One castle, barely used
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who bought Carla Bruni’s former home in Italy, is selling up without ever living there
One castle, barely used
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who bought Carla Bruni’s former home in Italy, is selling up without ever living there
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the singer and French first lady, outside the Castello di Castagneto Po
John Follain from Times Online
With a fortune estimated at £8 billion and his own Airbus A380 on order, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is the richest man in Saudi Arabia. This may help to explain why he put his Italian castle back on the market only five months after buying it, apparently without having spent a single night there.
Perhaps the castle, which was once Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s family home, was simply not luxurious enough, despite its 40 rooms and 170 acres of rolling countryside in the Turin hills. Back home in the Gulf, the American-educated prince — described by Time magazine as the “Arabian Warren Buffett” — lives in a £180m palace with 317 rooms, 250 television sets, gold-plated taps, a lagoon-shaped pool and a 45-seat cinema. The double-decker Airbus, due for delivery next year, will be the world’s largest private jet, and a suitably over-the-top addition to a fleet that already includes a converted Boeing 747.
The Castello di Castagneto Po, now priced at €19.5m (£17.8m), dominates the valley of the River Po. The agents handling the sale, Christie’s Great Estates and ImmobilSarda, call it “an estate of timeless enchantment... one of the most unique dwellings in Europe”.
It has a long and chequered history. Built in the 11th century, it has been owned by dukes and counts, fought over as local forces battled French invaders, twice razed to the ground and twice rebuilt. No wonder France’s first lady describes it as “a very mysterious, magical place”.
In an interview at the castle with The Sunday Times four years ago, Bruni-Sarkozy explained: “This house has many ghosts, very nice ghosts.” The singer and former model’s family lived in Turin and, later, Paris, but she spent many weekends and long summers there.
Her late father, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, owner of the tyre-maker CEAT and a classical composer, painstakingly renovated the six-floor property, installing central heating, kitchens, bathrooms and lifts, and carving a terrace garden out of the hillside, planted with roses, geraniums and lemon trees. The estate also includes vegetable gardens, orchards, greenhouses, a caretaker’s house and a farm building.
Alberto’s most stunning legacy, however, is his restoration of ancient frescoes in the grotesque style, majestic fireplaces and fine marbles. He also commissioned artisans to add marquetry parquet, wood panelling and tapestries. He filled its ornate rooms with a vast art collection, ranging from 18th-century miniature portraits and china to medieval crucifixes, paintings and Chinese ornaments.
“I remember my father telling us not to damage the works of art — no tennis in the living room,” Bruni-Sarkozy recalled. The family’s guests — her father was also head of the Turin opera house — included the diva Maria Callas, the pianist Artur Rubinstein and the conductor Herbert von Karajan.
When the Brunis decided to sell last year, Carla’s mother, Marisa, a concert pianist, worried about finding an estate agency that could take on the property. “None of the big international firms specialise in the Turin area,” she confided at the time. “It’s not like Tuscany or the Amalfi coast.”
In the end, the family needed to look no further than a friend of Marisa’s son-in-law, President Sarkozy: Prince Alwaleed, whose investments have included stakes in Citibank, AOL, Apple, Motorola, the Four Seasons hotel chain and the Savoy hotel in London. Alwaleed bought the castle in February for about £15m; his other purchases this year include two hotels in Mauritius for £150m.
This July, he allowed Bruni-Sarkozy back to the estate to show it to her husband during a brief visit; the couple lunched under a 250-year-old chestnut tree behind the castle. Later that month, the prince put it back on the market.
Giancarlo Bracco, the founder of ImmobilSarda, has no idea why — and Alwaleed’s entourage isn’t saying. “There’s no furniture in the castle at all: no beds, nothing,” Bracco says. “The Brunis auctioned it when the prince bought the castle.” Alwaleed has apparently made no changes to the property or its contents.
Another source close to the sale speculated: “When you’re as wealthy as Alwaleed, buying and selling a castle isn’t a big deal. Maybe he just changed his mind. It might be for personal or business reasons, but I’d rule out anything to do with the downturn.” The prince is believed to have lost a few billion during the recession, but the financial magazine Forbes estimates that he is still the 22nd richest man in the world.
Who will buy Castello di Castagneto Po? Bracco thinks it might appeal to a wealthy entrepreneur from nearby Turin, Milan, or across the border in France or Switzerland. “The ideal person would be someone who wants to breathe new life into not only the castle, but the estate,” he says. “The castle is in good condition, but there’s work to be done on things like the ancient stables, the rose garden and the vineyard.”
A couple of potential buyers have so far expressed interest. One is an industrialist from Turin, who is considering making the castle his family home, which he would keep intact, but overhauling the farm and the keeper’s house to stage seminars for staff from his company. Also interested are a Russian family based in Zurich, “who want to relocate to a warmer part of the world”, as Bracco puts it.
He admits the castle is no easy sell, despite its merits. “The difficulties are the size and the fact that it’s so unique. And an estate of 170 acres needs work. It’s not the kind of place you buy on the spur of the moment. In my experience, it can take months for someone to go from liking the place to deciding to buy, because it means such a big change in your life.” Unless, it seems, that someone is Prince Alwaleed.
More details on link below :
http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/overseas/article6934044.ece
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