Freddie Mercury’s gorgeous Kensington home goes on sale – for a jaw-dropping £30 million
Freddie Mercury lived at Garden Lodge with Mary Austin. (Phil Dent/Redferns and Arnold Slater/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
Freddie Mercury’s former Kensington home has been put up for sale, and you can buy it – if you happen to have a spare £30 million lying around, that is.
The Queen frontman bought the Kensington property, Garden Lodge, in 1980. With a Japanese-style garden and joint bar and library, his home is on the market for in excess of £30 million (close to $40 million).
The queer icon left the neo-Georgian mansion to his former partner Mary Austin, now 72, who has been living in the property, with her two children, for more than 30 years. They have now both left home, prompting her to sell up.
The property became a shrine for fans of the legendary singer, with flowers and notes left at the front gates in memory of the “We Will Rock You” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” hit-maker, who died there in 1991 from an Aids-related illness. He was 45.
Where is Garden Lodge?
Mercury’s eight-bedroom home is at Logan Place, in Kensington, West London, and is owned by Austin.
It was designed in 1907 by architect Ernest Marshall and originally built for artist Cecil Rea and his wife, the sculptor Constance Halford.
Describing it as his country house in London, Mercury enlisted interior designer Robin Moore Ede to renovate the 28-room mansion to fit his eclectic taste.
Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin
Mercury and Austin had a six-year romantic relationship and remained close friends even when Mercury revealed he was gay. She continued to care for him as his illness took hold.
“I don’t have that many people to turn to, the only one, if we’re talking about it, is Mary,” the flamboyant singer once said.
According to the Daily Mail, she told Bloomberg: ‘It was really only ever my house in name only. I had worked on the house with him and for him, and it will always be his. It was his dream, it was his vision.”
She reportedly later told The Telegraph that Mercury had said he was leaving it to her “because you would have been the woman I would have married, and by rights this would all have been yours anyway”.
Sky News quoted her as saying: “”It has been a joy to live in and I have many wonderful memories here. Ever since Freddie and I stepped through the fabled green door, it has been a place of peace, a true artist’s house, and now is the time to entrust that sense of peace to the next person.”
In case you were thinking of putting in an offer for Freddie Mercury’s Kensington home, just so you can look around, be warned: the estate agents handling the sale will only give out further details and make a viewing appointment if you can prove you have the cash to buy it!
Last year, Austin sold 1,500 of Mercury’s belongings at an auction at Sotheby’s.
The baby grand Yamaha piano, where he wrote hits for the band, raised a record-breaking £1.7 million ($2.15 million). The original 15 pages of lyrics for “Bohemian Rhapsody”, with its original title of “Mongolian Rhapsody”, sold for more than £1.3 million ($1.65 million).
Some of the money raised was donated to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, a charity founded by the surviving members of Queen to fund global HIV/Aids initiatives, and The Elton John Aids Foundation.
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