Goldsmith’s discount
Zac Goldsmith has dropped the price of his Devon estate by £500,000. Walreddon Manor came onto the market for £7m in November, but could now be yours for £6.5m.
The 543-acre estate on the fringes of Dartmoor was the marital home of the Conservative MP and his former wife, Sheherazade, who split up in 2010.
Goldsmith, 37, poured a lot of energy into boosting the estate’s green credentials, planting hundreds of thousands of native trees, making the farm organic and encouraging the spread of wildlife.
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The price includes the eight-bedroom manor, a coach house, two cottages, two farmhouses, a listed barn, farm buildings, pasture, lakes and river frontage. The house was once owned by Hugh Hudson, who directed the 1981 film Chariots of Fire.
01392 455755, savills.co.uk
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Joan drops price
The glamorous farewell party Joan Collins hosted before putting her New York flat on the market last spring may have been a little premature.
The actress has not found a buyer for the Manhattan pad, which she briefly took off the market this year and has just relaunched at $2.2m (£1.4m) — down from $2.9m. Collins, 79, decorated the three-bedroom flat with zebra-striped furniture and paintings of herself, including a 1985 Warhol.
The Dynasty star also owns homes in London, Los Angeles and the south of France. The Upper East Side flat has a $3,000 a month service charge — apparently one of the reasons she is selling.
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Colin’s next move
Excitement has been spreading through Wandsworth’s property circles thanks to rumours that Colin Firth is househunting in the southwest London area.
While his budget has not been revealed, you can be sure any house the actor chooses will be grander than his childhood home in Hampshire, which has just gone on sale for £595,000 (01962 736333, hellards.co.uk). Firth, 51, moved to the four-bedroom Victorian semi in Alresford, seven miles from Winchester, when he was 12, after spending his early years in Nigeria and America.
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The actor, who won an Oscar for his role as George VI in The King’s Speech, divides his time between Chiswick, west London, and Rome — home town of Livia Giuggioli, his Italian film-producer wife.
Osborne’s party pile
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Christmas Place, in Kent, on sale for £3.6m, was the setting for wild parties thrown each summer by the playwright John Osborne for people he had met that year. Laurence Olivier, Edna O’Brien and Jon Pertwee rubbed shoulders with local tradesmen, the milkman and the chimney sweep.
Osborne, famous for his 1956 play Look Back in Anger, lived in the nine-bed home near Edenbridge from the 1960s until 1986. It has a pool, tennis court, a lake and a summerhouse, where he used to write.
020 7016 3780, savills.co.uk
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