The moneyed and the Caribbean island of Mustique have been synonymous since British landowner and socialite Colin Tennant’s first sorties there in the early 1960s. It was nonetheless startling when Malcolm Healey, a British billionaire who built his fortune in kitchens, put his Mustique holiday home on the market for $200mn three years ago. The Terraces is a 13-bedroom complex comprising a main house, annexe, guest cottages and buildings for staff, with around 38,000 square feet of living space, the largest home on the island. It sits on 17 hilltop acres and includes three pools plus its own chapel. The asking price is almost four times more than the previous record set by a $52mn sale in 2005. Roger Pritchard, managing director of the Mustique Company, the island’s management company, describes it as “the trophy house”.
Pritchard says there are around 100 homes on Mustique, the best of which typically sell in the $30mn range; the four other properties on the market right now are priced between $12mn and $45mn. Healey “put his on the market for that [much] in case Jeff Bezos walked through the door. It created one helluva buzz,” Pritchard notes. There have been some 10 viewings from qualified buyers but no sale.
Two hundred million dollars is the new listing benchmark in today’s super-prime market — super-super prime, you could call it. Thirteen properties, including four in Monaco and three in London, have sold for that amount or more since 2011, according to Knight Frank. But how much is mere showboating listing — and how much higher can prices for single private properties actually be pushed?