestige without losing connectivity,' says Alasdair. '

'Its "wealthiest town" ranking simply confirms what global buyers already recognise: Hunters Creek Village is one of Houston’s most desirable enclaves. This magnificent property, bordered by Buffalo Bayou, captures that perfectly, with real seclusion and sweeping woodland views.'

It is, in other words, as good as it gets in Houstson — a point eloquently made by the co-agent.

'The Lodge at Hunters Creek represents the pinnacle of luxury living in Houston,' adds Carol Wolfe of Coldwell Banker Realty, 'a rare estate where privacy, scale, and architectural presence come together in a way that may never be replicated again.'

The Lodge at Hunters Creek is for sale at $59,999,999 via John D Wood & Co. International and Carol Wolfe at Coldwell Banker Realty.

What, exactly, constitutes a cottage? It’s a question which I fear modern television audiences may find tough to answer. According to Heated Rivalry, the recent hit television show in which two ice hockey players go from enemies to lovers (and whose lead actors, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, took part in the Winter Olympics torch relay in January), a cottage is akin to a Frank Lloyd Wright-adjacent building on the banks of Canada’s Lake Muskoka.

Not quite what you were expecting? I’ll explain. In the series’s penultimate episode, Williams’ character invites Storrie’s to his cottage so they can spend more time together away from prying eyes. Storrie first refuses, but eventually relents. The phrase ‘coming to the cottage’ has since become Gen Z-shorthand for seeing through commitments.

The only trouble is the ‘cottage’ in question is actually a 232-square-metre lakefront home by Trevor McIvor Architects, which has more in common with Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Estate in Wisconsin than a humble abode with a thatched roof somewhere in the country. At first I thought ‘coming to the cottage’ was a cheeky double entendre, but that too was a red herring.

It was the architects themselves who named the edifice Barlochan Cottage, presumably to entice buyers wishing to live somewhere cozy and bucolic with all the amenities of a modern house (admittedly appealing).

The property is currently available to rent for around £200 a night on AirBnB, rising to double that in summer, where outdoor temperatures can reach 25°C. Given Heated Rivalry’s unstoppable rise since it was acquired by HBO last December — if you haven’t heard of the show, you can bet your children or grandchildren have — I worry that this new definition of the cottage is about to become the definitive one with viewers outside of Britain.

Trevor McIvor’s firm is not the first to play with semantics. Take the 'cottage' from Shawn Levy’s 2005 comedy, Cheaper by the Dozen 2, a 743-square-metre complex with a two-storey boathouse and more than 200 metres of shoreline which went up for sale at £4 million in 2024.

Our transatlantic cousins, with their Anglophile affections, will happily adopt our vernacular (flattering) and adapt it to make a buck (ick). Just know that if I ever invite you to the cottage, I mean a rustic dwelling with rattling windows and an endless retinue of goats. Sorry, Toto: we’re not in Canada anymore.

You can see more of Trevor McIvor's cottages on his Instagram page. And you can find more Canadian property for sale at our international property search page

I won't bore you with the details of my week, but it wasn't great. There were miscarriages of justice, people being hit by cars (thankfully not seriously so) and a trip to a dentist which was extraordinarily long, and of course painful. And that's even before the misery of listening to the news.

So it's at times like these that my mind — like yours, I'm guessing — turns to the idea of running away from it all to go and live in a cabin in the woods.

Not forever, you understand. Some people might be able to just walk away from their everyday lives and spend decades in the wilderness like the hermit Chris Knight ('I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that.').

I am not one of those people. I like kitchens with gadgets, and central heating, and nice views, and a comfy bed. So what is out there for a Hermit Lite looking for some peace?

First stop: Sweden, the land of 267,570 islands, of which 266,570 are inhabited — and a country which, thanks to climate change, has been labelled 'The New Mediterranean. Last year I came across a private peninsula for sale on an island near Stockholm, and it's still available, but at around the £5 million mark it's quite steep. So now I've set my sights slightly lower, at this place on the Trosa Archipelago, to the south of the Swedish capital.

Built just under 20 years ago, it's not big — just over an acre of land, and a house of approximately 1,500 sq ft — but there are three bedrooms, wonderful views and an interior which looks like its escaped from a 1980s Habitat catalogue. In a good way.

There's one downside — or two, if you count the £1.625 million price — and it's something that's also an upside: this part of Sweden is popular, so there are plenty of other people around the area. That means there are shops and restaurants and doctors, but not the out-on-our-own-away-from-the-world feel you really want out of a good log cabin retreat.

So, in search of more seclusion, I turned my attention to Canada, the 233rd least-population-dense country in the world, according to this list I found on Wikipedia (that sounds like it could be nonsense, but in its defence the list does seem to be based on figures from the United Nations publication World Population Prospects.)

Canada has just 12 people per square mile, and at this property near a place called Pemberton, in British Columbia, you can believe it.

The initial signs, as I speed-read the blurb, are promising: 'a private haven with sweeping views, generous space, and endless possibilities', for sale at just under £850,000 in the mountains away to the north of Whistler.

As I flipped through the pictures, something about this house was missing: namely, the house itself. This property turns out to be merely a plot, and my brain had missed the words 'the opportunity to create' before the quote in the previous paragraph. As mentioned already, roughing it completely isn't really on the cards, and thus nor is building a house from scratch.

The search continues. Perhaps somewhere warmer? After all, the last time I went skiing (which was also the first time) I ended up doing a sort of pole-vault-somersault-pirouette which involved the ski poles lodging in my ribs and flipping me upside down. I can live without repeating that experience, so how about, say, Greece? After all the last time I went to Corfu (which, again, was also the first time), I had a lovely experience.

I was in luck. A Corfunian (no, I'm not sure if that's a word either) country estate is on the market at around £1.9 million, and the house is very much present and correct. As are the seven bedrooms, swimming pool, mountain backdrop, and access to the beautiful beach at Palaiokastritsa, on the island's north-west coast. It's even an easy drive to Corfu Town and the airport; absolutely ideal.

There's even a red telephone box beside the swimming pool. Really. You couldn't make it up.

Still, though, as beautiful as the house is — isn't it just a little too close to town? Do you really want views of other houses as you hide away from the world?

You don't, so it was time for one more look. And for getting away from everyone while still staying warm, Australia felt like the place to go. One promising option turned out to be only an hour from Brisbane; another one, pictured here looks gorgeous, has eight bedrooms and great views.. But it turns out to be commutable, which is good of course, but not really the vibe we're after right now. It's also priced in the region of £6 million, which really is quite a lot.

The other thing about an out-of-the-way property in Australia is that you expect it to be big — very big. The sort of place that it could take the best part of the day to walk across, and that search led me to this property: almost 15,000 acres of rural Queensland, near whose closest village is, amusingly, called Cheeseborough.

There's literally miles of space in a holding described as a 'development property' without a price listed by the agents, Savills, yet it's still not so far from the highway that you couldn't get there and back relatively easily. But this is really working land, a huge farm needing management, and anyone who's seen Clarkson's Farm knows that such things aren't to be taken lightly.

So all that more or less leads us back to where we started — and also to thinking that perhaps Scotland would be a better bet after all. This house in North Uist, in the western isles, is fresh to the market with an 'offers over £75,000' price tag. It's not a log cabin, it needs complete renovation, and it's tiny. But what a place to get away from it all.

‘Carnegie Hill is one of my favourite neighborhoods,’ says illustrator Tug Rice when I WhatsApp him with the news that I’m writing about an apartment for sale at 1107 5th Avenue. ‘[It is] very, very close to three major museums (The Met, Guggenheim, Neue Galerie) and great restaurants. It’s a little less lively than Fifth Avenue further south, but I think that’s why people prefer it.’

The apartment in question is, well, this one: a ninth floor ‘architectural masterpiece’ overlooking Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir — listed with John D. Wood for $12.5 million. And the specifications are nothing short of jaw-dropping: Ten-foot ceilings; a private lift and hallway that opens onto an impressive 24-foot gallery space; a corner master bedroom that stretches 27 feet down Fifth Avenue on one side.

The 14-storey building on the corner of East 92nd Street was built by the George Fuller Construction Company in 1925 and is famous for housing New York’s first-ever penthouse. To bring the brick and stone neo-Renaissance-style edifice to life, Fuller had to convince cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post Hutton — the wealthiest woman in the USA for much of her life (1887-1973) — to give up her mansion then located on the site. Post Hutton agreed on one condition: that Fuller recreate much of her 54-room home inside the new building’s top three floors. (Incidentally, around the same time, Post Hutton and her then husband, Edward Francis Hutton, were building a vast complex in Palm Beach, Florida, called… Mar-a-Lago — which was completed in 1927, declared a National Historic Landmark in 1980 and purchased by Donald Trump in 1985 for a rumoured $10 million.)

Today, 1107’s most famous resident is Ralph Lauren — an arbiter of taste whose fashion designs have influenced what we wear for decades. (If the barnstorming success of his most recent menswear show in Milan is anything to go by, the 86-year-old shows no signs of taking his foot off the pedal.) Ralph and his wife Ricky have reportedly lived in the building for more than four decades and, in 2022, purchased a secondary unit from the estate of Nancy Norman Lassalle, a patron of the School of American Ballet. A 2010 spread in Elle Decor, off the back of a gut renovation of the first property, shows an all-white apartment decorated with white lacquer tables and canvas sofas, bamboo armchairs and a lot of plants — seemingly at odds with Ralph Lauren the brand’s Americana-meets-British-heritage, all colour, texture and pattern look. ‘It was such a relief to come back to after a long day of looking at endless swatches, patterns, and colors,’ explained the designer, later on, in his book Ralph Lauren A Way of Living (Rizzoli, £60).

Ironically, this apartment is currently closer to the Ralph Lauren ‘look’ than his own home. Details inside the four-bedroom, five-bathroom complex include ornate, floor-to-ceiling wood doors, a commanding, carved wooden fireplace surround and cornicing in a myriad styles. More modern additions include air conditioning, a laundry room and a home gym; building amenities include a ‘first-class’ resident manager, full-time doormen and lift operators, bicycle storage and a ‘spectacular’, fully-furnished rooftop garden.

‘Residences of this caliber seldom come to market,’ says the agent, so we recommend you move quickly. Who knows, you might find yourself watching the sun set behind Central Park from the roof, right next to Ralph.

The apartment at 1107 5th Avenue is for sale via John D. Wood for £12.5 million (about £9.3 million) — see more details.

The Bahamas — £17.6 million

The Exumas consist of a string of 365 islands in the Bahamas, across the warm Caribbean waters south-east of Nassau — and this property is a rare chance to own one of those islands outright. It's an unspoilt, 144-acre dream island with swathes of jungle, white sand beaches and turquoise seas — seas which are sheltered by barrier islands ensuring calm, protected beaches ideal for swimming and watersports.

On top of all that, Clove Cay is close enough to Grand Exuma Airport (a 17-mile drive followed by a four-mile boat ride) to make it relatively straightforward to get to. It's ripe for someone to make this their own private paradise: there is a house on the island, albeit now dilapidated, and a boat ramp and a pier are in place. It should make restoring this island to glory a little easier.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Thailand — £7.2 million

A six-bedroom hilltop lodge on the island of Koh Samui, this is a house for partying: it has the usual cinema and games room facilities you'd expect, as well a 25-metre infinity pool, but it also has its own private nightclub.

Thankfully, three of the bedrooms are described as 'master suites' in their own separate pavilions, so multi-generational groups can let their hair down without keeping each other up all night.

For sale via Christie's International Real Estate — see more details and pictures.

Brazil — £2.2 million

The rainforests and beaches of Brazil meet Scandinavian design at this exotic, secluded and eye-wateringly beautiful lodge in Bahia, half-way up the country's east coast.

What a job they've done: it's not one home, but instead a series of interconnected bungalows ideal for large groups coming together — and the beauty of the place speaks for itself.

It sits within a gated community called Barracuda Villas, meaning that as well as having hotel-style facilities on site, you can also rent the villa out through the company when not staying here.

For sale via Christie’s International Real Estate — see more details and pictures.

Barbados — £32 million

A location right on what the agents call 'the most sought-after west coast beaches in Barbados' is the starting point of this property in St Peter — but the rest of the place is equally compelling.

There is a six-bedroom main house, a four-bedroom guest house, huge rooms, high ceilings, exquisitely-kept grounds, everything from a billiard room to a cocktail louge... and of course sunsets to die for. The dream.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Bahamas — £42 million

'A masterclass in elegance and tranquility' say the agents of this 15,675 sq ft house within the gated community of Xanadu, Old Fort Bay, near Nassau.

There are six bedrooms, somehow 12 bathrooms, Parisian-inspired design within and a setting right on the beach that speaks for itself. As does the fact that the upholstery in the master suite is cashmere. Extraordinary.

For sale via Lyford Cay Sotheby’s International Realty — see more details and pictures.

It was a truth universally accepted in the 18^th century that a young man of good fortune must be in need of a grand country house. The huge popularity of the Grand Tour at the time often meant that those wealthy children of aristocratic families, swayed by the treasures they'd seen (and as often as not collected) on the Continent, would commission one of the great British architects of the age to create a Palladian or Neo-Classical family seat: the likes of Robert Adam, James Gibbs, Sir John Soane and many more became enormously successful and famous, competing with each other for the best commissions.

In Italy the story was similar, but by the mid 18th century there was one architect in south of the country generally considered to be the name at the top of the list: Luigi Vanvitelli.

Vanvitelli (1700-1773) was the son of an Italian mother and a Dutch father — a painter — who became the most celebrated architect and engineer of his generation. He did everything from building aqueducts and palaces to re-building the dome of St Peter’s in Rome, and while he didn't design the Trevi fountain — that was Nicola Salvi — he was the architect chosen to remodel the Palazzo Poli that sits behind it, to further enhance Salvi's masterpiece.

The biggest chunk of his career, though, was spent in the creation the building that is his crowning glory: the Royal Palace of Caserta (aka Reggia di Caserta) for the King of Naples.

This baroque masterpiece is one of the finest palaces built anywhere in the world during the 1700s — and it’s certainly the largest, at almost 1.5 million square feet. That’s 50% bigger than Versailles, and almost double the size of Buckingham Palace. If you wondering what it looks like inside, dig out that old DVD of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Natalie Portman’s palace on Naboo was actually la Reggia di Caserta.

To find a house built by this great architect up for sale, then, is quite something — but that’s what we have in the form of Palazzo Doria D'Angri, right in the heart of Naples itself, which is on the market via Sotheby’s International Realty at €15 million.

Giving the bare numbers behind the palace gives a sense of its scale — five floors, 15 bedrooms, 22 bathrooms, 21,500sq ft plus a cellar, a lift and underground parking. The eagle-eyed will have probably realised that the number of bathrooms, the lift and the parking facility show that the palace is presently set up and run as a glorious baroque hotel.

Yet these types of details have never felt less meaningful, because this is a house whose appeal is in its beauty and the treasures within: according to the agents, 43 Murano chandeliers, 110 original artworks, more than 500 prints, 32 mirrors, 12 columns and 29 statues.

The architecture is the work of Vanvitelli — sadly, he died before it was finished — but the frescoes, stucco work and art within are the work of some of Italy’s best 18^th century painters and craftspeople, among them Fedele Fischetti, Francesco Fuga, Mario Gioffredo and the Desiderio brothers.

For all that, the house’s place in Italian history doesn’t rest on its eminent architecture or the glory within, for on September 7, 1860, General Garibaldi appeared on the balcony of Palazzo Doria D'Angri to announce that Sicily had been annexed by the nascent Kingdoms of Italy, following the revolutionary leader’s Expedition of the Thousand.

It wasn’t quite the final step in the creation of Italy as a nation state, but it marked the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire that the north and south of the country were united. It’s the dinner party story to end them all.

Palazzo Doria D'Angri is for sale via Sotheby’s International Realty — see more details.

Giovanni Dario (1414-1494), ambassador of the Republic of Venice, hailed from Crete, one of the floating city’s countless colonies. His grasp of the Greek language was key to his success — chiefly negotiating a peace deal with the Ottomans, on behalf of the Signoria of Venice. He was, for his efforts, given a substantial amount of money which he spent on a palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal.

Palazzo Dario, built at the tail end of the 15th century on top of an existing Gothic palazzo, is split over four floors with a ground floor (accessible both from the Grand Canal and the street) and garden, two noble floors and a third with bedrooms. It is currently for sale, price on application, with Christie’s International Real Estate.

Venice's houses are unlike any other domestic buildings anywhere in the world, erected over millions of oak and larch piles driven into the lagoon’s mud flats. And though there are 200 lining the fabled waterway alone, the appearance of Palazzo Dario on the market represents a rare opportunity to buy an intact one because plenty have been split into apartments or turned into hotels and museums.

Despite extensive renovation works in the 18th century, plenty still survives from Dario’s time, including a Moorish fountain on the first piano nobile and the magnificent facade decorated with circular polychrome marble inlays. The English art critic John Ruskin was particularly entranced with and wrote about the palace's Gothic marble-encrusted oculi.

Other inhabitants include Dario’s daughter, Marietta, whose father-in-law owned the neighbouring Palazzo Barbaro Wolkoff, Countess de la Baume-Pluvinel, a French aristocrat and writer, and Kit Lambert, producer and manager of The Who. Unfortunately, the large majority of the palazzo’s owners, or would-be owners, were struck down long before their time or in some kind of gruesome manner leading to it becoming nicknamed ‘The Cursed Palace’. Marietta committed suicide because of her husband’s financial failings. One was murdered; another incapacitated by a car crash. Lambert died, falling down a set of stairs in London, shortly after purchasing the building. In the 1990s, director Woody Allen expressed an interest in buying it, but was perhaps put off by the litany of disasters. You have been warned.

Somewhat more happily, in 1908, Claude Monet made paintings of the front of the building from the Canal; the canvases reside at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Museum of Art of Wales.

On the ground floor, there is an cavernous hall with columns, a marble well and large fireplace — and an ‘elegant’ marble staircase that leads to the first piano nobile and its fountain. There are similar spaces on the second noble floor decked out in Bevilacqua fabrics and antique Murano chandeliers. The third floor boasts a loggia terrace, as well as the palazzo’s bedrooms.

The land side of Palazzo Dario borders Campiello Barbaro, a small square planted with trees. The Basilica Santa Maria della Salute, one of the most popular churches in Venice that stands sentry on the Canal’s southern entrance, is a three minute walk away; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is just one. Guggenheim — who lived in Venice from 1948 until her death in 1979 — famously claimed to have slept with more than 1,000 men (including Lambert despite the fact that he was openly gay).

Palazzo Dario is for sale with Christie’s — see more details.

'Would you move to Dubai?’ It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times since the Budget last month. Returning the question has prompted many yeses, with people citing warmer climes, lower taxes and the city’s entrepreneurial mindset.

That same mindset can be fostered here. Britain is a cradle of imagination and lateral thinking: it is here that Mary Shelley invented science fiction, Charles Darwin came up with evolution and Thomas Saint created the world’s first patented sewing machine. Why, then, does it seem as if we’re falling behind? It could be that we’re looking for answers in the wrong places. I, for one, would urge us to look to the country. Take Hardy or Wordsworth, whose minds were altered by the beauty of Dorset and the Lake District; or Newton, who first imagined there might be such a thing as gravity in an orchard. Entrepreneurialism is not confined to glass buildings in Canary Wharf.

I had the good fortune of travelling to New York last month: a temple of entrepreneurship if there ever were one. It’s not exactly bucolic, yet I was struck by the importance that life beyond the city holds for citizens there. I met a man in a bar who was developing a biodegradable version of cardboard and spent time with a friend who, this week, launched a collection of skirts made entirely of second-hand shirts that would otherwise have ended up in landfill.

These are environmentally conscious ideas — but, more importantly, they are simple. For Kameron Cooper, whose ‘shkirts’ retail for $130 apiece (about £98), the project was driven by her interest in zero-waste garmentry. ‘I wanted to create an item that reassembled existing fabric,’ she explains, ‘rather than cutting and pasting different parts.’ She turned cuffs into cummerbunds and the result is magnificent.

Americans are very good at going ahead and doing things. It’s not so much a question of red tape — there being less of it — as of risk appetite among its citizens. The author Scott Galloway believes this is genetic: Americans are descended from immigrants who were brave enough to set sail for new lands. By this logic, they are to us what London foxes are to their rural brethren. Natural selection has enhanced their raw opportunism.

Yet risk needn’t frighten us. The former managing director of Condé Nast, Albert Read, suggested in his book The Imagination Muscle (Little, Brown Book Group, £12.99) that creative thinking needs structure to thrive. It is within familiarity (our own back garden, say) that the most fertile ideas are unleashed. So, no, sorry — I won’t be going to Dubai.

Those of a certain algorithm will be aware that the snow has begun to fall, and fall heavily. Resorts across Europe can scarcely contain their glee as the early season snow blankets their mountains, which means that the snowsports season is well and truly on its way (and for some intrepid adventurers, has already begun).

It is at times like this that I like to daydream about the kind of chalet I would buy, should I ever win the lottery or if it turns out that one of the plentiful scammers in my inbox is telling the truth about untold riches to be found in Nigeria or elsewhere.

There would be certain essentials. Anyone who has ever skied or snowboarded anywhere, at any level, knows that carrying skis or snowboards is the most annoying thing in the world, so direct access to the slopes (otherwise known as ‘ski-in, ski-out’) is essential. I would also like a sauna, so I can get rid of the aches and pains from my joints and muscles, as well as sweat out the many vices I will have undoubtedly indulged in at lunch and/or apres. The last thing would be enough bedrooms for all my friends to come and stay. I find hot-tubs to be quite unsettling objects, so I can take or leave one of those.

But Country Life is a broad church, so in this round up of ‘Ski Chalets That I Would Like To Own One Day If I Suddenly Had Lots Of Spare Cash’, I will not only pick things that I want, but also things I think you might want. I am kind and generous like that, and should be celebrated for being so (ideally by you, the reader, inviting me skiing). Let’s begin.

Saint-Martin-de-Belleville

There is much to love about Saint-Martin-de-Belleville. It is one of the smaller and more forgotten villages that is tacked on to the Three Valleys ski area (Europe’s largest). It is achingly traditional (and legally must remain that way), drenched in Savoyard charm and boasting an old church and traditional square. It is home to La Bouitte, a three Michelin star restaurant that might be the best in the Alps.

It would be perfectly reasonable to want a slice of the action, and a better slice you will struggle to find than this glorious piste-side residence with Free Spirit Alpine. If you’ve ever flown down the Biolley run, you will have seen it on your way down to the centre of town. Now you can live there.

Available for €7 million, this property is a rarity, combining traditional features with luxury in a ski village notorious for its planning restrictions. You can rest easy in this six-suite home in the knowledge that it will be a very long time indeed before the tourists and the hotel chains can find you and ruin the place.

So what does 7€ million get you? Plenty, as it turns out. The aforementioned six suites, including the master bedroom, which has one of the coolest four-posted beds I’ve seen, looking like it was carved directly out of a giant tree.

Also included is a sauna, Hammam, a wine cave, large balconies and terraces, garage and car lift, and a 110sq metre open-plan living area, which you will need because your friends will always want to come and visit. All arranged over five floors.

It’s the best of both worlds this place — access to some of the best skiing that Europe has to offer, but with none of the corporate baggage and crowds that usually come with it. Superbe.

179 South Fairway Drive

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise. And that surprise is not a picnic of bears (although there probably are some bears in Colorado, which are best to avoid), but rather the glorious wooden walls of 179 South Fairway Drive in Beaver Creek.

This week’s installment in ‘Good Gracious I would certainly like to live there’ takes us to the United States, specifically Colorado, specifically specifically the Beaver Creek Resort in the Rocky Mountains west of Vail. What we are being offered from our good friends at LIV Sotheby’s International Realty is seven bedrooms and 7,400sq ft of sensational living. Or, as they would say, ‘a rare offering where alpine elegance meets timeless prestige’. Yours for $14.7 million. Awesome dude.

This is a home for all seasons. Ski in the winter at the fabulous resort on your doorstep (or nearby Vail), and enjoy the greens of the Beaver Creek golf course, which is also on your doorstep. Sit on the many balconies and listen to the sound of running water, watch the meandering deer, and bask with the marmots.

Much like its surrounds, the property is achingly traditional, with a log and stone construction and influence both inside and out. Double height entertaining spaces, seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, wine cellar, tennis court, three fireplaces, cinema room — you name it, this place has it. It’s always been a family home too, and has never been rented out.

What I wouldn’t give for just a day at this woodland paradise.

Chalet Genepi

Ahhh Meribel, the birthplace of the hangover. It was here that Monsieurs Hang and Over first joined forces to invent ‘après-ski’, thus creating the dry mouth and stinging headaches that can only be cured by a day on the mountains. Who can forget misspent youths dancing in RondPoint, Sullys, or Le Pub. Depends how hard you party, I suppose.

The good news is that Meribel and Les Trois Vallées as a whole is still a pretty sensational space to ski, even if your best partying days are behind you. And a sensational place to ski needs a sensational place to stay. Where better than within the sublime stone walls of Chalet Genepi on the snowy banks of the Georges Maduit piste? Seven bedrooms, premium ski-in, ski-out access and only minutes away from the town centre. Tres bien.

For sale with the chalet specialists Free Spirit Alpine for a more than reasonable €11.95 million, this is a rare chance to own one of the best chalets in not just Meribel, but the entire ski area. If you’ve been to Meribel before, you might ask: ‘Is this that chalet?’. The answer is 'oui, c'est ça'. Let’s look inside.

With more than 4,300sq ft of living space, the property offers a minimum of seven en-suite bedrooms (with a spectacular master with a private balcony), garage and staff accommodation, more south-facing terraces with insane views, a private cinema, gym, spa with hammam and jacuzzi — in short, the works. Traditional local materials and styles are combined throughout to create a modern space that is very much in keeping with the local vernacular, which is a big plus for me, as the arbiter of taste on all alpine related activities.

I, personally, would live here year round because just look at it. However, I understand that might not be possible for the more jet-set or business oriented types. The good news is that this chalet has lived a life as a rental in the past, meaning all the infrastructure is already in place for it to make money in the winter months.

And just look at those bedrooms. Where better for younger (or indeed older) heads to sleep off an afternoon or night on the genepi…

Chalet Piccolino

Because I am kind, I will let you in on a secret that isn't really a secret, but rather something that more people should know about. Skiing in Italy is the absolute best. The Dolomites are criminally underrated, and you should absolutely go.

The reasons are simple but compelling. The food is better than France, Switzerland or Austria. The scenery is more dramatic. It's less busy. The cost of it all is extremely reasonable. The wines are sensational.

I would begin my Dolomitian (if that is a word) conquest at Chalet Piccolino in the aforementioned village of Piccolino. It is a three bedroom, three bathroom home with frankly outrageous views and it is for sale with Savills for €1.45 million. You will not find something bigger for that price anywhere else in Europe. Multo bene.

Currently used as a family home, the property is essentially a blank canvas for its new owner (who is sadly not me). Turn it into the house of your dreams. Make friends with your neighbours, (there are only six families living on this hillside of Pic Ju). Ski the Sellaronda in the winter with a lift just 650 metres away, and hike from your front door in the summer. Be free, be happy, drink lots of Tyrolean wines and eat glorious pasta. Live my dream.

Available from August 2026, the property also features a north-facing garden, plenty of outdoor terraces, car parking and a Tyrolean Stube in the living room.

NOT A HOTEL: Rusutsu

To the island of Hokkaido and the Rusutsu resort, where Mount Yotei towers over the snow-capped hills of one of Japan’s largest ski areas. It would take something quite special to stand out from this already pristine scene, but this villa by NOT A HOTEL is rather special indeed.

This obsidian curve could be mistaken for a spaceship that has briefly stopped on its trans-galactic voyage to observe the winter habits of the human race. It is giving ‘lair of world domination’. It is serving ‘neo noir chalet of the future’. Basically, I like it, and I think it is cool.

The details: four bedrooms, four bathrooms, ski-in, ski-out, a sauna, swimming pool, meditation pool, gorgeous living spaces with high ceilings, modernist fireplaces and, crucially, a conversation pit. There are not enough conversation pits in the world, so I am glad to see they are coming back.

But perhaps better than all of that is the location and the view. Situated on the very top of its own hill/mountain, and served by a lift, the landscape can be enjoyed in 360º. And best of all, that view of Mt Yotei will never get old. The design comes from Snøhetta, the firm behind the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, The 9/11 Memorial Pavilion in New York, and the Shibuya Upper West Project. In a word: pedigree.

The project is expected to be completed in spring 2029, but sales are open, so start digging around the back of the sofa. Prices for partial ownership begin at about $7.5 million.

In 1857, a pair of brothers named Adolphe and Édouard-Jean Cointreau were wondering what to do with their growing business. It had been running nicely since 1849, and profits were up when they diversified out of confectionery and started making traditional Guignolet — a type of cherry brandy — but they felt they needed something new, and began tinkering with recipes. Strawberry, plum and orange were all tried, and they began to enjoy success, even winning an award, but things were relatively modest.

18 years later in 1875, Édouard-Jean's son, Édouard, took on the family business, and he and his wife Louisa believed they were sitting on a goldmine with the orange liqueur in particular. They spent years refining and perfecting the recipe — full of flavour, yet not cloyingly sweet — and expanding their team, as well as designing the beautiful square bottle that's was as distinctive and recognisable then as it is today. Cointreau was born.

The rest is alcoholic history, a drink that's a true household name and not quite like anything else on the market (the production process has remained a closely-guarded secret for 140 years). With success came money, and with money came the chance to build a lovely great chateau in the Loire Valley, the brainchild of Louis Cointreau, son of Édouard.

That chateau is now on the market via John D. Wood with an asking price of €3.99 million — or around £3.5 million — which seems rather reasonable-sounding for a palatial 10,000sq ft, 12-bedroom country house that was totally refurbished in 2018 by the sixth generation of the Cointreau family.

If you're wondering about the chateau's stonework — which is markedly different from the traditional smooth white stone of most chateaux of a similar size — it's because the place is made from pink granite, supplemented by a mix of Anjou schist (a type of metamorphic rock) and reinforced concrete, which at the time of the building's construction in 1928-32 was still a new material. The net result is a striking house, set in an elevated spot which offers wonderful views across the 500 acres of the Boudré Forest.

The interior is just as grand as the exterior — possibly even more so. A marble entrance hall opens to a grand salon, with a vintage C. Bechstein piano, a stately dining room and a smoking lounge (this is France, after all).

The bedrooms on the floors above are all themed, retaining their period character and style, and on the top floor you'll find an artist’s studio, where works by the poster artist Jean-Adrien Mercier — a relative of the Cointreaus — adorn the walls.

While it's a family home, the chateau also feels very much like a place to entertain, from the dining table that seats 24 to the.

There is a beautiful orangery that's big enough to throw a party with 120 of your closest friends. And for the special few at the end of the night, you can invite them down into the wine cellar which has been turned into a tasting room.

What better place to concoct your very own new flavour of liqueur with which to take over the world?

The Cointreau family property in Anjou is for sale at €3.99 million — see more details.

'In one of the most beautiful landscapes in Graubünden, a magnificent castle rises on a mountain spur from which you can enjoy a spectacular view of the Alpine landscape.' So begins the Luxury Portfolio International description of this Swiss castle, and if we thought we could sum up its appeal any better than that, we'd have done so.

Located in the eastern Grisons Canton (or Graubünden in German), it's the sort of breathtaking place that evokes Gothic novels, classic movies and dramatic paintings. Just looking at the place you can imagine Lord Byron composing a poem on the terrace while Sean Connery hang glides onto the roof. A more perfect picture of an Alpine retreat is hard to imagine.

The charm doesn't rest merely on its first appearance and setting: this is a home full of original character features from the moment you walk through the extravagant front door.

There are wood-panelled walls, antique light fittings, leaded windows brightened by stained glass, balconies and covered terraces and more.

Beyond the house, this part of eastern Switerland — which is within easy reach of St Moritz and Davos — is a haven for hiking, mountaineering, biking, wellness, golfing and horseback riding. And skiing, of course: there are two resorts nearby. But as the world changes, summer in the Alps is only becoming more appealing with every passing year.

A quick look at these pictures of the local area will show why:

The price is listed as 'on application', but expect to pay somewhere in the £7.5 million bracket. And as you may or may not know, having the money is only part of the story to buy a home in Switzerland. The country's 'Lex Koller' laws on foreign nationals buying property in the country are as complex as, well, the mechanism for a hand-made watch, varying by area, property size and your country of origin. Post-Brexit, a new agreement for UK nationals was put in place, but it'll be up to you (or rather your lawyers) to straighten everything up.

Once all those hoops have been jumped through, you'll be free to take in all the property options that this remarkable land has to offer. Anyone fancy buying a chateau on Lake Geneva?

A four-bedroom apartment briefly occupied by French troops during the Napoleonic campaigns is on the market with Sotheby's International Realty, for €1,100,000.

The 340 square metre residence is located inside an an 18th-century Italian villa and comes with three acres of beautiful shared garden.

Villa Gnecchi Ruscone in Verderio, 35 kilometres north-east of Milan, was once the home of the influential Gnecchi Ruscone family who were silk industrialists and patrons of the arts. As well as Napoleon's troops and, if you believe the rumours, Napoleon himself, Giuseppe Garibaldi — the revolutionary and republican who contributed to the Unification of Italy in the 1800s — is also said to have visited.

The property’s outdoor space, which is shared among all its residents, includes parkland, a swimming pool and tennis court. However, the apartment's own stand out features are its two impressive reception halls with parquet flooring, coffered ceilings, a Murano glass chandelier and original 18th-century fireplace. The tapestry is embroidered with pure gold.

Located in the right wing of the villa, this part was formerly used as a tea room, library and parlour. The buildings residents are able to hire a shared grand ballroom — which would mean you could host your very own decadent Italian ball, if you so chose.

For more information visit the website of Sotheby’s International Realty.

'A palace on a perfect street' is how Lily Allen describes the New York townhouse she lived in with her now ex-husband, in her new song 'Nonmonagamummy'.

The Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, property was on the market for $8,000,000 with the estate agents Gambino. It has now sold for $7,000,000.

The 19th-century brownstone was reimagined by designer Billy Cotton and architect Ben Bischoff specifically for Lily and her former husband, the Stranger Things actor David Harbour. The pair, who split in 2024 and are now divorced, recently made headlines following the release of Lily's album, West End Girl, which alleges that David was unfaithful during their marriage and in one of their homes, possibly 381, Union Street.

The couple purchased the house in 2021 and gave Architectural Digest a tour of the premises two years later. The video, which went viral and now has 8.2 million views on YouTube, features some of the couple’s more curious design ideas. These include a pink fridge in their carpeted bathroom (David's mysterious request), their windowless pink bedroom and a pair of back-to-back green sofas that, according to the couple, were perfect for arguments.

The couple paid $3.3 million for the five-bedroom, four-bathroom property in 2020 and its new owners will inherit their busy botanical wallpaper (by Zuber), a kitsch tiger-print television room, and other flamboyant features — which Gambino describe as ‘whimsical’. You might be relieved to hear that the more traditional details include crown mouldings, a Plain English kitchen (Lily's request) and a twinkly chandelier.

Outside, in the garden, there is a cold plunge pool and a sauna — perfect for relaxing in while you listen to Lily's latest, and most revealing, musical offering.

381 Union Street was on the market with Gambino.

When they were younger, ‘oh so much younger than today’, the Fab Four made a series of films designed to capitalise on the Beatlemania that, in the 1960s, was steadily sweeping the world. Fervent adoration of a European musical figure or group had not reached such frenzied levels since the Lisztomania fad of the 1840s (for Hungarian composer Franz Liszt) and fan-targeted film tie-ins, such as those starring Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard, were all the rage.

Following the success of 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, director Richard Lester took the Liverpudlian quartet on a surreal globe-trotting escapade for the following year’s Help!, a feature-length proto-music-video for their fifth studio album of the same name. The bizarre plot, what little of it there was, revolved around the pursuit of a mystical ring worn by, appropriately enough, Ringo Starr. It was a case of ‘band on the run’ (both finger and musical kind) as the Fab Four were chased from Britain to the Bahamas, via the Alps, by an Eastern cult — a comic parody of the real-life villainous sect from India called The Thuggee, whose members provided the origin of the English word ‘thug’.

Manager Brian Epstein chose the filming locations: New Providence and Paradise Island in the Bahamas for the sun (and, according to Lester, tax reasons) and Obertauern in Austria for the snow, which was required for the scenes in which the quartet — incongruously attired in the Swinging London fashions of the day — flee their pursuers on skis, toboggans, snowmobiles and even through a delightfully explosive game of curling with Roy Kinnear and Victor Spinetti.

As well as proximity to Salzburg — into which The Beatles and a 60-strong film crew flew during March 1965 to be greeted by 5,000 fans (mostly female, mainly screaming) — Obertauern offered an advantage over other winter-sports resorts, such as Kitzbühel, that had also been considered. ‘As the snowiest destination in Austria — we receive an average depth of 264cm — it was the only place where they could count on snow that late in the season,’ says Lukas Eisl from the local tourism office. ‘Obertauern sits at 1,750 metres above sea level with the ski lifts rising up to 2,300 metres. Its location on the Radstädter Tauern Pass means we get two different snowstorms hitting it in winter, which pretty much guarantees perfect skiing conditions.'

With the white stuff sorted, one problem remained: none of The Beatles, who were all in their early twenties, could actually ski. A solution was provided in the form of four instructors from the local Krallinger ski school. The men, clad in fur coats, dark glasses and wigs, doubled as the Fab Four in any scenes requiring a modicom of alpine aptitude. One of those instructors was Herbert Lürzer whose family own the Edelweiss Sporthotel where Messrs Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr stayed (in separate rooms on the second floor that can still be booked today).

A memorial to Obertauern’s most famous guests stands outside the Edelweiss, erected 10 years ago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film. An even larger-than-life version, the ‘Beatles denkmal’, welcomes guests to Obertauern on the gentle slopes opposite the Steiner Hotel.

‘The Beatles came,’ Herbert recalls, ‘and someone said: “You’re about Paul’s size — you’ll be Paul.”’ Far from being starstruck, the 82-year-old reveals that they ‘couldn’t ski at all’ and they had to ‘teach them very slowly, step by step. Even using the lift was difficult’.

Although their skills on the slopes may have been questionable at best, they excelled in one off-piste activity: après-ski. In the bar of the Marietta Hotel, where the rest of the crew stayed, the Beatles staged an impromptu and unofficial concert one evening (their only one in Austria) that continued into the early hours. McCartney, being the only member of the band travelling without a female companion, had struck up a friendship with the hotel owner’s 22-year-old daughter, Gloria ‘Gigi’ Mackh. Gigi spoke excellent English and her translation skills may well have prompted the (at that time) single Beatle to prolong the performance.

Renamed ‘Places by Valamar’, the hotel still possesses the drum kit used by Ringo Starr, now enshrined within a glass case. Another instrument from that night has also been preserved for posterity, on celluloid. The Marietta’s Bösendorfer grand piano was hoisted 6,463ft up the mountain by helicopter to be used in the Ticket to Ride sequence of the film. A shiny replica now stands in its place, reached via the Grünwaldkopfbahn gondola. Its lower station stands opposite a branch of the Sport Gefäll shop from which The Beatles rented their Kneissl skis.

Sport Gefäll’s new owner Peter Kernstock (previously head chef of the Marietta Hotel) remembers that the piano was completely ruined — probably due to the cold and snow, combined with the fact that Harrison and Lennon stood right inside the piano during shooting. ‘When the film crew checked out of the Marietta,’ Peter explains, ‘they were charged with the cost of replacing the piano. Richard Lester said: “Okay, but then deduct it from what we’ll charge you for having the biggest group in the world play a concert in your bar!”’

During my summertime visit to Obertauern, I saw neither skis nor snow — although I’d only missed the last flurry by weeks, according to locals. Instead, I hiked around the Hundsfeld Moor (moorland) where The Beatles filmed the scenes on snow bikes. Filled with the healthy aroma of Zirbe (Pinus cembra), it’s believed to be one of only two places in Europe (the other being in Sweden) where a small, rare bird called the red-spotted bluethroat (Luscinia svecica) nests, making Obertauern popular with bird enthusiasts, as well as Beatles fans.

Over an excellent Wiener Schnitzel in the town’s five-star Seekarhaus Hotel, where two menus signed by the Beatles are displayed proudly on the wall, I rewatched the Obertauern section of Help! on my phone (with sound off, naturally, out of respect for other diners). It’s not as if hearing the dialogue would help it make any more sense, anyway. Even some members of the cast are still flummoxed by the film. As Herr Lürzer writes in his memoirs (Die Beatles und Ich) about the time when a small, but beautiful ski resort in the Austrian Alps became, for one week, the epicentre of the Swinging Sixties: ‘Now that it’s all 60 years ago, I think I can reveal: I still don’t really understand the script.’

Find property for sale in Austria at the Country Life International Property Portal.

It'll be 62 years next month that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. If the 35th President of the USA were alive today, he'd be 108 years old. Yet the mystique around JFK and the Kennedys still commands attention even today, and it's not hard to see why: the young, handsome, and twinkly-eyed president, who lived a colourful life alongside one of the world's most photographed women, tragically cut short in his prime. So when one of his former homes comes up for sale, it's news — especially when it's as handsome a home as this $7.5 million red-brick townhouse in Washington DC's charming Georgetown neighbourhood.

The Kennedys moved to the house in late 1957 while JFK was still a senator. 'It was the couple’s first owned home in the city,' the agents relate. 'It was a setting for young family life and rising national political ambitions.' Coincidentally, at the exact same time in London, Margaret Thatcher and her husband Dennis bought their first house: a family home in Bromley which they apparently found in Country Life.

Unlike the Thatcher's home in the suburbs of south-east London, the Kennedys' Georgetown house had a long history in politics, having originally been built in 1811 for William Marbury, a key figure in the early legal history of the USA.

A century and a half later Kennedy and his team used the house as an unofficial nerve centre in the 1960 presidential election campaign. It was from here that president-elect John F. Kennedy left for his inauguration on 20 January, 1961; later that day, he moved in to the White House, which would be his final home.

The house's owners since then have done an admirable job of keeping this five bedroom, 5,215 sq ft home in superb shape, while keeping its sense of history alive. It is a house, according to TTR Sotheby's International Realty agent Michael Rankin, that 'offers what sophisticated buyers prize most: architectural integrity, enduring materials, large gardens spaces, ample parking and a storied address at the core of Georgetown’s village life.'

'It is a home that has hosted statesmen and young families alike,' Mr Rankin continues, 'where measured elegance frames modern living and where every arrival walks through a doorway shared by figures who shaped American history.'

3307N Street NW, Washington DC, is for sale at $7.5 million via TTR Sotheby's International Realty — see more details.

One hazy evening in July 1963, music lovers who had attended the Juan-Les-Pins jazz festival were surprised and delighted at an impromptu performance by Ella Fitzgerald from a balcony of the Hotel Le Provençal.

Now, 62 summers later, fans of the Queen of Jazz can live in a thee-bedroom apartment where she stayed — so long as they have the £6.75 million required to buy it.

Fitzgerald herself, it has to be said, would probably not recognise the place if she woke up here one morning. The hotel was once a mainstay of the Cote d'Azur at its glorious height, frequented by Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Coco Chanel and Winston Churchill — and it inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to writeTender is the Night — but the place fell on hard times in the 1970s and was shut down for decades (of which more later).

Attempts to restore Le Provençal to its former glory place have been rumbling along since at least 2008, but it's now complete after a 10-year effort by the British entrepreneur John Caudwell, the billionaire who made his fortune launching Phones4U. The hotel is now a £300 million 'super prime residential complex'.

Ella Fitzgerald's suite has — according to Caudwell — been inspired by the singer, the glamour of the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, and the Cote d'Azur's post-war zenith. But as the pictures on this page show, it's a very 21st century take on that idea; as the developer puts it, 'this architectural gem seamlessly blends the opulence of its past with the elegance of modern living,' and, 'offers a unique opportunity to experience the epitome of sophistication and prestige'.

In other words, this is a world of privilege where apartments have high-end fittings, private terraces and even — in this case — a covered loggia. In the reception room is a dark gold feature wall against a palette of rich purples, soft chocolate browns and natural wood.

The open plan kitchen has bronze finished timber cabinetry with stone countertops and a central island and breakfast bar clad in marble.

This 2,172 sq ft apartment is the latest unit to be launched of 41 penthouses, apartments, and villas at Le Provençal. The first hit the market in the spring and around 40% have been sold so far. Le Provençal will once again be a playground for millionaires, with a string of services offered to residents, and the best of the French Riviera on the doorstep.

It seems apt that it should be resurrected by a billionaire with a high public profile, since that's how it began. The original Hotel Le Provençal was built in 1926-1927 for Frank Jay Gould, the American railroad tycoon — he already sounds like a character from an Agatha Christie novel — who built and owned hotels and casinos, and was one of the richest men in the world at the time.

With views of spectacular sunsets across the Bay of Golfe-Juan, at the gateway of the Cap d'Antibes, this hotel was a favourite haunt of the beau monde in the 1960s and 1970s, also dubbed 'the jazz years' and the 'golden years of the Riveria'.

What a place it must have been at the time. As well as Monroe, Chanel and Ella Fitzgerald, the hotel also hosted Ernest Hemingway, Jackie Kennedy and Louis Armstrong, while Scott Fitzgerald lived in the nearby mansion Belles Rives and would prop up the hotel bar in the late '20s. The story goes that Picasso used an annexe there as a studio and painted the walls. In 1977 the music stopped, and the 10-storey hotel closed for a refurbishment that never materialised.

It was abandoned for almost 50 years. Several property magnates tried to revive it. Cyril Dennis (of Docklands fame) had plans, but they were thwarted by the Global Financial Crisis. Eventually, the derelict building was bought in 2014 by Caudwell. An octagonal lobby has been modelled on the original salon with an inlaid bronze monogram, while bas-relief sculptural designs run throughout lobby, pool area and the new port cochere.

Caudwell has developed several high-profile property holdings in recent years — he has a £2 billion project in London called 1 Mayfair — but in France he found his biggest challenge was dealing with the local planning officials who were 'very difficult'. Among other points of conflict was the dictate that he should paint the building in ochre, rather than the original off-white. Caudwell's response to them can be paraphrased as 'Cry me a river' — he's stayed true to the original look of this Art Deco landmark.

The new Ella Fitzgerald show apartment at Le Provençal is priced at €7.75 million (around £6.75 million) and is sold fully furnished — see more details.

Is the summer officially over? Technically speaking that depends on whether you ask a meteorologist or an astronomer: the former will tell you autumn began on September 1, while the latter will tell you that it doesn't kick off until Monday, 22 Septemeber 2025 at 7:19 pm BST.

There's a better way of figuring it out, of course: have you started wearing jumpers again? If so, then it's autumn — which means that the UK is now most likely set for this cold, damp weather until some time next April.

It would all be so different if you owned a property in Morocco: not only would you not have got your jumpers out yet, there's a good chance that you wouldn't even own one, except one you keep in the back of the drawer for when you go hot-air ballooning over the Atlas Mountains. Which is definitely something you'd do at your weekends, if you lived in one of these magnificent, palatial homes.

Rabat — £4.1 million

'This rare residence, a true private palace, captivates with its grandiose architecture,' say agents of this sprawling and impressive property.

The central hall has a 5.3m-high ceiling with a pool ringed by columns in its centre, while there are five bedrooms .

For sale at £4.1 million — see more details.

Central Marrakesh — £800,000

You can rock the Kasbah (it's an area of central Marrakesh, as well as a generic name for a north African fort) from the comfort of your own home in this four bedroom property.

It's a beautiful riad, recently refurbished, with a ground-level courtyard space, and rooms above accessed via the stairs which eventually take you to the sort of roof terrace from which you can imagine Indiana Jones jumping to escape his chasers.

For sale at £800,000 — see more details.

Outskirts of Marrakesh — £4 million

The 10-bedroom Villa Lions isn't just a villa: it comes with nearly 3,500 acres of land, with stunning views across the desert to the Atlas Mountains.

The house itself is equally vast, with almost 14,000 sq ft of internal floor space and around 20,000sq ft of terraces and patios.

And that's before we even mention the 36-metre swimming pool.

For sale at £4 million — see more details.

Casablanca — £950,000

The very name Casablanca conjures up thoughts of the classic 1940s film starring Humphrey Bogart. But a place like this makes you wonder: would Ingrid Bergman have still got on that plane if she'd had a home like this to live in?

Thinking about making an offer? If you don't, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life. (Well, possibly.)

For sale at £950,000 — see more details.

At Country Life, we bow to nobody in our love of castles — and not just because we have one of the world's foremost castle experts on our team, in the form of our architectural editor John Goodall.

And while we love the castles of Britain most of all, that doesn't mean that we don't appreciate the continental take on what is without question the most dramatic, romantic type of building on the planet.

Today, we're looking at some wonders that we've come across for sale on the continent. And once you've finished enjoying these, don't miss our look at the best castles for sale in Scotland.

Italy — £2.5 million

A glorious Italian castle — also pictured at the top of this page — has come up for sale in the medieval borgo of Sant'Apollinare, close to the charming village of Spina, in the hills roughly half-way between Rome and Florence, not far from Perugia.

The building is over 1,000 years old, and was originally built as a defensive castle though it went on to become a monastery, and eventually a nobleman's home.

This is a huge property, which comes with around 180 acres of land stretching down into the valley below. The main castle alone is some 16,500 sq ft, a fair amount of which is built below ground level and into the hill itself. Eight bedrooms, a string of reception rooms, kitchens and more are here, and with this much space the agents suggest it could be converted into a wonderful boutique hotel. We can't wait to see what happens next.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details.

France — £22.5 million

A neo-Gothic castle built at the end of the 19th century, set close to Blois, Bourges, and Orleans — and therefore near some of the greatest chateaux in France — this is a magnificent creation offering over 32,000 sq ft of space.

'A rare place, designed to transcend eras without sacrificing authenticity,' say the agents, 'destined for those seeking an extraordinary property ready to write a new chapter in history.' Nicely put.

For sale via Espaces Atypiques — see more details.

Germany — £4.5 million

What could be better than living in a castle? Living in a castle beside a spectacular, unspoilt lake. And that's what is on offer in the penthouse of Schloss Possenhofen, near the German town of Pocking, just south of Munich.

The lake — or the Starnberger See, as it's called — is a fittingly beautiful setting for this old palace, built for Elisabeth, the daughter of Duke Max Joseph, who went on to become Empress of Austria.

The sale isn't for the entire castle, though it does include the entire second floor and the (as yet undeveloped) attic space above. There are three bedrooms, magnificent communal gardens reserved solely for the castle residents, and panoramic views which reach as far as the Bavarian Alps.

For sale via Christie's International Real Estate — see more details.

The very top end of the property market has a name: super-prime. It's a term that loosely refers to the top 1% of properties on the market — and in London, that translates to an asking price of £10 million and upwards.

Super-prime is the icing on the cake. But what of the cherry on the icing? The homes with nine-figure price asking prices, so rare that they don't even have a name. Are they super-super prime? Super-duper prime? Ultra prime? Any such label makes them sounds more like transformers than the world's most extravagant, opulent and exclusive properties, but that's what they are. And recent weeks have seen some fascinating developments in this rarefied area.

Top of the list is the launch of the most expensive home currently on the open market in the USA: Little Lake Lodge and estate, which is for sale at $300,000,000 (around £225 million) via Sotheby's International Realty.

This 18-bedroom, 18,466 sq ft home is set in just over 74 acres of land beside a lake just a mile or so from the centre of Aspen, Colorado. This truly beautiful setting is an Alpine fantasy that draws on influences from around the world to create what the agents describe as 'a lovingly, painstakingly created and maintained alpine compound that can never be matched or replicated.'

Several rooms could have come straight from a lodge in Austria or Switzerland; the kitchen could easily have been lifted from a country house in Wiltshire; the spa bath recalls a Japanese onsen; and there's a grandeur throughout which put us in mind of the sort of Highland shooting lodge you might imagine Andrew Carnegie commissioning in the 19th century.

That note about commissioning your own mountain escape is relevant, since as well as Little Lake Lodge and guest buildings on the plot, the sale also includes permission and architects' plans for a new 19,750sq ft house, intended to turn this into a 'multi-generational compound', and a chance to 'establish an enduring legacy of luxury and harmony with a majestic natural setting — an opportunity unlikely to occur again in the great Mountain West.'

We love it when estate agents — who don't have a great reputation as artists — find the poetry in their souls to come up with descriptions like that. And it seems only fitting to dig deep when selling a place that, assuming the new construction goes ahead, could end up costing the buyer half a billion dollars.

On the other side of the world, a home has just been sold with a price that hit a billion dollars — albeit Hong Kong dollars, which equates to 'only' around USD$130, or £100 million. The home in question is 1 Gough Hill Road, one of the grandest houses on The Peak in Hong Kong.

Once owned by the Bank of China, this mansion — which has been completely refurbished — has no private lake or sprawling acres. At what is the most prestigious address in one of Asia's most expensive cities, it buys a five-bedroom home with 11,500sq ft of space, and five bedrooms.

It's a modest price compared to a different property on the same street, 15 Gough Hill Road, which in 2016 reportedly became the most expensive house on the planet after being sold for £200 million (the buyer, a Chinese billionaire named as Chen Hongtian, subsequently had the house seized by receivers acting for a bank who'd issued a loan against it, according to the South China Morning Post).

As and when 15 Gough Hill Road is sold again, it seems likely that it'll be for substantially less than £200 million, and that's an important point to note in super-super-prime property: things change.

Take The Holme — dubbed 'London's White House' — which was sold at the end of 2024 to an unknown buyer (reports suggest it was a US tech billionaire).

When it originally hit the market 18 months or so before the sale went through, the asking price was £250 million — a sum which would have made it the most expensive residential property of all time, and with 29,000sq ft and four acres of a Royal Park to call your own, it seemed a good candidate to take that title.

The Holme is one of just a handful of homes within the confines of Regent's Park, this two hundred year old villa was designed and lived in by Decimus Burton (1800-1881), a founding fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Burton was well-versed in the Roman and Greek revival and Regency styles, and designed many other buildings of note: the Athenaeum Club, and both the Palm and Temperate Houses at Kew Gardens.

But this was no normal sale: The Times reported that the sale had been forced due to a £160 million loan that had been taken out against the property by the previous owners. The result was a sale that went through at £138.9 million, a £111 million discount on the asking price.

The gap between asking prices and realised prices is something that crops up regularly in super-super-prime property. In April 2024, Château d’Armainvilliers — a former home of the Rothschild family — was listed on the market at £335 million, which would have been a world record sale, but by February 2025 it had been cut to €180 million, or around £155 million at today's exchange rate.

That leaves the record for a French property sale being the £223 million sale in 2015 of The Chateau Louis XIV, a modern take on Versailles that is genuinely spectacular (the photographs on the developer's website are well worth a look). It's a remarkable piece of work, and its very newness give the place a sort of glossy, Las Vegas feel (Kim Kardashian almost got married here in 2014 before switching the nuptials to Italy). Such a shiny, pristine look is odd for those used to traipsing around such places and looking at them as living pieces of history, but it makes you realise that The Sun King's magnum opus itself must once have felt fresh-out-of-the-box.

Is it the most expensive house ever sold? Well, comparing property sales around the world is not easy: inflation, exchange rates and grey areas abound. It's more than the £210 million UK record, sent in 2020 for the sale of 2-8a Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge, and more than the present US record of $238 million (£177 million) for a New York penthouse in 2019. California's record was set in 2024 with the $210 million sale of a house in Malibu, while in Naples, Florida, a compound went for $225 million (£166 million) in April 2025.

That leaves us going back to Hong Kong to find the present record holder: 75 Deep Water Bay Road, which was bought by businessman Pan Sutong for HK$2.5 billion in 2017 — that's £240 million, or £322 million adjusted for inflation. It's safe to say that it's not worth that any more: Pan Sutong's business empire ran into trouble a few years later, and he was declared bankrupt in 2022.

Ibiza — €17.5 million

'With no neighbours in sight, there's a feeling of completed calm and seclusion at Can Draco,' reads the opening line of the listing for this €17.5m villa on the north coast of Ibiza.

They had us at 'no neighbours in sight', but there's a lot more to enjoy at this 5,500 sq ft home set in just under four acres of woodland, with breathtaking views across the Mediterranean. Picture windows make the most of the setting, while the colour scheme and decoration within — all reimagined by the artist owner — has been 'plucked from nature'.

In general the vibe is calm and soothing but there are some exotic flourishes — not least the green, er, thing in the kitchen that is described by agents Domus Nova as 'a monolithic green stone island' that is 'part sculpture, part culinary station'.

Slightly eccentric? Absolutely. But it adds to the charm — and if you don't like it, then you can always re-reimagine it for yourself.

For sale via Domus Nova — see more details and pictures.

Nicaragua — £15m

If you're really getting away from it all, what could be better than thousands of acres of unspoilt coastline — much of it part of a wildlife refuge — that includes around five miles of beach on Nicaragua's Pacific coast, just across the border from Costa Rica.

There's a huge amount of land — around 5,000 acres — included in the sale, though it's worth noting that it's spilt across a series of different parcels. There's huge potential for creating dream homes, eco-tourism or more.

For sale via Christie's International Real Estate — see more details.

Sweden — 69 million SEK (approx £5.4 million)

'You are surrounded only by trees, water, and silence,' say the agents of Edudden, a 100-year-old house on an 11-acre private peninsula on the eastern coast of the island of Ingarö, less than 50km from Stockholm.

The elevated setting of the house and its position out on the water means that the sun swings around the property throughout the day.

As well as the main house there is also a timbered outbuilding with a sauna, a cottage on the higher slope, and a private dock — all within commutable distance of Stockholm.

For sale via Christie's International Real Estate — see more details.

Vermont — £900,000

Vermont can be a paradise for those with eight-figure budgets — this incredible house caught our eye, for example — but if seclusion is the main aim then this simple, charming three-bedroom home might do many people just as well.

It's cosy, welcoming and peaceful and there are miles of outdoor trails literally on your doorstep.

For sale via Pall Spera — see more details and pictures.

‘I’ve got a thing about gated things,’ a colleague carelessly said as she walked away. How was I to know whether this thing was good or bad? It was about Sotogrande, a place I have never been to and know not much about.

First impressions count, and my first and so far only impression of Sotogrande landed in my inbox last week. It was this house, which goes in one way, and also in another. I think the terms are ‘Modernist’ and contemporary. It is called Villa Stern, and it is for sale with Luxury Portfolio International for many millions of Euros (€5,060,000).

There are houses that are expensive and there are houses that look expensive. This place is both. The sweeping lines, the large windows, the open-plan living spaces, the pool, even the materials. It all feels decidedly futuristic and expensive. Who lives here? Someone who drives a very nice modern car and potentially has had multiple run-ins with agents from MI6.

Unsurprisingly, the property comes with just about every kind of amenity imaginable. Six bedrooms, six bathrooms and more than 1,000sq m of living space over three floors, there is lots of room to do things — whether that be hosting parties or just marveling that your home resembles a spaceship.

Other features include, but are not limited to, a wellness area with spa, gym and sauna, and an outdoor pool with a water mirror, as well as indoor pool in case it rains I guess. It is also state-of-the-art when it comes to energy, using solar panels, storage batteries and a geothermal system. According to the agents, it is entirely self-sufficient.

There is plenty to do nearby too, if golf and polo are your thing (which they surely must be). The property sits in a 2,000sq m plot within the Los Alcronocales Natural Park, and is part of the Real Club de Golf de Valderrama, which is one of the finest courses in Europe (it hosted the Ryder Cup in 1997).

That’s all very fascinating, but I am just taken by the shapes and the contours of this place. A home of architectural splendour, albeit one behind a gate. So far, things seem to be pretty good.

Villa Stern in Sotogrande is for sale with Luxury Portfolio International for €5,060,000. For more information and pictures, click here.

To the Georgian artist, the painterly appeal of ruined priories and their broken outlines lay in the effect on the senses, recording decay as picturesque scenes, as places of poetic intrigue. Derelict strongholds and stony contours of some long-lost cloister sketched out in watercolour hinted at bygone status, drawing out a romantic retort. All kinds of architectural fragments survive in the parks of country estates, many former monastic lands granted post-Dissolution to aristocratic families who built new houses nearby. Buying a property complete with an ancient wreck is, to many, an attractive prospect, but it comes with caveats for would-be purchasers.

‘The draw is that it is historically interesting and the house looks out over the ruins and the river,’ points out John Coleman, director at GSC Grays in Richmond, on the spectacular arrangement at the 1,103-acre Kirkham estate on the River Derwent in North Yorkshire.

It is currently for sale for £25 million with GSC Grays, complete with the early 19th century, pale gold-coloured mansion at its core and the craggy remnants of the Augustinian Kirkham Priory nearby, hollowed out by commissioners to Henry VIII. Yet, having the old shell of a building as part of an estate requires an understanding of statutory designations and associated obligations.

Here, English Heritage manages the Priory, its maintenance, security and even dedicated parking for tourists. ‘A new owner could take comfort from the knowledge that they can enjoy the ruins without the responsibility to manage them,’ observes Mr Coleman. ‘There are those who would rather not have any public access, but that would inevitably mean taking back the management responsibilities.’

Elsewhere, the onus may fall directly on the owner. Henry Ryde, head of heritage and townscape at Savills, notes that many may be designated Scheduled Monuments. ‘It is against the law to disturb them without consent, cause deliberate damage, or use a metal detector or remove an object from the site without a licence,’ he says, adding that ‘works which directly affect a Scheduled Monument—for example, resulting in loss or damage, repair or alteration—in England will require consent from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.’

Looking after old buildings and sites can be expensive, although Historic England does provide grants for repairs to those eligible and usually considered ‘at risk’. This includes for the curtain wall and keep of Mettingham Castle in Suffolk, a little-known site with an impressive provenance as a manor house fortified by Sir John de Norwich in 1342. The six-bedroom, converted timber-frame barn within the crumbled fortifications of this Scheduled Monument, for sale with Savills for £1.6m , provides the chance to buy into the past.

It is set on a plot of three acres and includes the ruins, which have in the past been repaired with the help of Historic England grants, and a Victorian glasshouse. ‘Mettingham Castle is one of the most remarkable properties I’ve had the pleasure of visiting,’ says Tom Clayton, associate director at Savills Norwich. ‘Its setting is unique and the opportunity to own a piece of genuine history is nothing short of extraordinary.’

Not all remains are above ground. At Castle House, Otford, near Sevenoaks, Kent, a Grade II-listed, extended farmhouse of the 15th/16th century now available for the first time in years, the property lies at the edge of a succession of ponds connected to Thomas Becket’s Well and within the Scheduled area corresponding with the remains of the Tudor Otford Palace set out in 1518 by Archbishop William Warham. Among its many selling points, not least pretty landscaped gardens, selling agent Knight Frank highlights an archaeological dig that uncovered a Roman villa in the paddocks.

The layers of history might run deep, but pockets sometimes run deeper. The reinstatement of an old building as a habitable dwelling could cost the earth if not done correctly.

New services and access might prove tricky. ‘We always advise going in with open eyes and the right team and that a conservation-led approach is essential, together with tradespeople who understand the materials and methods involved,’ recommends Alexander Macfarlane, head of residential building consultancy at Strutt & Parker. ‘Ruins tend to hide their secrets well: behind every stone or slab is the potential for something unexpected. Timescales, budgets and contingencies aren’t only helpful, they’re essential. When it works, however, the result is often a home like no other. A restoration should speak the same architectural language as the original. It shouldn’t overwrite the past, but work with it, continuing the story.’

Outstanding examples of renewal include Hellifield Peel in North Yorkshire, a defensive relic of the 14th century that was once open to the elements and famously revived as a superlative family home. Others, such as the RIBA Stirling Prize-winning Astley Castle in Warwickshire, brilliantly demonstrate the capacity for inventive change— here with modern accommodation in contemporary design blended with the ancient fabric of what was a burnt-out shell, a visually powerful connection between old and new. It is not before time.

Portofino, Italy — £20.5 million

There are Talented Mr Ripley vibes to spare at this six-bedroom villa, formerly the private residence of a prominent Genoese family, with breathtaking views from its perch on the slopes of Portofino Mountain, down to the beautiful harbour and across the Mediterranean.

This six-bedroom villa was painstakingly renovated in 2010, with furniture commissioned specifically to fit each room.

As elegant as the interiors are, the outside space is arguably even more of a draw, with terraces, lawns, a rose garden, small orchard and a kitchen garden, while the pool is build on an overhang to give a giddy sensation that you're floating above Portofino itself.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more pictures and details.

West Palm Beach, Florida — £17 million

An apartment of over 7,000sq ft that gives the impression that you're not just living on the water in West Palm Beach, but actually flying over the harbour.

There are five bedrooms and five bathrooms in the 7,166sq ft home, and while the light and space is great, the design really edges things up a notch — as the pictures here show perfectly. Everything here has been custom-designed and made for the owner — an interior designer — with Italian marble bloors, leather-lined closets and a bathroom that really just has to be seen.

The building itself is called The Bristol, which has a fitness centre, swimming pool and spa, alongside many other amenities.

For sale via Sotheby's International Realty — see more pictures and details.

Aix-En-Provence, France — £15.4 million

A 60-acre estate set in an olive grove, with beautifully-landscaped grounds and an almost absurdly perfect Provençal feel.

Inside the main house — called the Bastide — you'll find a series of huge, traditional rooms with high ceilings, stone floors and traditional furnishings. There are several other houses included on the estate.

Also within the grounds are the olive grove, gardens, two swimming pools and a covered terrace.

For sale via Savills — see more pictures and details.

Manhattan, New York — £21.25 million