[title]
If you’re the type of perverse individual that dreams about one day having an old man pointing an accusing finger at you and croaking ‘You're fired!’ then we might be able to steer you to a bit of that. Yes, ‘The Apprentice’ house in Hampstead that homed this year’s candidates is currently up for sale. Only problem is that it costs a cool £17 million, so any budding entrepreneurs will probably need a bit of a leg-up from Lord Sugar first.
If money is no object, then location might be a consideration. You’ll find the modern mansion known as Huxley House designed by Wolff Architects in leafy Hampstead on the (in)famous Bishops Avenue, aka ‘Billionaires Row’. It’s on the books of James Edition estate agents.
For your cash, you’ll get a private pool, a spa, a jacuzzi, eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a chandelier-heavy reception hall, plus a handy lift for transporting your little wheelie suitcase around. If you are more of a renter, then £100k would see you through a month of the luxury lifestyle here.
If you are not initiated into ‘The Apprentice’, of which there are 16 series, then you have yet to enjoy the sheer schadenfreude of watching people who are supremely confident enact tasks they claim to be experts in, and fail dismally and poetically week in, week out. Rumour has it that at one time the BBC series actually sought thrusting young capable types to be a business partner for Lord Sugar and get a £250,000 investment, but now, far more entertainingly, ‘The Apprentice’ appears to select total plums. Each series starts with 16 of them who all live in a luxury home together and the show gradually whittles away at their will to live while dissecting their business acumen until just one plum remains.
The house – which changes from series to series but is always enormous and luxury-end – is a key player in all of this. We see the candidates being woken at some unearthly hour to be summoned to Legoland or The Wolseley or somewhere 30 minutes later and then scrabble round in their scanties to get to the mirrors with the hair gel or curling tongs. At the end of the day, the not-at-risk-of-being-fired candidates return to the house and strew themselves over its white leather sofas in athleisurewear speculating which one of the hapless chumps won’t come back.
The 2022 series was compulsive viewing in a slow-car-crash way that elevated it – if ‘elevate’ is the right word for the utter inept chaos that the candidates enacted including designing a cruise ship logo that looked like a turd and a child’s toothbrush that looked like a turd. As a consolation, they did get to stay in the luxury des-res, sharing with back-stabbing roomies overfond of hairspray and/or Davidoff Cool Water.
Our prediction for the future of Huxley House? We’d like to see it taken over as the new showroom for 2019’s much-loved London-based candidate Thomas Skinner’s ever-expanding bed empire. A sign saying ‘Skinner’s Pillahs’ on the frontage might liven the local stiffs up no end.
Hotels more your thing? Sleep in the boutique one where the Rolling Stones once recorded.
Surprise surprise, London house prices are at their highest ever.