A HOUSE at the centre of one of London's biggest planning controversies has been put on the market for £25million - complete with a giant hole in the garden.
On the face of it the Grade II listed Georgian home in Knightsbridge has just about everything a wealthy buyer looks for in the super-prime central London property market.
It has a sought-after address, boasts one of the area's largest private gardens and has the potential to be turned into a nine-storey mansion which is 25 TIMES the size of the average English home.
But the property has attracted anger from neighbours for almost a decade after the garden was turned into an eyesore by its conman owner.
Achilleas Kallakis began digging a mega-basement in the mid-2000s to house a swimming pool, spa, cinema and car lift.
The project was abandoned when workers downed tools in 2008, and in 2011 the property was sold to its current owner for £28million.
Six years on it remains an unfinished building site, with a 30ft deep crater the size of two tennis courts dominated by more than a dozen 60ft piles.
The registered owner, British Virgin Islands-based 31 Brompton Square Ltd, has now put the property on the market for £3million less than it paid.
Estate agent Savills describe it as an "exceptional opportunity to create a spectacular family home of over 22,000 sq ft in this elegant Knightsbridge garden square".
It adds: "The new proposals provide nine floors of living spaces including a swimming pool, underground car parking with car lift, double-height reception spaces and an impressive entrance hall."
Plans for a lavish four-storey mega-basement complex were approved by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea last year, despite the council's policy to restrict basement excavations to one storey.
The whole of the lowest floor is given over to a vast underground garage with car lift and turntable, according to the architect's plans.
Above that will be the swimming pool and gym. Basement -2 will be a "family space" along with music room, music store and cinema.
Basement -1 will have three guest bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms along with a kitchen and laundry room.
The original home above ground will have grand entertaining rooms with a huge master bedroom suite taking up the whole of the second floor. The top two storeys will have five further bedrooms.
The ground floor will have a large kitchen, reception room and formal dining room as well as the entrance to the garden.
Brompton Square residents have described the long-running planning saga as a "nightmare".
One neighbour said it had "been a plague on our lives for eight years".
They added: "We've had problems with subsidence from the dig. We don't overlook a garden in a lovely London neighbourhood but a vast chasm into a building site."
Tony Knight, who lives nearby, said the hole was a "complete mess" and described it as "probably almost as deep as the Führerbunker in Berlin".
The saga dates back to a 2005 planning application from Achilleas Kallakis, who snapped up the grand home as part of a haul of trophy assets.
In 2013 he was jailed for seven years after posing as a Mayfair property tycoon to dupe banks out of £740million with forged documents, sham legal letters and bogus guarantees.
His sentence was later extended by four years.
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