I’m just the blue door from Notting Hill, standing in front of a house, asking you to buy me
The home behind the iconic blue door from Notting Hill is up for sale.
One of the quirks of working at Country Life, and there are many, is meeting interesting people who have strange hobbies. People like to collect things, from peacocks to Peugeot pepper grinders, they like to write and then e-mail you manuscripts for fiction books that you never intend to read, and they like to take photos. Plenty of people, as it turns out, like to take photos of front doors.
Doors, as it turns out, are more interesting than you might think. I found this out when I interviewed a door fancier on the Country Life podcast. Stanley Kubrick was also obsessed with doors, as Jon Ronson discovered when he visited the director’s estate and found hundreds of boxes of pictures of doors that he collected while filming Eyes Wide Shut.
But perhaps the most famous door, at least in London, of the late 1990s and early 2000s is the blue door that houses William Thacker, the affable and clumsy bookshop owner played by Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. That blue door (well, not that blue door) is for sale now with Sotheby’s International Realty, for £7.5 million.
That blue door can be found on Westbourne Park Road in (unsurprisingly) Notting Hill. It was the home of the film’s writer Richard Curtis. Supposedly, when it was chosen for the film by production designer Stuart Craig, he wasn’t aware that Curtis lived there (which seems like an astounding coincidence). The actual original door was sold at Christie’s for charity, but the current owners of the home have simply painted the new door in the original famous colour.
All very interesting, but not as interesting as the actual house itself. Behind said door a small vestibule then leads to a courtyard and patio garden, on the other side of which is a three bedroom house of some 2,700 square feet.
Most of the property manifests itself in the large dual height kitchen/dining/living room, which extends to almost 50 feet in length. The space rises to a dramatic vaulted ceiling, and also comes with a first-floor galleried landing that wraps around 75% of the perimeter. The mezzanine contains the study, and the principal bedroom and en-suite bathroom, while two further bedrooms and three bathrooms occupy the ground floor. As if all that wasn’t enough, the property also features a roof terrace space, in case the front courtyard garden doesn’t take your fancy.
Westbourne Park Road is one of the prime locations in Notting Hill, itself a prime location in London. Combine the storied history of the front door, the location and the unique layout of the home, and there’s no doubt that this home is worthy of any bookseller or film star.
