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Chelsea barracks developers win race to buy US Embassy
Ross Lydall and Mira Bar-Hillel03.11.09
The American Embassy building is to be sold to the foreign developers responsible for the Chelsea Barracks scheme, it was announced today.
The building, in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, which has been the focus of protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars since opening in 1960, is expected to become expensive flats.
US Ambassador Louis Susman has signed a deal to sell the building to Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company. The price is believed to be
£300 million to £400 million.
Sources insist last month's decision to impose a Grade II listing on the embassy's facade did not influence the sale price, despite speculation this could have reduced it by £200 million.
But the listing will make the 600-room, ninestorey building — three of them underground
— more difficult to redevelop.
However there was confusion today around Sir Stuart Lipton and Elliott Bernerd's company Chelsfield, previously thought to have secured the sale against a rival bid from the embassy's
freeholder, Grosvenor.
The US authorities want to build a new £275 million embassy in the Nine Elms area of Battersea. Dubbed The Iceberg, it would be protected by a 30-metre “blast zone” and a detachment of US marines.
Work on the new embassy is due to begin in 2012 or 2013 and be complete by 2016 or 2017.
