$300M mansion with 24 jewel-encrusted bathrooms has only 1 resident: a homeless man living on its porch

One of the most expensive homes in the world has 45 rooms, four elevators, an indoor pool and sweeping views of London’s Hyde Park. It has not had a real resident in years.

What it does have is Anders Fernstedt, a bearded, cheerful Swedish homeless man who has pitched a tent on the front porch and called the mansion home for the past three years.

The property at 2-8A Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge sold for roughly $280 million in 2020, making it the priciest residential sale in British history at the time — and one of the most expensive houses in the world. 

Its 24 marble bathrooms were once encrusted with semi-precious stones. Its wastepaper bins were coated in 24-karat gold leaf. 

Now Fernstedt, who has no running water, relieves himself into a plastic bottle at night. 

“Everest base camp problems,” he told the Guardian. “One has to be clever enough so as not to get out of the bloody tent every time.”

The contrast is almost too on-the-nose to be real. But it is very real, and it is a warning sign that should resonate far beyond London.

The property’s history reads like an international thriller. It was assembled in the early 1980s by Lebanese billionaire and future prime minister Rafik Hariri, who knocked together a row of Knightsbridge townhouses to build himself a London palace. 

After his assassination by a truck bomb in Beirut in 2005, the property passed to a Saudi crown prince, who died in 2011. Its entire contents, including the jewel-encrusted fixtures and Murano glass chandeliers, were auctioned off in 2015.

The 2020 sale appeared to be to a Hong Kong-based billionaire, but was later traced to Hui Ka Yan, founder of the Chinese property giant Evergrande. 

The purchase was made through a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Evergrande began defaulting on its debts in 2021. The house went back on the market in 2022 for roughly $268 million and did not sell. 

When transparency laws forced disclosure of the company’s true beneficiary, the name on the documents was not Hui’s but his then-wife Ding Yumei’s. They have since divorced. Evergrande collapsed in 2024. Hui pleaded guilty earlier this year to fraud and misuse of funds charges. Ding’s assets have been frozen. Nobody can sell the house. Nobody is living in it.

Fernstedt, meanwhile, has decorated the porch with flowers, bicycles, teddy bears and stacks of books.

This is not just a British problem. New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other American cities are wrestling with the same phenomenon, luxury towers and trophy properties bought by overseas investors that sit vacant while housing waitlists stretch into the hundreds of thousands.

“It’s bizarre and perverse that, in the middle of a housing crisis and a social crisis more broadly, you can find a magnificent home like that lying empty for years, homes that are not functioning as homes but as assets, part of a portfolio to be traded, or as a temporary residence for a small number of weeks a year,” Atkinson said.

In England alone, more than 300,000 homes sat vacant long-term in 2025, up nearly $15 from the year before. London accounts for a disproportionate share, with one in nine homes in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea sitting empty.

Fernstedt is not what most people picture when they imagine a rough sleeper.

He studied horticulture at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, fact-checked for the Economist and helped a New York Times writer research a book on robotics. A series of no-fault evictions, a violent assault that ruptured his eardrum and the theft of all his belongings while he was hospitalized landed him on the streets.

He has learned to survive. A nearby Lebanese restaurant lets him charge his phone and use its wifi. The Russian Orthodox church around the corner gives him food and clothes. He knows his neighbors, including a retired Azerbaijani ambassador who lives a few doors down.

Asked how he copes with being separated from a multimillion-dollar property by a single door, Fernstedt has developed his own mental framework. 

“What I’ve said to myself is it’s my pretend reality. I’m a child, my parents are in the house. I just asked them: ‘Can I camp in the treehouse?’”

He adopts a strict parental voice. “‘Do you want to sleep in your room, son, or in the treehouse?’”

Then, the voice of an elated child.

“‘Treehouse! Treehouse! Treehouse!’”