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Fleetwood Mac Star Christine McVie’s London Penthouse Hits the Market
The Belgravia duplex owned by the rock legend has a price tag of £6.9 million. Christine owned the top 2 floors and the roof top terrance
In 2014, Christine McVie, best known as the keyboardist for Fleetwood Mac, rejoined the band for its reunion world tour. At the time, McVie—who wrote some of the band’s biggest hits, including Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun—owned a 19-acre Tudor property in the Kent countryside, according to her former manager Martin Wyatt, who’s now the executor of her estate.
“When she first moved back to England from LA, she was desperate to be in the country. She clearly wanted the Hunter Boots and Barbour coats and Range Rover—the classic English country life situation,” says Wyatt of his close friend, who died in 2022. But McVie eventually missed the buzz of the big city, and going back on tour made her want to have a home base in the capital again, he says.
“She was desperately keen to get a place in London and briefed me to start looking for permanent homes for her,” Wyatt says in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Pursuits. McVie, he says, wanted to be in the middle of everything. “She liked Belgravia, because she could walk to Harvey Nicholas and Harrods around the corner, and that’s what she used to always do when she came up to London,” he recalls.
Wyatt came across a penthouse duplex on tony Eaton place in a classic Regency-era Belgravia building, just a 10-minute walk from those famous department stories. He and McVie liked that it was a corner apartment with an abundance of windows. “The roof terrace was a real selling feature, because she loved the garden that she had at the other house,” Wyatt says. “She had over-planted, to be honest with you. There were plants everywhere!”
McVie purchased the home in 2015 and lived there until her death seven years later at age 79.
Now, McVie’s Belgravia flat has hit the market for £6.95 million ($8.8 million) with Beauchamp Estates. For that, a buyer gets McVie’s 2,552-square-foot penthouse with three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms and a roof terrace in a building with a doorman. The apartment’s entry level is accessible via an elevator. The home also has air conditioning, a rarity in London’s historic housing market.
The first floor of the apartment features a reception room, kitchen, dining room and study. There are light-colored oak parquet floors throughout, installed at McVie’s request. She also did work on the kitchen, adding an oak worktop, warm yellow ceramic wall tiles and a breakfast bar.
McVie hosted family Christmases in the dining room a few times, Wyatt recalls. “She did like to sort of twinkle around at Christmas time and play a few old carols and things like that on the piano. But it was difficult sometimes—when we tried to encourage her to play piano, she’d go, ‘No, that’s my day job. That’s what I do all the time.’”
Christine's kitchen as she decorated it
The duplex’s upper floor is home to the primary bedroom, which has a dedicated vanity and dressing area and en-suite bathroom with a large soaking tub and shower. There are two additional bedrooms and bathrooms on this level. The roof terrace that sold McVie on the house is just above that.
“She did like the sun, so she enjoyed being able to get up there, but it was generally only her up on the roof most of the time. It wasn’t like she was entertaining up there, although there was enough space,” he says, adding that she wasn’t a “party girl” during her time in Belgravia. (She was in her 70s for the years she lived in the apartment.)
Wyatt thinks McVie’s penthouse will likely suit another well-known person due to the general glamour and exclusivity of the area. “There’s apparently quite a few famous people who live around the corner to us, but I’ve never bumped into them,” he says.
Though she was a member of one of her era’s most famous and successful rock bands, McVie herself managed to keep a fairly low profile. “Stevie was always the one who got spotted out of the band, of course, and Mick because he’s so tall and outrageous,” Wyatt says of his McVie’s bandmates Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood, “but Christine and John [McVie, Christine’s ex-husband and a founding member of Fleetwood Mac] could slide in anywhere. People wouldn’t even know they were at the next table at a restaurant,” Wyatt says.
“She really enjoyed the quiet of being in Belgravia,” he says. “She was happy there.”
Source: Bloomberg
