How the Hollywood elite have turned the eco-home into the ‘ego-home’

“Mawgan Porth”, claims its local website, “is a little-known but never forgotten village on the rugged coastline of North Cornwall. The one-percenters clearly feel safe in numbers, gathering around Cotswold villages or Cornish beaches like bees around a honey pot – exclusive, mango-scented Pitcairn honey Owing more to American hotels than English domestic design, several have replaced older houses and this, according to newspaper reports, “infuriates” neighbours, even when the older houses themselves were indifferent and out of kilter with their surroundings. As Tinseltown boomed, newly fledged stars flocked to the hills to, as Aldous Huxley described in his 1939 novel After Many a Summer, “houses all new, almost in good taste – elegant and witty pastiches of Lutyens manor houses, of Little Trianons, of Monticellos; light-hearted parodies of Le Corbusier’s solemn machines-for-living-in; fantastic adaptations of Mexican haciendas and New England farms. open image in gallery The Beckhams’ Grade II-listed £12m barn conversion in the Cotswolds boasts a football field, an outdoor pool and a sauna, but additional luxurious features have reportedly been at the centre of disputes Blanchett herself co-presents Climate of Change, a podcast with Danny Kennedy, CEO of New Energy Nexus – “connecting entrepreneurs to capital to build an abundant clean energy economy that benefits all” – which is fine and dandy, yet no amount of bat boxes, green sedum roofs and ground source heat pumps will make a big new house somehow “green” especially if it has a big car park. The one-percenters clearly feel safe in numbers, gathering around Cotswold villages or Cornish beaches like bees around a honey pot – exclusive, mango-scented Pitcairn honey brought to you, meditatively, from Polynesia on board a Kon-Tiki-style raft.