Inside Tamara Towers: Ecclestone girl's jaw-dropping £18million home refurb - with motorised shoe racks, bowling alley, nightclub and her doggy spa
By Lara Gould
Last updated at 10:50 AM on 20th November 2011
Extravagant makeover: Only the best will do for Miss Ecclestone
When Formula 1 billionaire Bernie Ecclestone bought his daughter Tamara a £45 million house, the renovation was never going to be low-key.
Now plans for the 27-year-old’s new home reveal how she is spending £18 million transforming the mansion into an opulent 55-room pleasure palace.
By the time work is completed next autumn, almost every inch of the property will be dedicated to indulgence, with Miss Ecclestone having her own underground nightclub, bowling alley, fully
operational beauty salon and even a dog spa.
Other touches include a vast dressing room to store the heiress’s equally vast wardrobe and £500,000 handbag collection, and a vehicle lift for her supercars, so she needn’t do anything as demeaning as stepping into a garage.
Miss Ecclestone has already revealed plans for a £1 million crystal bathtub, imported from South America, but proposals for the six-storey property submitted to Kensington and Chelsea council show that is merely the tip of the iceberg.
No expense is being spared on the overhaul. The project manager has been given no fixed budget for the works – just whatever it takes to create what the model describes as ‘a fairytale dream of everything I’d want in a home’ for herself, her stockbroker boyfriend Omar Khyami, 37, and their five dogs Alvin, Puggle Socky, Buster, Hob Nob and Duke.
A team of 80 construction workers, led by site manager Gavin Brodin, began working on the double-fronted, listed property in one of London’s most exclusive streets in the summer and have already excavated underneath the 55,000 sq ft house to create two further floors.
The sub-basement, carved almost 40 feet beneath the back garden, will house a private swimming pool complex, including a sauna, massage room and pool with integrated Jacuzzi.
The focus of the pool area will be a ten-foot-wide cascading water feature along one wall of the 16ft high sub-basement.
The area will be lit by lanterns with real flames and Miss Ecclestone and Mr Khyami will be able to relax on either a full-size double bed suspended over the water or in one of two ‘submerged seats’ built into the wall of the pool.
Treatment rooms designated purely for massage, changing rooms with lockers and a tiled sauna, will run the length of the pool, while the far end of the room opens out on to a fully stocked glass-topped bar.
But it’s upstairs that the house’s incredible renovations come into their own. A staircase at the back of the pool leads up to the base- ment and an underground night-club area dedicated to entertaining and relaxation.
The L-shaped club has its own bar with wine and beer fridges and tiled wine storeroom. There are bar stools, armchairs and seating built into a wall alcove.
The club, which also has turntables for a DJ to use, leads on to a billiards room with cue store, and ladies and gentleman’s washrooms complete with a 7ft aquarium.
Grand designs: Miss Ecclestone is spending £18million improving her £45m home, pictured above
Double doors at the other end of the bar lead to a hallway with a magnificent barrel vault ceiling contributing to what Miss Ecclestone predicts will be ‘the best house in London’ when it is completed.
A side door from the hallway opens into a large gymnasium kitted out with the latest equipment worth more than £20,000. The centrepiece is a state-of-the-art Ciclotte exercise bike mounted in front of a TV screen.
The distinctive stationary bike, costing £6,800, was created by Italian Luca Schieppati and is considered a design classic.
It is matched by a £7,400 Kinesis Personal Vision, a wall-mounted piece of equipment for resistance training which costs £800 just to install, and a £4,995 PowerPlate machine – a vibrating platform which has become a must-have for celebrities including Madonna and Kylie Minogue.
The basement will also feature a full-size, single-lane bowling alley which will stock its own bowling shoes and for which Miss Ecclestone has commissioned custom-made bowling balls. In her Channel
Five reality show last week, Miss Ecclestone was seen asking if the balls could be covered in crystals to which she was told: ‘They can be covered in whatever you want.’
Next door is a media room fitted with a C-shaped sofa for watching films shown on a movie screen from an adjacent projection room.
All taped up: Tamara Ecclestone is filmed on a staircase amid the building work on her home for the Channel 5 show
It leads on to a games room with poker table and a dog spa for Miss Ecclestone’s five pets. Until now Miss Ecclestone has treated her dogs – which she calls her ‘babies’ – to weekly grooming sessions at Harrods, where they are given facials and get their claws painted.
But the dogs will now have the run of their own private spa, complete with a dog bath and a grooming area with bone-shaped inlays. After being washed, the dogs will be led up a made-to-measure mini-ladder to stand underneath specially-designed hairdryers and have their coats set.
According to project manager Mr Brodin, the room will also include ‘a little wardrobe for all their little clothes, leashes and collars and the option for a running machine.
This area is for all their spa treatments and you can get a masseur in here too.’
On the ground floor, an imposing entrance hall leads on to an enormous reception room, running the length of the building and containing three separate seating areas set around a grand open fireplace.
As well as a formal dining room at the back of the house, there’s a breakfast room that can seat eight, as well as a dining table in the main kitchen, which leads on to a butler’s pantry. In the black marble kitchen, Miss Ecclestone, or her staff, will be able to cook on a top-of-the-range Viking professional cooker, costing about £8,900.
Pampered pooches: The pet dogs wrapped in blankets above, will have their own spa
Rub-a-dub: A new bathtub will cost £1million alone
Off-street parking for the couple’s fleet of luxury cars, which includes a £370,000 Ferrari 599 GTO delivered in August, is provided outside. Laser-controlled automatic gates will open as Miss Ecclestone arrives home, and she will be able to drive straight on to the car lift which will take her to the underground parking, from where she will be able to enter the house. Such car lifts typically cost at least £50,000.
Daddy's girl: Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone
But it’s on the first floor where perhaps the greatest expense will be incurred. The floor is dedicated entirely to Miss Ecclestone and Mr Khyami’s personal living quarters with a huge master bedroom with a customised bed at its heart. Sliding doors lead off to a master lounge for the couple to watch television or have a drink from a custom-built bar.
Next door is ‘his’ dressing room, which features four mirrored wardrobes along one wall, leather-lined storage cupboards and a central ‘island’ with hampers for underwear and two further cupboards for
Mr Khyami’s shoes. Plans show there is even a section dedicated to his belts. Should it all become too much, a deep leather sofa facing a flat-screen TV has also been included.
The dressing room leads on to Mr Kyhami’s personal bathroom complete with steam shower.
But Miss Ecclestone’s dressing room and private bathroom, spread over an entire wing at the back of the first floor, are even more ostentatious. The centrepiece will be the £1 million stone bathtub, carved out of white crystal. The bath, which will require reinforced floors to support its two-ton weight, will be illuminated from underneath and semi-transparent.
The other half of the wing will be dedicated to the model’s exhaustive designer wardrobe. Miss Ecclestone, who once said that she had ‘lost count’ of the number of £5,000 Hermes Birkin handbags she owned, will have her clothes stored in six rows of wardrobe racks, dedicated to either ‘eveningwear’, ‘casual/gym wear’ or ‘everyday’.
A floor plan showing her extensive wardrobe space
Lingerie will be kept in a cabinet with silk-lined drawers, while shoes and handbags will be stowed away on ‘conveyer racks’ allowing Miss Ecclestone to summon the perfect accessory from her collection, which, at the last count, included £700,000 worth of shoes.
Other designer accessories will be showcased inside glass counters with drawers lined in exquisite leather from French couture designer Hermes.
The dressing room, which the heiress has already boasted will have ‘mirrors everywhere so I can see how fat my bum looks before I go out’ – includes a ‘three-way’ mirror, with a trio of panels ensuring she gets the all-round picture.
But if that’s not enough, the dressing room will also include a ‘vanity TV and camera’ behind another mirror. Using this, she can film her outfit, then transform the mirror to a screen on which to examine it from every angle before leaving the house.
Another corner of the room has been set aside for a ‘leather pin-up wall with Polaroids’ – presumably of the heiress – and with her ‘T.E. logo’ stitched into it.
The first floor will also become the home of the heiress’s impressive art collection, which includes works by Tracey Emin, and her study.
The second floor is where guests will stay – with two large suites (one including side-by-side ‘his and hers’ showers) and two children’s bedrooms, despite Miss Ecclestone and her boyfriend of just over two years having no children of their own.
High-heeled: The improvements will include motorised rotating show racks
There’s also a library and a fully functioning beauty salon with a pedicure area, two nail stations and a sunbed.
Staff employed to run the household will be offered live-in accommodation on the third floor, which includes a driver’s bedroom, two further staff bedrooms, two bathrooms and a shared lounge and kitchen, and the laundry for the entire house.
The proposals, drawn up by London-based architects Brooks/Murray, have already been granted planning permission and work is well under way – although a new application amending some technical details is currently being considered by Kensington and Chelsea Council.
Miss Ecclestone will be keen to ensure nothing gets in the way of her home becoming the height of luxury – especially as her 22-year-old sister Petra, with whom she has a ‘healthy rivalry’, is currently renovating her £91 million mansion in Los Angeles.
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