“I love houses,” Stephen Schwarzman told The New Yorker in 2008. “I’m not sure why.”
An armchair psychologist might make a decent guess. Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the private-equity behemoth Blackstone, is a modern-day Ozymandias. His houses are not humble homes but sprawling monuments to power, success, and status. Not trophy assets but entire trophy cabinets—many of which, curiously, were once owned by the great robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries, and almost all of which have a knack for irking neighbors with their various adjustments, demolitions, and surgical tweaks. Look on my poolhouse, ye mighty, and despair!
The latest addition to Schwarzman’s groaning hoard lies on the sleepy border of Wiltshire and Hampshire, in southern England. Conholt Park is a late-17th-century manor house with a Grade II listing. Bought by Schwarzman in 2022 for around $85 million, it is not one of the great architectural beauties of its vintage—an asymmetrical and unadorned structure in gray stone, cramped on three sides by stables, outbuildings, and later additions. But the real value lies not in the house itself but in what it looks out on: namely, 2,500 acres of green and pleasant parkland, which serves as perhaps one of the most storied shooting estates in the Home Counties. To quote Purdey, the shotgun-maker supreme:
“The topography of the estate is second to none. With its dramatic banks and chalkland valleys, high ‘birds’ are assured. The variety of drives at Conholt means teams of guns will be guaranteed a thrilling variety of shooting, including a unique grouse drive set across a line of sunken grouse butts. A great way to prepare for the grouse season!”
Grousing certainly seems to be in season. Less than three years after Schwarzman acquired the site, he has already ruffled locals’ feathers with his extensive refurbishment plans for a new, three-story wing: “An expansive and complex multi-year endeavor that has required a substantial … increase in on-site activity, far above and beyond the capacity of existing areas within the estate to accommodate it,” according to a retrospective construction application to the local council.
But it was Schwarzman’s plans to construct a vast lake on the site—likely for fishing, in a bid to further boost the estate’s hunting credentials—which really inspired local ire. The falling-out essentially centered on the question of whether or not Schwarzman used a borehole to extract groundwater to fill the lake—a situation which could lead to water shortages for the many nearby properties which also draw from the aquifer, according to The Mail on Sunday. (A spokesman for Schwarzman denied the use of a borehole, claiming that the lake instead collects rainfall via a “highly sophisticated water collection system.”)
Neighbors were already ill-disposed to Schwarzman after a convoy of construction equipment descended on the narrow lanes of the area as part of the refurbishments. But since the lake was finished, in March, local residents have grown increasingly suspicious of its plentiful waters, in a period of historically dry weather when farmers are said to be concerned about their own reserves. “How could it have filled that much if it’s not being filled from a borehole?” one resident asked The Mail on Sunday. “It’s the farmers around who are so worried as these resources are not infinite.”
“I’ve built lakes in the past during my time in agriculture and I can tell you it takes a hell of a lot of water to fill one that size,” said another. “In recent months we’ve had pretty much no proper rain. This is why people are confused and there’s mistrust.”
The locals are also distressed by rumors of planned 500-pheasant days at Conholt. “I don’t like what he is doing,” one told the paper in reference to the sheer volume of birds likely to be shot. “That’s not sport.”
But it’s exactly the kind of sport for which Conholt, originally constructed for the farming and hunting of deer, was designed. At first glance, it’s surprising that Schwarzman would wish to add this particular estate to his portfolio, as it sits a good distance away from London in a not very fashionable part of the country.
The Cotswolds, surely, would have made for a more logical choice, with their gold-stone houses, scene-y members’ clubs, powerful residents (Murdochs galore), and a liberal sprinkling of comparable American financiers such as Charles Noell, the billionaire founder of JMI Equity, who rides with the historic Heythrop Hunt. (The late Peter Mullin, the California banking titan, built a Norman Foster–designed car museum near the cheerful cottages of Great Tew.)
But it’s Conholt’s hunting credentials that must really have tipped the scales. The estate represents perhaps the final square on the plutocrat Monopoly board that Schwarzman has not yet claimed. He’s got pretty much everything else.
Like the Manhattan apartment: a 35-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue, which cost a record $37 million in 2000 and was once owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Or the Federal-style home, on a cozy eight acres on Mecox Bay in Water Mill, for which Schwarzman paid $34 million in 2006 and that was previously owned by the Vanderbilt scion Carter Burden. Or the oceanfront villa in St. Tropez, with a jetty that pokes out into the crystalline waters of the cove, to which Schwarzman decamps each July.
Or the grand coastal home in Jamaica. Or the Newport “cottage,” Miramar—a 30,000-square-foot, French-neoclassical wedding cake, for which Schwarzman paid $27 million in 2021. Or the Palm Beach home, Four Winds, which he bought in 2003 for $20.5 million and almost immediately demolished, to the horror of local residents, sparking a 14-month legal wrangle with the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The residents of the parish of Chute (comprising the villages of Upper Chute, Lower Chute, Chute Standen, Chute Cadley, and Mount Cowdown) probably have little in common with their counterparts in Palm Beach. But they’ll certainly know the feeling of watching a cocksure financier jumping into a historic home and instantly setting about making vast “improvements” to it.
The Chute set may soon also share the apprehensions of those in Newport, who were struck immediately by the thunderous party-throwing of their newest neighbor last August. (Dress code: “Ladies - Day Dresses and Shoes for the Garden … and Perhaps a Hat. Gentlemen - Summer Suits … and Perhaps a Hat as Well!”) And in 2007, Schwarzman closed Park Avenue with the lavish celebrations for his 60th-birthday party at the Park Avenue Armory, where Rod Stewart performed.
In this way, perhaps, Schwarzman stands as a sort of late-capitalist Gatsby—an endlessly wealthy New Yorker with a fortune of questionable merit, prone to pyrotechnic parties, and always searching for the next diversion, the next acquisition.
What is the flickering green light at the end of the Great Schwarzman’s personal dock? In a 2019 “Lunch with the FT” interview, Schwarzman wasn’t so sure. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I like generally doing things that nobody has done.” It is not yet clear whether this particular caprice extends to allegedly pilfering your neighbors’ water supplies. Down in Wiltshire, the grouse await the hounds.
Joseph Bullmore is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the editor of Gentleman’s Journal in London
