By
Alison Boshoff
Last updated at 12:05 AM on 18th June 2011
Petra Ecclestone collects £10,000 Hermes Birkin bags. She has never held down paid employment
She is so slight and quiet that were it not for her perfectly blow-dried hair, Smartie-sized diamond earrings and gold Rolex watch, you might think Petra Ecclestone was just another well-heeled London girl.
That would be quite a mistake, for this 22-year-old, who has never held down paid employment, is in the process of buying the kind of second home which would make a plutocrat green with envy.
Her first property, a magnificent Grade II listed house in Chelsea, cost £56 million and is still being renovated. Her new house in Los Angeles — The Manor in the Holmby Hills, which once belonged to TV producer Aaron Spelling — is the most expensive in America, and will set her back a further £91 million.
Petra’s spokesman, Eliot Sandford, tells me: ‘The deal is not yet finalised so I can’t confirm it, but it is being negotiated now.’
Actually, she isn’t even planning to live in this gigantic pile full-time because she doesn’t want to relocate to America. It’s too far from her comfort zone of London nightclubs Tramp and Annabels and her dear friends, such as Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
So the house in Los Angeles seems likely to be magnificently empty for much of the time.
‘It’s going to be a partial relocation,’ says Sandford. As a statement of wealth, that euphemism takes some beating.
But then Petra Ecclestone — who collects £10,000 Hermes Birkin bags, Damien Hirst artwork and has five miniature dogs — is quite a spending phenomenon.
The youngest daughter of Formula One tycoon Bernie is a beneficiary of a family trust, believed to be held in Switzerland and worth around £2.4 billion, and what can be gleaned is that Petra is showing every inclination to spend it.
Certainly her property buying makes other ‘It girls’ like Paris Hilton (who has a £50 million fortune) look as if they are scraping by on the minimum wage.
Although very close to her father, to whom she speaks every day, she is his polar opposite.
Petra’s new house in Los Angeles is the most expensive in America, and will set her back a further £91million
He is, at 80, a workaholic who has amassed a huge fortune but has no time for any ostentation. He and his wife Slavica (until they divorced after 24 years together) didn’t have a housekeeper or a nanny. Bernie’s favourite food remains egg on toast with brown sauce.
Petra, though, is cut from rarer cloth. She counts shopping for vintage Alaia designs as bargain-hunting, and describes the large £80,000 diamond earrings given to her by fiancé James Stunt as ‘cute’.
She has been dating Stunt, once involved in running a betting firm, for four years and they are due to marry in August.
The nuptials are being organised by Peregrine Armstrong-Jones, the society smoothie who oversaw the wedding of footballer David Beckham and is in charge of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall’s wedding.
Understated, it certainly won’t be.
At their recent engagement party in Battersea, pop singer Rihanna was paid £250,000 to perform — her fee presumably covered by the trust.
Bernie, it is said, worried about how Petra, and her older sister Tamara, will handle such wealth.
‘The trouble is that they have nothing to do with their lives, no jobs and no ambitions,’ says a friend of Bernie’s.
‘At least this LA house will give Petra something to do. The trust is paying for it. In fact, the payment is coming in cash — paid from the interest on the interest!’
Although very close to her father, to whom she speaks every day, Petra is his polar opposite
The property is sheer vulgar excess and was built to the specifications of Aaron Spelling’s wife, Candy. Legend has it that she showed the architect a postcard of Buckingham Palace and said: ‘Build me this.’
But the house is a mish-mash of styles, also taking inspiration from the sweeping staircase in Gone With The Wind. There is parking for 100 cars, countless bedrooms, bathrooms and a bowling alley. Candy Spelling had one room set aside just for wrapping presents. There was also a bomb-proof anti-terror room. And a whole floor for wardrobes.
Petra, rather famously, has many clothes, too. An interviewer who was invited to her home marvelled at her colossal wardrobe room, only to be told breezily that these were just her casual clothes and that she kept her evening wear in the next room.
Whether she has any interest in earning money remains to be seen. I’m told that in the next month or so she is planning to launch a range of designer handbags titled Stark.
Let’s hope it is more of a success than her menswear range, Form, which went bust after only 14 months, despite considerable financial assistance from her doting father.
Cynics say she started the project with great enthusiasm, but soon grew tired of the grind of having to oversee the range and sell it into top-end department stores. Despite Bernie’s talk about his children being ‘level-headed’, this should really come as no surprise because Petra has been formidably spoiled.
Petra is due to marry James Stunt in August. They have been together for four years
For her 12th birthday, Bernie hired the boyband Damage to play, as she was a fan, and also paid several of the EastEnders cast to attend. It cost him £300,000. Petra ‘came out’ at the Crillon Ball in Paris and was given a £6,000 watch for her 16th birthday.
She was expensively educated at London’s Francis Holland girls’ school and then went to a crammer for A-levels. She won a place at London art school Central St Martins, but never took it up.
Instead, there has been a countless round of parties, and a spot of modelling and charity work instead. She is an ambassador for the Meningitis Trust, and is keen to raise awareness about the disease, which she contracted when she was 14.
Always very thin, she once wanted to be a model. One schoolfriend says their contemporaries used to joke that Petra’s handbags weighed more than she did.
The Ecclestones’ divorce, of course, was devastating for the girls, though their parents seemed the oddest of couples: Bernie tiny, stubborn and undemonstrative, Slavica a foot taller and brimming with jealousy and anger. The joke always told was that they were the same height — when Bernie was standing on his wallet.
According to a biography about Bernie Ecclestone by investigative author Tom Bower, the motor racing tycoon was happily settled with his Singaporean girlfriend Tuana when his mistress, Croatian model Slavica, became pregnant with his baby.
In the book entitled No Angel, Bower contends that Slavica told him that he had to set up home with her, or face never seeing the unborn child again. When Tamara was born in Milan in 1984, he regretfully broke up with Tuana and formed a family unit with Slavica.
He told an interviewer: ‘She shouts a lot and sometimes she throws plates. I go and hide in the next room because she seems to love terrifying me.’
Slavica eventually got fed up with his workaholic nature and urged him to give up running Formula One. Bernie, the son of a trawlerman, never took her threats seriously and was astonished when she finally left him.
At first, the two girls dreamed that their parents might be reconciled, but Bernie found a new Brazilian girlfriend, less than half his age, which they found upsetting.
In an interview with Weekend magazine earlier this year, Tamara said: ‘Just because you have money, it doesn’t mean you don’t go through the emotions everyone else does.
‘We used to have such homely Christmases in our house in Switzerland.
‘My mum cooked; my dad decorated the tree. It’s very sad for me to think there won’t be any more. Money doesn’t stop the upset and turmoil.’
Petra with her mother Slavica, father Bernie and sister Tamara in 2008. The Ecclestones’ divorce was devastating for the girls
In the following months, they seemed to crave attention — giving interviews and Tamara modelling Ultimo underwear. And now, with the purchase of the £91 million LA mansion, Petra has indulged in the ultimate piece of exhibitionism.
I’m told that Bernie Ecclestone approves of Petra’s fiance, Chelsea-boy-about-town James Stunt, because he’s convinced he is not a gold digger. Stunt, whose father is a Tory Party donor and lives in Virginia Water, is known for being flash, spending up to £20,000 on champagne in nightclubs, and for his yellow Lamborghini with the numberplate S7UNT.
A friend set up the couple on a blind date and Petra says she fell in love with him immediately. His current business is collecting wine, although he insists he is virtually teetotal, as is Petra.
She says ‘I like to have dinner and watch TV. We both love EastEnders’, and adds that they are both ready to settle down.
Theirs will be an almost impossibly gilded life, replete with butlers and all the rest. But you wonder what this charming, aimless young girl will find to do in her huge houses.
Explore more:
People: Rihanna, David Beckham, Mike Tindall, Paris Hilton, Candy Spelling, Bernie Ecclestone, Aaron Spelling, Petra Ecclestone, Damien Hirst, Zara Phillips Places: London, Milan, Los Angeles, Switzerland, America, Buckingham Palace
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I don’t understand why these women lead such pointless lives, squandering their parents’ hard earned money. I’m in my 20s and I also come from a wealthy family (not as rich as hers, but rich enough to buy that £91 million estate if I wanted to waste the money). Yet like my siblings, I live in a fairly normal house and I work for a living (in a low paid job in education). I don’t need the money, and in fact the money’s completely insignificant to me, but I work to contribute to the economy, to society, to have a sense of self-worth, to make my own name, to have normal friends, and to honor the hard work my parents did to build their fortune. These girls like Petra Ecclestone really should be ashamed of being such wastes of space.
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james stunt looks like crap compared to petra
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What a pathetic, pointless woman family! For the women of the family to have all of that have no direction…..sad.
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It’s a different life for some… Although it means nothing she is gorgeous.
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She was expensively educated at London’s Francis Holland girls’ school and then went to a crammer for A-levels…. think you mean grammar???
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What’s the betting they are married less time than were going out as a couple. ie four years?
Neither have any need to make it work.
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