Rudolf's retreat: £1.8million rural home that became unlikely bolt hole for ballet legend

Mail on sunday 31 december 2016

He was the first Soviet from the arts world to defect to the West, paving the way for other ballet stars such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alexander Godunov. 

And in deserting his homeland, Rudolf Nureyev knew that he would probably never be allowed back, cut off from his family and former life for ever.

But Nureyev – who, after his defection in 1961, was to become the world’s most famous ballet dancer – found a home from home in an unlikely bolt hole in Oxfordshire. And it all came about because of his relationship with the English ballerina Margot Fonteyn.

It was Fonteyn, who was then the Royal Ballet’s prima ballerina, who arranged Nureyev’s first appearance in Britain in 1961, and she happened to be friends with a ballet-lover of Russian descent, Paklusha Bicat.

Paklusha had been brought up in Paris after her family – wealthy from owning vast oilfields – fled the Russian Revolution.

Fonteyn arranged for the new- to-London Nureyev and Paklusha to meet at a restaurant in London’s Jermyn Street, and from there a friendship developed. 

Then, for 15 years, from 1962 to 1977, Nureyev would spend long periods at the home Paklusha shared with her theatre-set-designer husband, Andre, and their three children. ‘Paklusha could get on with anyone from a doorman to a duchess,’ Wallace Potts, a lover of Nureyev, once said.

Nureyev formed a dance partnership with Fonteyn and danced with the Royal Ballet, where he was principal dancer, from 1962 to 1970. He then became a guest artist so he could perform internationally and on tours, before he committed his future to the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1980s.

Although he had a flat in London, Nureyev would often stay with the Bicats at Crays Pond House, which is in the hamlet of Crays Pond, near the Thames in south Oxfordshire.

The house, which is being sold for only the third time since the Second World War, is on the market for £1.825 million through estate agents Strutt & Parker.

When they were living there, Andre and Paklusha would have many visitors. ‘It had lots of small rooms, which worked for the many guests they had,’ says company director Jane Butcher, 49, who bought the house in 2000 with her husband Stephen, 55, a retired business director. In her biography of Nureyev, author Julie Kavanagh backs this up, mentioning ‘the Bloomsbury-like bohemia of [the Bicats’] family life in Oxfordshire’.

Another guest at Crays Pond House was Nureyev’s fellow Soviet defector and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Jane says that Paklusha and Andre ‘were very, very fond of him because he would play with the children’. 

In contrast, Nureyev was quite reserved. ‘But he left his Mercedes in the drive at Crays Pond House and was happy to let the children jump all over it and play in it.’

While Paklusha craved the stimulation of artistic society in this fairly remote Oxfordshire home, Nureyev appeared to relish the tranquillity and liked to practise his barre work in the garden. As the family didn’t want him to be seen by passers-by, they planted a mature yew tree hedge to conceal him.

Although Nureyev stopped staying at Crays Pond House in 1977, in 1985 – when Paklusha was dying – he came back to be by her side. He himself was to live only eight more years, passing away in 1993, aged 54.

The house, which has five bedrooms, dates from 1820 and was originally a bakery. By the time Andre and Paklusha Bicat bought it, for £5,000 in 1947, it had become an eight-bedroom house. The subsequent owners converted it further before the Butchers purchased it. They are selling it now because they want to move abroad.

Features of Crays Pond House include a tiled wine cellar beneath the drawing room, accessed via a trap door, and an electric five- bar wooden gate at the property’s entrance that leads to a gravel driveway and a triple garage.

The hamlet of Crays Pond is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern Hills, and the villages of Goring and Pangbourne are a few miles away.

‘Crays Pond House is not only a handsome-looking house on the outside but it is light and airy with well-proportioned rooms inside,’ says Alex Barton, partner at Strutt & Parker’s Pangbourne office. 

‘It has the appeal of being in a great location for Reading station and within the catchment of the good schools of the area. It also has a lovely garden perfect for a family.’