British music legend Jimmy Page, founder of the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin. (Photo by Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance via Getty Images)Getty
There are rock stars, and there are pop stars. Jimmy Page is a rock star. Robbie Williams, formerly of the Mancusian boy band Take That, is a rather glitzier, sequin-jacket-wearing, much less meaningful pop star. But his (low) rank on the cool-ness meter doesn’t mean that Mr. Williams doesn’t also make money by the long ton. The two Londoners, Page and Williams, are also, improbably, close neighbors in London’s mansion-strewn Holland Park neighborhood of Kensington and Chelsea. In fact, their mansions are next door to one another. And therein lies the rub.
To his credit, Page got there first, buying the iconic Tower House at 29 Melbury Road, a beautiful Grade 1 listed Victorian brick mansion by William Burges, an intellectual architect-luminary of the day who was friends with Oscar Wilde and William Whistler. Burges built Tower House as his home from 1875-81, done in the French Gothic style, from brick, with stone trim. It’s a fanciful old place, generous and warm, and had after Burges’ death a list of well-known owners, including, latterly, the actor Richard Harris, from whom Jimmy Page bought it.
The trend in London townhouses and mansions with what the owners believe to be insufficient room is to expand radically downward, into what’s being derogatorily called a ‘mega-basement.’ The mega-basement trend is based on the desire for capacious home gyms, tricked-out screening rooms, parking garages, and swimming pools, in other words, spa and other luxe-life fixtures for which no normal house, not even a pop-star mansion in Holland Park, would necessarily have room. And the mega-basement trend is also a direct result of the landmark status of many of central London’s structures and much of its ground, very much including Kensington and Chelsea — you can’t just plop in an above-ground swimming pool and spa in that borough, or in many others. The planning boards would laugh you out the door.
Thus, a glorious multi-million-dollar mega-basement with all the trimmings, including the pool and the gym that extended well out from under the footprint of their own mansion, was what Robbie Williams and his wife proposed to put in next to Jimmy Page’s fabulously bespoke 19th-century gem of Tower House. The difficulty with the proposal was, and is, since construction has not begun, that the Williams’ mega-basement is so deep and so big that the vibrations from the earth moving and subsequent concrete trucks run the risk of undermining the landmark Tower House foundations, as well as possibly wreaking havoc with its 130 year-old stained glass and other irreplaceable fittings. Whoops. How mega is too mega? In Kensington, home to actual royalty as well as rock royalty, moving mega-amounts of cash is no problem. Basements of the size and order of Robbie Williams’ proposed Carlsbad Cavern may be just a bit too mega.
Suffice it to say that the legal dispute between the two men, with very nearly unlimited means on both sides, has been five long years in coming to judgement, but when it did two weeks ago, the disposition of the case had a striking, delightfully Solomon-like effect. The judge gave the pop-star Williams full permission to have his swimming pool and dream gym dug out, as if the house were going to mime a spa hotel in Marbella. But! Built into that long-sought freedom was the amazing condition that the Williams’ legendary neighbor, Page, had to be given real-time, complete electronic monitoring of the vibrations throughout the entire construction process, and furthermore, that machine-powered digging or excavation work was forbidden. In short, the Williams mega-basement will have to be dug by hand.
Throughout the proceedings, Jimmy Page stuck to his guns that the debate was strictly about the preservation of the extraordinary, and extraordinarily delicate, architectural value of his landmark house. The judge has sided with that thesis. The fact is that — although mega-basements are the rage and every man with deep-enough pockets seems to want one — nobody much likes what they bring, namely, all this, the planning commission headaches, legal wrangles, and neighbors up in arms.
The London pundits have been estimating that the shovel-work will now cost Williams a cool extra $1.5-million. No hard estimates yet on how many cubic yards of good, solid Holland Park dirt and rock will have to be removed by hand and bucket, but it’s safe to say that it will be a long dig, something like an archeological dig, but for a pop star’s weight room. The hole has to be bigger than the rooms planned to fit within it, because it has to incorporate the shell structure, the foundations, and the utilities. The Williams family construction masters will do well to recall the efficiency of the 19th-century bucket brigade. Perhaps hiring fifty or sixty fit, non-claustrophobic spelunkers and former coal miners to snake their way down to the rockface every day could actually approximate the speed of a couple of zippy diesel-powered excavators, John-Henry style.
And, there’s this sad fact about a tricked-out mega-basement: after you dig out a capacious twenty-five-to-thirty-foot hole embracing some few thousand square feet in living area, including a tunnel from the house, you’re still just at floor level. Below that, Mr. Williams’ new bucket brigade will look forward to being tasked with digging out the hole for his pool.