Digging in: my war with the neighbours

“But, of course,” Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring, is saying, “I was forced to pay an absurd amount on planning and appeals.”

She speaks in the refined old-Chelsea accent that comes of having been born and raised in the area six decades ago, and with a force that goes a long way towards explaining why she, the local council and her next-door neighbour have been locked for four years in a dispute about a double basement during which she has faced criminal prosecution, High Court judges and a public inquiry.

In February the council finally granted her the right to change the former office into a home — it had taken her six planning applications, five of them quashed, thanks largely to the efforts of her next-door neighbour. (At one point she even had the building’s planning designation changed to “storage”, because she’d been advised that it was easier to switch from storage to residential than from office to residential.)

“A completely ludicrous amount,” she protests.

How much has she spent?

She pauses to reflect. It matters, on the ground of taste, she implies, that she, though the daughter of a Russian immigrant, is “second-generation borough” compared with many other rich residents here: “Foreigners,” who think “they can make up the rules. I think my interpretation of the rules is slightly more British.” The pause is there, also, for dramatic emphasis. At last, she speaks: “Seven figures.”

What has made this dispute infamous, however, is not the money but Lisle-Mainwaring’s decision in March last year to paint the little mews property in bold — she says “cheerful” — red and white stripes. The neighbours were aghast, as she must have known they would be. They complained publicly that the stripes were too “in your face” for Kensington and that Lisle-Mainwaring was “selfish and unneighbourly”. The council stepped in: candy stripes contravened the council’s strict preference for “muted colours” on the exteriors of its residential buildings.

Well, she says, the council should have given her permission to change the property’s use from storage into residential. “I was making a statement: if you want a warehouse, this is a warehouse,” she says, smiling at her ingenuity. “They kept on talking about the ‘vibrancy of the area’. I would say red and white is fairly vibrant. Wouldn’t you?”

In January this year a court ordered her to repaint the house. But by then planning application No 7 was on its way to being granted: by February she’d received permission to rebuild it entirely. It’s still red and white, under the builder’s tarpaulin and scaffolding. “The only time I’ve had a letter from my neighbour was about two days after the stripes went up and it didn’t, how can I say, displease me that this had annoyed him.” She smiles.

“I’ve had correspondence from Mexico, America, the Bahamas,” she says. “Europe — obviously.” Who was this mischievous “woman behind the stripes”? On social media the aesthetics of the property’s new frontage was discussed. Journalists dug deep into her private life, interviewing the son of her late husband about a falling-out over money. “The world,” she says, “is divided on those stripes.”

People were intrigued by the saga, she speculates, because of the sums of money involved. As she discovered, when a few years ago she “pulled off the property deal of the century” (she’s largely self-made, she says) and swiftly became very rich, people treat you differently when you have money. “It made life easier but what I didn’t anticipate was how much envy and jealousy it aroused in others.”

Stripes or no stripes, her house is said to be worth £15 million. Not so, says Lisle-Mainwaring, who estimates the real value of her mews property at “just under five”. A hefty enough sum, but there are juicy themes to this drama besides cash: neighbours who hate each other, and the unaccountable bubble in which London’s wealthy elite seem to exist, to name but two. Then there are subtexts: the transformation of the city’s once vibrant areas into dead zones, and the apparent powerlessness of councils to protect local areas from “luxury vandalism”.

Lisle-Mainwaring’s first planning application was to build a double basement where she would house a swimming pool — a luxury that her millionaire next-door neighbour, a South African businessman called Niall Carroll, has also allowed himself. Carroll argues that his underground pool didn’t set a precedent and that the noise of the excavation would force him to move out of his home.

It seems to be Carroll who is most energetically campaigning to block Lisle-Mainwaring’s plans of building her dream retirement home. “I don’t think you can say because the queen has a tiara, everyone should be allowed a tiara,” he says in a documentary being shown tonight.

She says: “He lives in a house which he completely refurbished.” Carroll counters that his basement was constructed under “a different set of circumstances”.

When, after months of refusals, she appealed to an independent inspector, finally winning the right to change her office into a home, Carroll went to the High Court, arguing that he hadn’t been properly consulted — her permission was quashed. Two weeks later the stripes appeared.

“The noise of builders is horrible, I understand that; but this is the life we live in London,” she says. “London is in a constant state of being built.”

Why didn’t she just get a big enough house somewhere else?

“That’s a curious thing people say. People buy what they can afford, and extend it.” She smiles that smile.

However, her dreams of a super-basement are modest compared with those realised by fellow residents. There are houses in Kensington and Chelsea worth £55 million. Property here is worth an average of £12,000 a square metre, the most expensive in Britain — and the financial incentive alone to increase that space is powerful. In 2014 applications for basements in the borough doubled.

A five-minute walk from Lisle-Mainwaring’s bombsite mews house takes you to Kensington Palace. Millionaires’ Row backs on to it: Roman Abramovich lives here, so do the Israeli, Russian and French ambassadors. The French ambassador, Sylvie Bermann, is in the process of trying to overturn planning permission granted by the council to her neighbour Jon Hunt, the billionaire founder of Foxtons estate agency.

Lisle-Mainwaring bought the mews property, which was an office at the time, in August 2012. That in itself put Carroll’s back up, she claims, because he had intended to buy it himself. He’d already bought and moved into the £11.5 million house next-door. Whether or not Carroll really wanted to buy the mews, she bought it for £4.75 million — cash — more than £1 million more than it was worth, gambling that she would get planning permission to convert it, with a basement, and double its value.

Could Carroll ever own the house? “My house?” she says with a laugh. “Never. Never! I mean, he keeps on hoping that I’ll die but I’m making provisions in my will.”

Lisle-Mainwaring has rarely broken her silence. In person she is charismatic verging on imperious. She seems to be indifferent to what other people think of her. Yes, “I could give all my money to charity, but I’m not that nice a person.” Since her name began to appear in the press, “I’ve got all these trolls saying that’s what I should do with my life, I should do good works. F*** ’em. Really. I’m sorry.”

She is equally clear about her own status: she is non-resident, not non-dom — a very important distinction, she says. She takes the Tube and knows what social housing is. And she cares about London’s long-term aesthetics and dislikes the “nonentity” buildings that councils are allowing developers to construct. Her wealth — it’s been said to be “up to £60 million”— has been “grossly overestimated”. When I ask her how much she is worth, she tells me off for having asked a “very unEnglish” question.

It’s only because she’s female, single, childless (“you don’t need that much space”), widowed and has Jewish roots that she has attracted so much criticism, she says. “I’m not the way women are supposed to be: accepting. Some people are saying online that I’ve ‘Jewed’ my way to the top.”

Is there such a thing as too many basements?

“No. It’s a bit like me saying, ‘It’s all right for me to have two cars but you having three cars is excessive.’ [In] one of the Harrods developments, they’ve gone down seven floors.”

Will she win in the end? She still needs a party wall agreement from Carroll before she can level the mews building. That could take months. Meanwhile, it’s understood that Carroll has appealed for leave to contest the planning inspectorate’s decision, in February, to grant permission for demolition and change of use for Lisle-Mainwaring’s property. She has a new planning application in for a single basement. “I think it’s more likely to happen than not,” she says.

Does she think her neighbour regrets having taken her on? “I don’t think he’s a man who would ever admit that.” She’s cheered, though, by the thought of the woman he’s forced to live next-door to, which — by her calculation — makes his home unsellable.

“I mean, would you live next door to me?” she says, smiling. “He’s got to tell everyone now that I’m a monster.”
Posh Neighbours at War is on Channel 4 tonight at 7.30pm