This glorious bathroom was once the setting for the most celebrated of high-class-high-society sex scandals that rocked 1960's London. It's also fresh from refurbishment and along with the rest of the house - now
for sale at £17,500,000 so join the Hound and let us takes a peep through the keyhole of notorious
48 Upper Grosvenor Street .....
Life.... you always get more than you bargain'd for.... take, for example, legendary society beauty -
Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll - who once popped out from her Mayfair townhouse to visit the chiropodist on nearby Bond Street. She was probably expecting an afternoon of soothing massage and some corn treatment but what she actually got was a near fatal fall forty feet down an elevator shaft and a very nasty bang to the head.
After her recovery, the Duchess's friends noted that not only had she lost all sense of taste and smell due to nerve damage but she also had become sexually voracious to the point of nymphomania...... hmmm strange ... Anyway she began to dispense advice such as ... "go to bed - early and often" and indeed she did.... In fact .... Marge went to bed quite so early and quite so often .... that her husband, the Duke, could take no more. He accused her of
cuckolding him with over 88 different lovers including cabinet members, silver-screen stars and even members of the royal family .... Magic! but this was to be the opening gambit in the most sensational, costliest and long running divorce case that Britain had ever seen....
The Duke's evidence included a series of Marge's salacious diaries along with some compromising photographs taken with a Polaroid camera. The most scandalous images showed the Duchess, dressed in her signature three strands of pearls -but nothing else- fellating a naked man in her mirrored gilt and silver art-deco bathroom. Other photographs showed a man masturbating for the camera in the same bathroom. These naughty pictures, only showed the man from the neck down and it led the press, overexcited with the ongoing
Profumo affair, to launch a campaign to identify exactly who was this headless man? There were very strong rumours that it might be the cabinet minister Duncan Sandys (the son-in-law of Winston Churchill) or the famous film star
Douglas Fairbanks Jr...amongst other likely candidates… but the man’s identity was never proven .…
Lord Wheatley, who granted the divorce in a 50,000-word report that took more than three hours to read, pilloried Marge as a high-class harlot. oh dear! Her Ladyship’s reputation, of course, was entirely ruined by the ensuing scandal and indeed she became known as ‘the Dirty Duchess’…. so much for 'Swinging London'! .... After the divorce, she was ostracised by the society that had once flocked to her glittering parties. Marge was also ruined financially. She tried to capitalise on her notoriety by showing groups of rubberneckers around the Mayfair house, but the
Grosvenor estate quickly put a stop to that.
Indeed Marge was forced to sell the house in 1978, moving into an apartment at the Grosvenor House Hotel before ending up in a Pimlico nursing home. There have been books, biographies, articles and a even a full-length opera (
Powder Her Face, by Thomas Adès) devoted to Marge’s times in the Mayfair house but -a true lady to the end- she died in 1993 without ever revealing the identity of that headless man …..
Well the house comes to market following a comprehensive three year refurbishment which has sought to preserve or restore the most beautiful period and art deco features and combine them with the very most 21st Century of creature comforts. The entrance hallways is like a window on to a bygone era of London glamour ….. highly reminiscent of
Claridge’s lobby you can just imagine famous guests such as
Noël Coward,
Cary Grant,
Anthony Eden being ushered through the door by her Ladyship’s excellent butler, Simpson. Apparently he would show them up the beautiful staircase, past portraits by
Panini and
Gainsborough, .... and soon they’d be drinking cocktails in the first floor drawing room with royalty and film stars like
Lauren Bacall,
Deborah Kerr and a young Joan Collins. Indeed this amazin' room was once the very lynchpin of post-war London society and played host to glittering gatherings that attracted the cream of Hollywood idols, society figures and leading politicians…indeed you can still almost hear the clink of champagne glasses and hee-hawing of pardee guests ….
The original ground floor dining room is now a spectacular kitchen diner with a bespoke and handcrafted
La Cornue island complete with that ‘essential’ - a
teppanyaki plate! and a built in Nespresso coffee machine – bet the Duchess would have loved all that …. There’s now a cinema room in the basement that comes with red velvet walls and gold pillars. It seats eight and features an integrated red velvet curtain that’s swings opens to reveal a 108 inch screen with true cinema surround…..Magic! And of course the bathroom….. well the original art deco bath and basin have been refurbished and are now complemented by hand painted tiles and an amazing ‘walk through’ overhead shower ..... Some of the mirror'd walls remain but one particularly nice touch is that with one click of yer
Creston unit and the gilt framed mirror over the fireplace turns into a TV…..now we’re sure the Duchess would have approved…. check it out
here
