The distinctive blue front door became a tourist attraction following the release of the film. Photo / Getty Images
The distinctive blue front door became a tourist attraction following the release of the film. Photo / Getty Images
The home of Hugh Grant’s character in the film Notting Hill has gone on sale for £7.5m ($17.8m).
The three-bedroom property was depicted as the house owned by hapless bookseller William Thacker in the 1999 romantic comedy, which also starred Julia Roberts and Hugh Bonneville. It was owned by RichardCurtis, the film’s screenwriter, at the time.
The property on Westbourne Park Rd, which is listed by Sotheby’s International Realty, has an open-plan kitchen, two bathrooms, a roof terrace and courtyard spanning more than 2700 sq ft.
The estate agency said the Notting Hill property was “originally conceived as an artist’s studio”, with vaulted ceilings, skylights, exposed roof trusses and a first-floor gallery running around its perimeter.
Sotheby’s added that the property had a “discreet entrance” added after its distinctive front entrance became a tourist attraction following the release of the film in the late 90s.
The original 19th-century blue door featured in the movie was auctioned for charity at Christie’s, with its replacement painted the same colour.
In the film, Thacker, who runs a failing travel bookshop, says he bought the property in southwest London with his wife, before she left him “for a man who looked like Harrison Ford”. To help pay off the mortgage, he has taken in a lodger, Spike, played by Welsh actor Rhys Ifans.
Hugh Grant runs a failing travel bookshop in the film. Photo / IMDb
However, there is little chance that someone in Thacker’s position could realistically afford to live in Notting Hill today, London buying agent Henry Pryor said.
He said: “These films captured the times when young people were young, naive, in love and invariably living in homes that their characters couldn’t afford today.
“Their jobs wouldn’t support a mortgage for the properties, and the deposits would have to come from the Bank of Mum & Dad.”
The average price of a property in Kensington and Chelsea has risen from around £300,000 ($715,000) in 1999 to £1.2m ($2.8m) today, according to Land Registry figures.
Curtis has previously faced derision from viewers for the contrast between the modest jobs of his characters and their spacious homes in prime London locations.
In the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary, Renée Zellweger’s character lives alone in a large flat in the heart of Borough Market despite working as a junior publishing assistant. Flats in the area typically sell for around £710,000 ($1.6m).
Pryor added that, like many of the other locations in a Curtis film, “the value of the properties has almost out-grossed the movies they starred in”.
He added: “Any one of the Four Wedding venues or the Wandsworth terrace house in Love Actually, the Cornish retreat in About Time, to name just three, have all done as well as the audiences of the time.”
Josh Ratcliffe, at Sotheby’s, said Notting Hill had “changed enormously since the film was shot”.
“It’s also a long way from what Hugh Grant’s character could afford today,” he said, adding that it was “one of the few places in London that people from all over the world feel a personal connection to”.
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