Petula Clark's Downtown townhouse
mail on sunday 19 january 2014
Found just off the buzzing Kings Road near Sloane Square in Chelsea, No 4 Royal Avenue is a proper ‘Downtown’ address. So it was, perhaps, the perfect home for legendary singer Petula Clark, whose classic chart hit Downtown has become something of a signature tune.
Indeed, Petula loved the house so much that she kept an eye on it after she moved out, even asking its new owners if she could have a look round.
Petula lived in the five-bedroom townhouse in the 1980s – and wasn’t the street’s first famous resident. Royal Avenue is the fictional home of James Bond, while architect Richard Rogers, who designed the Lloyd’s building and the Millennium Dome, lived at No 18.
The Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti rented No 36 for his mistress Fanny Cornforth, and American film director Joseph Losey lived at No 30.
One of his best-known films, The Servant, which starred Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig, was set in an empty house opposite.
No 4 is now owned by financial adviser Michael Berry, 58, andhis wife Sherifa, 52, who moved there in 1998.
Their daughter Carina, 26, was living there when Petula, who had downsized a few streets away, called.
‘She was nice; the house must have meant a lot to her,’ Carina says.
And though Petula, now 81, has sold 68 million records, appeared in 30 films and had a new album out last year, Carina admitted: ‘I didn’t know who she was!’
But it’s no surprise that Petula had fond memories of her former home. It is an impressive early Victorian, stucco-fronted, five-bedroom, four-bathroom family home offering bright, flexible and spacious accommodation.
The house benefits from a commanding position by the gravelled open space originally intended as a carriageway leading to the Royal Hospital. It has a large south-west-facing terrace. Mr Berry is now selling it with a price tag of £5.85 million, as his three daughters have moved out.
He says: ‘It is an empty nest really, now that my youngest daughter has just gone to university.’
The property’s unusual garden arrangement is a major feature.
Mr Berry says: ‘It had its garden built over, so we’ve got a roof terrace at a mezzanine level between the ground and the first floor, which, in many ways, is better than a garden because it’s less gloomy.’
He says he can grow apples and tomatoes on this raised patio, whereas ‘the only thing you can grow at ground level here are ferns’.
The first-floor sitting room has a Venetian theme. ‘We’re both very fond of Venice and we’ve got quite a lot of Venetian things,
’ Mr Berry says. ‘We’ve been to Venice twice in the past year. My wife always likes to go and bring back things.’
The lower ground floor of the house, which used to be servants’ quarters, can be used as a separate flat.
Mr Berry says: ‘It’s the perfect family house because we can live quite separately and then come together.’
‘My wife can watch television in one room and I can listen to music in another.’
The Berrys, like Petula, have become ‘downtown’ fans, after moving to Chelsea from Vauxhall in South London, and won’t be going far.
Mr Berry says: ‘I think three bedrooms would suit us but it has to be in Chelsea. It can’t be anywhere else. It’s my wife’s stipulation; she likes the buzz.’
Guy Gittins, sales director at Chesterton Humberts Chelsea, says: ‘This traditional Chelsea townhouse will make an ideal family home or – for our international buyers – a rather opulent pied- a-terre.’