Son of ‘Donald of Dubai’ buys £190m Regent’s Park mansion: Emirati billionaire set to be new owner of ‘mini-Buckingham Palace’ in one of London’s priciest ever house sales
The son of an Emirati billionaire dubbed ‘Dubai’s Donald’ is buying one of London’s most expensive mansions for £190 million.
Abbas Sajwani, whose father Hussain Sajwani is Donald Trump’s longtime business partner, is nearing a deal to buy The Holme. It sits alone on four acres of private grounds in Regent’s Park.
Hailed as ‘the definition of Western civilisation’ by one architectural critic, the 40-bedroom Georgian-Regency villa overlooks expansive lawns that extend to the park’s boating lake.
Inside, there are 29,000 square feet of sumptuous rooms lavishly decorated with millions of pounds worth of gold leaf, creating a look that Mr Trump would surely approve of.
The mega-deal comes less than two years after the current owner, whose identity has not been disclosed, paid £139 million for the 200-year-old house.
Before that, it belonged to the family of former Saudi defense minister Prince Khalid bin Sultan al Saud. He put the plane, which he bought for £34 million in 1991, on the market in 2023 after creditors demanded repayment of the private jet loan.
The asking price was a record-breaking £250 million, but nearly two years later it changed hands for a much lower price of £139 million.
Holme sits alone on four acres of private grounds in Regent’s Park, with lawns stretching down to the boating lake
Holme was first built in 1818 and is still owned by the Crown Estate.
Hussain Sajwani was photographed at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach last year
Abbas Sajwani bought the property on behalf of his family, a person familiar with the deal said F.T..
His father, Hussain Sajwani, is a close ally of Donald Trump, who hailed him as a ‘great investor’ at a press conference last year. A $20bn (£15bn) investment in US data centers is planned.
The two have known each other since 2021, when Hussein’s real estate company partnered with the Trump Organization to build the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East.
He has an estimated net worth of $15.3bn (£11.5bn) and has significant investments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI.
Abbas Sajwani’s website describes him as ‘the youngest billionaire in global real estate, having built a multi-billion dollar development company in less than five years’.
The 26-year-old’s company, AHS Properties, is an ‘ultra-luxury’ property developer based in Dubai. Bought last month The Shangri-La five-star hotel in Dubai has been bought for $300 million (£228 million).
Even the £140 million Holme would be the second most expensive house ever sold in the UK, beating the £138 million paid for Aberconway House in London’s Mayfair two years ago, placing it in third place.
The £205 million paid by Chinese businessman Cheung Chung Kiu to another Saudi royal in 2020 for the 62,000 square meter Rutland Gate overlooking Hyde Park still outstrips both.
His son Abbas Sajwani is in the photo with Donald Trump
Britain’s current most expensive house: Originally built as four separate family homes, the seven-storey, stucco-fronted grand residence stands at 2-8A Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge.
Holme is owned by the Crown Estate, but the long-term lease of the Regency masterpiece was sold by the British Government to a Kuwaiti businessman in 1984 for just £5 million.
Six years later, Prince Khalid, a former Sandhurst graduate and career soldier in the Saudi Army, owned it before selling it in 2016.
The following year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered a purge of the growing royal family, leading to some being jailed.
Prince Khalid was not among them, but the crackdown coincided with a ‘major’ deterioration in his finances and he later sold a £70 million house and two yachts in Paris, according to reports at the time.
Sales of high-end homes are often done secretly and often through trusts, sometimes obscuring the identity of the parties involved.
There are only a handful of families in the world who can afford to purchase, renovate and maintain a mansion like The Holme, which requires a full-time staff of around 20 people.
