The world of super-super prime homes, where £100 million is barely even the starting point

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.'

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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.

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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.