Kazakh woman spends £50m on this home ... and another £30m changing it

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Now Toprak Mansion has been bought by billionairess Horelma Peramam from Kazakhstan. She plans to spend another £30million on improvements on her new home in Bishop's Avenue, Hampstead.

With the help of an Italian designer she wants a complete revamp, including the installation of a beauty salon, spa, heliport, cinema and squash court. She will make the transformation complete by changing the house's name from "Toprak Mansion" to "Royal Mansion".

The sale was confirmed today by estate agent Trevor Abrahamson, who sold another Bishop's Avenue property, Palladio, to Russian-Israeli diamond billionaire Lev Leviev for £35million. Even as it is, the house is an example of the triumph of wealth and ambition over style and restraint. It has a main bedroom as big as the average house, a leisure complex with pool and glass bridge, and has been described as the architectural equivalent of a "stretch limo".

It was built by Turkish businessman Halis Toprak. He never moved in and has been trying to sell it since at least May 2005 after his bank was seized by the Turkish government. Its neighbours on what is known as Billionaires' Row include the Sultan of Brunei and the Saudi Arabian royal family.

Toprak has a floorspace of about 28,000 square feet, five times the size of an ordinary large detached house. Built in a bewildering variety of styles, it has a neo-classical colonnaded entrance with Grecian-style pillars but also a green copper sloped roof with Velux windows. An indoor complex features the large pool, a Turkish bath and a sauna. The master bedroom suite has a salon, dressing room, meeting room, office and kitchen. There are six further bedroom suites.

For architecture writer Gavin Stamp, it epitomises the triumph of new money over good taste. He said: "The aim now is something like a plantation house in America's Old South with a huge two-storey portico, which can look like something ordered from a catalogue and stuck on."