Tucked into four private acres on the Inner Circle of Regent’s Park, a Georgian villa known as The Holme has just changed hands for around £190 million — one of the largest residential property transactions in British history. The sale caps a turbulent few years for a house that has passed from Saudi royal ownership, into receivership, through an anonymous flip, and now to one of Dubai’s most talked-about young developers, all in under a decade.
A 200-Year-Old Villa
The Holme was designed by the architect Decimus Burton as a home for his own family and built in 1818 by the construction firm of his father, James Burton, who ended up living there himself. It was the second villa built in Regent’s Park and the first constructed by the Burton family. Architectural admirers have not been shy about their praise: the scholar Guy Williams called it “one of the most desirable private homes in London,” while the critic Ian Nairn went further, writing that if you wanted a single-view definition of Western civilization, The Holme was it.
The house itself is a study in Regency grandeur: two storeys above ground plus basement offices, entered beneath an Ionic-style portico and pediment, with a bow or rotunda decorated by four columns, topped by an attic and a cupola. Renovations added wings in 1911, designed by Bertie Crewe, and replaced a dome with a balustrade in 1935. Today the estate spans roughly 29,000 square feet of interior space, reportedly decorated in places with gold leaf, and includes around 40 bedrooms, a tennis court, and a swimming pool.
Ownership of the land has always been separate from ownership of the house. Prior to 1984 The Holme belonged to the Crown Estate, and the freehold of the land remains with the Crown to this day — meaning whoever owns the house holds it on a long lease rather than owning the ground beneath it outright.
From Saudi Royalty to Receivership
The Holme’s modern ownership saga began in 1991, when it was bought for £34 million by the children of the former Saudi defence minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud, holding the property through the Guernsey-registered company Quendon Ltd.
Things unraveled dramatically from there. The property was reportedly seized by creditors after a default on a loan taken out for a private jet — the jet had been leased by Yuntian 10 Leasing Company, an Irish subsidiary of China Minsheng Bank, through a corporation registered in Bermuda — and it was alleged that the property had been used to manage loan arrears while concealing the identity of its ultimate beneficial owner. Multiple reports place the loan secured against the house at around £150 million, a figure worth flagging since it is sometimes rounded up in circulation.
By March 2023, the mansion was listed for sale at a reported £250 million, which would have made it the most expensive private residence ever sold in the UK. It didn’t fetch that price. Instead, in December 2024, it sold for £139 million, offloaded by Abdullah bin Khalid Al Saud — Saudi Arabia’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna and its ambassador to Austria — to a UK subsidiary of Zedra, a Luxembourg-based corporate services firm that manages investments for wealthy clients, in a deal brokered by Knight Frank.
A Silent Owner, and a Quick Flip
It’s worth being precise about what happened next, because the 2024 sale is often mistaken for the end of the story. Zedra was acting as a corporate vehicle on behalf of an undisclosed client, not as the end buyer in its own right. At the time, reports suggested the ultimate owner was a US-based, tech-connected billionaire — later reporting from The National described the buyer as a “US-Chinese billionaire” seeking privacy and security, who reportedly considered using the property as combined offices and housing before changing course.
That owner held the property for barely 18 months. In June 2026, The Holme went back on the market, off-market in the literal sense — never publicly listed — and sold again for a price reported at either £190 million (per the Financial Times and outlets following its reporting) or £195 million (per The National and several other outlets), netting the outgoing owner a profit in the region of £50–56 million. So while the original article’s framing was not technically inaccurate, it under-explained a key detail: the 2026 seller was this anonymous 2024 buyer, not Zedra or the Saudi family directly.
The 2026 Sale: Enter the Sajwanis
The buyer was soon identified: Abbas Sajwani, an Emirati real estate developer and son of Hussain Sajwani, owner of DAMAC Properties. Abbas is reportedly acquiring the estate on behalf of his family, in a deal that would rank among the highest-value residential property transactions ever completed in the UK capital, according to the Financial Times, which first broke the story. The price was brokered through UK Sotheby’s International Realty and completed off-market.
At just 26 years old, Abbas Sajwani has become a prominent figure in Dubai’s luxury property scene as founder and CEO of AHS Properties, an ultra-luxury developer that has expanded rapidly since he launched it in 2021 with a handful of renovated villas in Palm Jumeirah and Emirates Hills. His own company’s biography describes him as “the youngest billionaire in global real estate,” having built a multibillion-dollar development company in under five years. The Holme purchase came in the same busy stretch as another major deal: earlier the same month, AHS Properties announced the acquisition of Dubai’s five-star Shangri-La Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road for roughly $300 million (about AED 1.1 billion).
His broader portfolio includes One Crescent, an ultra-luxury development on Palm Jumeirah that launched in 2023 and reportedly sold out within a week — though its value is inconsistently reported across sources, cited variously as around £190 million and as a $250 million development on Sajwani’s own company materials, a discrepancy that likely reflects currency confusion (GBP vs. USD) rather than two different figures. His portfolio also includes AHS Tower, a long-vacant 69-storey building on Sheikh Zayed Road — nicknamed “Big Ben” locally for its clock-face design — which AHS acquired from the Commercial Bank of Dubai and is redeveloping into a luxury commercial office tower.
The family name will be familiar to anyone who follows US political business ties. Hussain Sajwani — one of the Middle East’s best-known property developers and chairman of DAMAC Properties — has a long-standing relationship with President Donald Trump, dating to 2011, when DAMAC and the Trump Organization partnered to develop a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai. That connection has earned Hussain the nickname “the Donald of Dubai” in parts of the British press. Beyond real estate, Hussain Sajwani has also invested in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI, and Forbes estimates his personal fortune has risen sharply over the past two years to around $15.3 billion.
Where It Ranks
Even at £190 million, The Holme doesn’t top the UK charts. The current record for the most expensive home ever sold in Britain belongs to Providence House in Chelsea — the Grade II-listed mansion owned by property developer and Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy, sold in April 2026 to hedge fund manager Suneil Setiya for a price reported at between roughly £265 million and £275 million, setting a new benchmark for London residential sales altogether.
Before that, the record belonged to 2-8a Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge — a converted seven-storey, roughly 62,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Hyde Park, sold by the estate of the late Saudi crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz to Hong Kong-listed developer Cheung Chung-kiu for around £205 million in January 2020, though the Financial Times later reported the true buyer behind that purchase was actually Evergrande founder Hui Ka-yan.
Still, £190 million puts The Holme comfortably among the small handful of London homes that have ever changed hands for nine figures, alongside properties like Aberconway House in Mayfair, sold to Serum Institute of India CEO Adar Poonawalla for £138 million in a deal reported in December 2023 — a little over two years before The Holme’s most recent sale, rather than the flat “two years” sometimes cited.
A House Only a Few Can Keep
Owning a property like The Holme comes with a maintenance bill to match its price tag. The estate reportedly requires a full-time staff of around 20 people to keep it running — a reminder that in London’s ultra-prime market, the purchase price is often just the beginning of the real cost of trophy ownership.
Two centuries after Decimus Burton built it as a family home, The Holme remains what it has arguably always been: one of the very few private houses in central London grand enough to be compared, only half-jokingly, to a head of state’s residence — and rare enough that its ownership keeps changing hands among a shortlist of the world’s wealthiest families.
