Property www.theolivepress.es Plumbing magnate flaunts his glitzy Marbella lifestyle on British reality TV
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NE of the UK’s most successful businessmen has been giving British TV viewers a glimpse of how the rich live in Marbella. The Pimlico Plumbers CEO shares his flush with success on the Channel 4 reality show, How’d You Get So Rich? Charlie Mullins, who owns the biggest plumbing firm in the UK, worth €80 million, showed comedian Katherine Ryan around the London and Marbella pads he has bought with the fruits of his labours. He flies between his €9 million penthouse in London and his €15 million bolthole in Marbella by private jet. He also drives two Bentley cars.
March 29th - April 11th 2017
From root valves to riches
A-List
Mullins left school at 15 and became an entrepreneur, setting up his own business, Pimlico Plumbers, in his basement in 1979 after completing a four-year apprenticeship. He has now been named as Britain’s richest plumber with an A-list of clients who include Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and ex-UK Prime Minister David Cameron. On the show, Ryan jets out to Marbella with Mullins to look around another luxury villa that the plumbing mogul plans on purchasing to boost his portfolio, which already contains two properties in the area. While looking around the first luxury villa, the pair are seen joking about Charlie’s cock-
ON-SCREEN: Mullins’ Marbella mansion, Bentley (inset top) with Katherine Ryan ney accent and were even villa and assuring Katherine it filmed twerking on the balco- won’t tug on his purse strings. “No, we’ll take on more ny of the plush pad. But Charlie foregoes buy- plumbers and do more work ing the home, instead opt- out here. I think we can afford ing for another €15.9 million it,” he says.
Barren times A STRUGGLING millionaire art collector may be forced to rent out her home on the Costa del Sol. Baroness Carmen Thyssen has admitted she has ‘not yet ruled out’ renting her massive 1,000sqm Marbella pad, in order to ease her cash flow crisis. She lovingly refers to it as Mata Mua, a reference to her favourite painting by Paul Gaugin. “I have not yet ruled out the rent of the house in Marbella,” said Thyssen in a recent interview, in which she also talked about putting one of her collection pieces, Edgar Degas’s Race Horses in a Landscape, up for sale. “I have current liquidity problems,” she admitted. The house is one of several owned by the glamorous 73-year-old who now lives in Andorra. Her collection also includes a mansion in Lugano, a chalet in La Moraleja and a house in Sant Feliu de Guixols.
Bagged THE world’s most eligible bachelor and owner of one of Spain’s largest estates - La Garganta in Cordoba - is officially off the market. Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, has been spotted holidaying with the ‘love of his life’, new girlfriend Harriet Tomlinson. Grosvenor became the seventh Duke of Westminster when his father Gerald died suddenly nine months ago.The 26-year-old inherited the bulk of his father’s €9.5 billion fortune, including the massive hunting estate which straddles the Cordoba and Castille la Mancha border.
Luxury hotel addition A LUXURY hotel chain is to open a resort in Marbella. W Hotels, which belongs to umbrella group Starwood Hotels, is to manage the 300m five star project by investors Platinum Estates in Las Dunas de Real de Zaragoza zone. The 151,000msq beachfront site is the latest
project for the worldwide hotel group, which has another hotel in Barcelona and one under construction in Madrid. The three-storey-high building, which is set to open for business in 2019. Talking about the hotel, Mayor José Bernal said: “Since we came
to governance we have worked to attract tourist investments that better the welfare of our citizens by generating wealth and employment. “The investment will be an important stimulus for the town and for its tourism, our main industry.”
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March 29th - April 11th 2017
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