The unsellable mansion in London’s oligarch district
Matt Oliver
12 min read
Having once been described as ‘the ultimate lockdown pad’, Heathfield Park remains on the market even as memories of the pandemic begin to fade - Sotheby's
Even the man tasked with selling Heathfield Park admits the mansion is a bit avant garde.
“It’s not everyone’s cup of tea,” says estate agent Trevor Abrahmson.
“You could say it’s sort of like a bright yellow or lime green Lamborghini: For the person looking for something more traditionalist, clearly it is not going to be for them.
“But I think it will appeal to someone who wants something more exciting – not at all vin ordinaire.”
Certainly, nothing about Heathfield Park is ordinary. In fact, pretty much everything about the property is slightly unusual – whether it’s the offbeat architecture, the eye-popping price tag or the mysterious owner.
Designed in the 1990s and completed in the mid-2000s, the four-storey Highgate property boasts a curved facade, glass panels and cream exterior that are reminiscent of MI6’s Vauxhall headquarters or – less charitably – a New Labour-era leisure centre.
The mid-century modern interiors could be classed as “oligarch chic”.
Abrahmson and his colleagues have now been hunting a buyer for the property, which is valued at £32m, for three years.
Yet the house’s failure to sell is not just down to its unique features. It underscores a growing weakness in the top end of the property market, as rock bottom interest rates squeeze borrowing. A smaller field of potential buyers after Ukraine-related sanctions triggered an exodus of wealthy Russian buyers from London is also weighing on activity.
According to research by Knight Frank, sales of properties above $10m (£8.2m) globally in the second quarter of 2023 were 13pc down compared to a year earlier.
Earlier this year, the estate agent said the wobbly market was forcing some wealthy property owners to rent out their London pads temporarily instead of selling them.
Heathfield Park’s travails encapsulate the struggles of the wider market.
Set in two acres of land, the property boasts a 300-foot driveway, sprawling garden, private tennis courts, five en-suite bedrooms, an indoor swimming pool, sauna, gym and four-car garage, as well as a glass lift linking each floor. A separate lodge for housekeeping staff contains a further five bedrooms.
Photos of the white, gold and glass-panelled interiors show lavish decoration and fixtures including a crystal grand piano made by Japanese brand Kawai. (Similar-looking models sell for $212,000, according to the company’s website.)
There are other extravagant flourishes, like a stained-glass window designed to look like a peacock’s tail feathers, a walk-in bath and a fish tank inset into a bookcase. The property’s swimming pool is bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows retract into the floor, opening directly onto the garden.
Meanwhile, the mansion’s top floor study offers panoramic views over Hampstead Heath, which is just a three-minute leisurely stroll down the road.
“The driveway sort of opens up into this oasis,” Abrahmson says. “And upstairs, the study has got the most stunning views of the Heath.
“You have got about two acres – but it makes you feel as though you have 200. You could be in the countryside.”
With top schools nearby too, the house should have a formidable pedigree.
In 2020, 2021 and 2022, it featured on Rightmove’s top 10 “most viewed” properties, described as “supremely extravagant” and “futuristic”.
Yet the sprawling house – which has an interior floor space of 18,000 square feet – has struggled to find a buyer.
One reason the house attracted so much attention on Rightmove was its £40m price tag, making it the most expensive home for sale in London and at one stage the most expensive in Britain.
Abrahmson argues that this eye-watering figure may be why it has struggled to sell, coupled with the relatively small pool of wealthy house hunters who can afford to buy it.
The asking price has since been slashed by £8m. “It is now in a benchmark that more accurately reflects its underlying value,” Abrahmson says.
He adds: “Of course, the owner will consider a sensible figure.”
Then, there are the property’s particular and unique stylings.
“It’s a specially-shaped slipper, for a particular fit,” Abrahmson says.
Once, that slipper was tailored for Aleksander Bronstein, a Russian-born multi-millionaire who made his fortune from metals and mining following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Bronstein was part of a wave of new money oligarchs who poured money into London’s property market in the years after 2000.
Almost nothing has been written in English language media about the publicity-shy magnate, who claims Estonian citizenship and has never held a Russian passport.
An interview published by Forbes Russia in 2018 with Bronstein’s son, Daniel, offers a rare glimpse into his world. It portrays him as a formidable, details-focused man who built a fortune by cultivating the right connections and pulling off a string of well-timed deals.
Aleksander Bronstein was born in 1954 and emigrated with his family to Estonia a year later so that his father, Mikhail, could get a job teaching at Tartu University. They were fleeing the persecution of Jews in St Petersburg at the time.
Mikhail would go on to become a celebrated economist, a deputy in the USSR’s parliament and an advisor to the Estonian embassy in Moscow.
Aleksander studied mathematics at university then worked at Estonia’s ministry of forestry and nature conservation, before moving to Germany and entering business following the Soviet Union’s collapse. He soon moved into the aluminium trade and joined forces with Russian oligarch Mikhail Shlosberg, banker Mikhail Otdelnov and, later, Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch and future close ally of Vladimir Putin.
Bronstein partnered with Putin allies including Viktor Vekselberg (pictured) when he was building his fortune in the Russian aluminium industry - Alexei Druzhinin/POOL SPUTNIK KREMLIN
Doing business in Russia at that time was risky. In 2001, the night before Bronstein and his business associates were set to discuss a merger at their plant in Volkhov, Russia, a car was reportedly blown up outside their building.
By that time, he and his partners were running Raznoimport, a former Soviet state entity responsible for a huge chunk of Russia’s aluminium exports. Bronstein himself ran the company’s Eastern European operations and then its offices in London.
Bronstein’s Sevzapprom group, where many of his aluminium interests were concentrated, was dwarfed by other, larger interests including Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal and Vekselberg and Leonard Blavatnik’s SUAL.
Bronstein eventually sold his interest in Sevzapprom to SUAL and made millions in the process. After the SUAL deal, he retained a chemicals business.
By the 2000s, Bronstein was reportedly worth more than $200m and was regularly seen in the company of Vekselberg and Blavatnik, including at football matches. Yet his fortune, though beyond the wildest dreams of most people, was still comparatively small-fry by the standards of ex-Soviet oligarchs.
The businessman’s main company today is Solway Group, which is based in Switzerland and led by his son.
It runs mining and smelting operations in “countries with difficult economic and political situations,” according to Daniel Bronstein. These include Guatemala, Indonesia, North Macedonia and Ukraine, where the company’s operations have recently been disrupted by Russian attacks on the local power grid. Risk is high, but so are the rewards.
Solway has come under fire from the US Treasury, which branded it an exploitative “Russian enterprise” last November.
Two employees, Dmitry Kudryakov and Iryna Litviniuk, were sanctioned by American officials for allegedly paying bribes to secure mining operations and “support Russian mining interests” in Guatemala. Three companies said to function as Solway subsidiaries were also blacklisted.
Solway insisted it is “not Russian owned, controlled, connected, or influenced”. An American law firm hired by the company to carry out an independent investigation said there was no evidence of any Russian ownership, influence or interest in Solway, its shareholders or executives. It also claimed there was “no relationship” with one of the alleged subsidiaries, Mayaniquel.
Separately, some 23 companies related to Solway were accused by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project of carrying out a string of “suspicious” transactions worth $1.9bn between 2007 and 2015, “without a clear business purpose”. The companies had also transacted with other entities used in Russian tax evasion and money laundering schemes, the OCCRP claimed.
Solway says all its dealings were “strictly in line with applicable national laws and international regulations” and denies being involved in any illicit activity.
In recent years, some of Bronstein’s business contemporaries have seen their fortunes turn. Both Vekselberg and Deripaska were sanctioned by the US in 2018 for “malign activity” on behalf of Russia and have faced further sanctions in other western countries following the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Bronstein and his family are not subject to any sanctions.
Publicity-shy magnate Alexander Bronstein (right) donated funds to open Estonia's first post-WWII synagogue in 2007 - RAIGO PAJULA/AFP via Getty Images
The tycoon, who is said to enjoy skiing on “black” slopes and diving with sharks, has donated some of his wealth to philanthropic causes, for example sponsoring the construction of the first synagogue built in Estonia since the Holocaust, the Beit Bella in Tallinn. He has served as a vice-president of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress.
Around the time he was working at Raznoimport, Bronstein also appears to have decided to buy a home in London – like many of his Russian associates.
Many chose to buy historic piles, such as fertiliser magnate Andrey Guryev who bought Witanhurst in Highgate, the second-largest house in London after Buckingham Palace.
However, Bronstein opted to buy a prime slice of land nearby and build his own abode from scratch.
Bronstein hired Alan Power, an architect introduced to him by a Russian friend, to develop the project. Other sites nearby were being split into smaller plots but the Estonian decided to develop the whole lot himself.
At the time, the site was occupied by a 1920s house that had fallen into disrepair. It would be knocked down to make way for its successor – but beforehand Power took Bronstein to the roof, where almost the only things visible were Hampstead Heath and a church spire.
“It was a quintessentially English landscape view, with minimal intrusion from the city,” Power says. “I told him [Bronstein] that the heart of the new house should be at this level – a private space…. with a sublime view.”
Power, a modernist architect, says the house’s curved facade emerged from a desire to offer wide garden views and to soften the property’s exterior, which would be visible from some parts of the Heath.
Power had no input on the mansion’s interior or landscaping and says that after the concrete structure of the house was finished, he handed over the project to a construction crew brought in from Russia.
Bronstein himself is understood to have taken a particular interest in the swimming pool and its retractable windows.
“The garden landscaping design is too sculpted for my taste,” adds Power. “I would have preferred a more natural landscape, giving a sense of a continuation of the Heath.”
Several aspects of the design were subsequently changed, he believes. For example, patterned stone was used on the building’s front, which he had not planned.
Planning documents suggest Camden council granted permission for the house in 1997. It would take more than a decade to be completed.
It is understood that Bronstein lived in the house after its completion but that it is now mainly used by his wife, who he is separating from.
Bronstein’s one-time rival in the aluminium industry Oleg Deripaska has been sanctioned for his ties to the Kremlin - MAXIM SHEMETOV
Neighbours still have little idea of who owns Heathfield Park. A few, when asked, suggest “someone Russian, or Ukrainian” might live there but say they know nothing else.
“I’ve never seen anyone coming or going except gardeners and security cars,” says one woman on her morning jog. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever actually lived there.
“The gardens look amazing though. You can see them down the driveway when the lovely wooden gates open.”
Another woman who grew up in the area and still lives nearby says she can remember the house being built.
“It was a construction site for ages – we used to play in it when I was a little girl,” she recalls.
Many of the properties nearby – some on private streets, bookended by guard-manned checkpoints – are themselves surrounded by high walls and large gates, with a bevy of Land Rovers and Teslas parked outside.
At most of these properties, a buzz of the doorbell camera or intercom goes unanswered.
Asked about Heathfield Park, one man doing work on a neighbouring house simply says: “It looks a bit out of place, doesn’t it? I’m a bit more traditional myself.”
Bronstein put the house on the market in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was gripping the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this led to the mansion being described as the “ultimate lockdown pad” by some newspapers.
It also appeared in an episode of Channel 4 television show Britain’s Most Expensive Houses, which showed estate agents brainstorming how to sell it and gawking at the luxurious interiors.
“Who wouldn’t like to come home, relax, get your kit off and go for a swim in the biggest pool I’ve ever seen in my life for a single residence?” one breathlessly tells interviewers.
Another, walking around one of the rooms simply says: “Words fail me.”
Bronstein is not mentioned in most of the coverage. Abrahmson, the latest person hired to find a buyer, is equally tongue-tied when asked about the details of his mysterious client.
For now, Heathfield Park remains a curiosity – perched on one of the most expensive slices of real estate in Britain. It encapsulates the story of how London’s luxury property market is shifting, with much of the oligarch money that helped to define the market over the last two decades has now disappeared in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Today, the leafy suburb’s N6 postcode is associated with celebrities including Harry Styles, Kate Moss and Jamie Oliver who call it home.
Whoever does one day become their neighbour at Heathfield Park will almost certainly be anything but ordinary – just like the house itself.
