They call this the most secret house in London for a reason. The house has a complicated history of ownership, with suspicions that it belonged to Russia’s richest woman, Yelena Baturina, the former mayor of Moscow. She denied it — and in 2011, sued the Sunday Times for saying she lived there.
Here’s how The New Yorker described the home in 2015, when it was under construction and had changed hands to a new unknown owner:
“Guards protect the property, and cameras monitor the grounds. A woman who knows the owners advised me to ‘choose another story.’ Stephen Lindsay, one of the real-estate agents who sold the house, spoke to me only after I agreed to leave my phone and bag in another room. He then put the family’s lawyer on speakerphone and announced that he would take the secret of Witanhurst’s ownership ‘to the grave.'”
With more digging, the article’s author, Ed Caesar, revealed the owner to be Audrey Guryev, a Russian billionaire.
