Techno-tastic

Developer Chris Aspinall spared no expense when kitting out a Belgravia terrace with high-spec gadgetry. But with a £6.5m price tag, will he break even?

From the outside, 36 Chester Row appears the same as its neighbours. A humble mid-terrace - or as humble as you can be in the depths of London's Belgravia - that sits conveniently up the road from The Wellington Pub and a small grocery shop on the corner.

From the outside, 36 Chester Row appears the same as its neighbours. A humble mid-terrace - or as humble as you can be in the depths of London's Belgravia - that sits conveniently up the road from The Wellington Pub and a small grocery shop on the corner.

But once you've stepped inside and gingerly removed your shoes so as not to harm the impeccably varnished walnut flooring with light oak inlay, you know that you have arrived somewhere a bit grander than your average fading, genteel domicile associated with certain upper-class circles.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. All over Britain, house builders are ripping the guts out of older buildings and replacing them with the "must-haves" that every aspiring bride and groom would have on their Vogue-inspired wedding list. Whether any of them could all accomplish such a transformation as sleight-of-hand as that by Chelsminster Estates, the company behind Chester Row's resurgence, is another matter, however.

"I know it is an over-used word, but we look for something unique," says Chris Aspinall, the young, spiky-haired developer who has spent two-and-a-half years on this project with his partner Mark Clayton. "Lateral apartments are a lot of fun, but this is our first house and we feel quite brave taking it on."

The remarkable materials used and James Bond-esque gadgetry employed would make the former owner Anthony Blonde, founder of Spectator magazine, chuckle. He lived there in the Fifties and threw parties with Lord Lucan and the Rothschilds, long before multimedia digital internet fridges and Jerusalem Desert Gold Limestone bathrooms came along.

Chelsminster has re-jigged the space to add a mezzanine garden room with an ingenuous Italian retractable roof that would set you back £50,000, and a £100,000 subterranean leisure centre with pool, sauna, wet room and gym. This required weeks of toil by specialist firm Cellars and Basements digging down 10 metres and excavating 3,700 tons of earth by hand. "Westminster Council and Grosvenor Estates didn't want to set a precedent and allow us to use machinery," explains Aspinall.

Now the £6.5 million Grade II-listed house ranges over five storeys measuring 3,515 square feet, which works out at just over £1,800 a square foot. It might seem ludicrous for mere mortals to even fantasise about owning such a pad, let alone bothering to poke their nose round the front door, but many of the newfangled goodies are likely to one day trickle down to the middle echelons of the market. It is a bit like watching Dan Dare as a kid and being bowled over by people talking on videophones. But now such technology is upon us and it gets more affordable for the masses by the day.

Take the Philips Pronto keypad. A small handheld console not dissimilar from a Psion Series 3, it looks after the whole house from the air conditioning, underfloor heating and £70,000 worth of audiovisual and surround sound kit in the cinema room, to the LG plasma widescreens tucked away in bespoke cupboards and Polaron lighting system pre-set for various moods to impress your friends and woo gullible lovers.

Niche developers love to announce "firsts" in their latest projects and Aspinall is no exception. Usually, installing a complex sound system with an abundance of speakers means mounds of twisting wires and annoyed wives or girlfriends, says Aspinall, so Chelsminster has put in ceiling-mounted speakers that look neat and inconspicuous, with no cables to get in the way of the hovering. The other first - if you can have more than one - is the large £2,000 Aqua Vision bathroom mirror, which has a close-up mirror in the centre that doubles a telly. You flick a switch hidden under the basin and hey presto, can watch the morning's news while shaving, although you wouldn't want to confuse the chiselled features of the news presenter with your own.

It would be cheating to say that the integrated multimedia digital internet fridge with TV is another first - word has it that Posh Spice has just bought one and it featured in the remake of Stepford Wives. You can leave video messages for your loved one ("Honey, we've run out of Chablis"), surf the web, watch telly, send e-mails and keep a digital diary.

Forget wonky "fridge art" designed by the kids and stuck on with yesteryear's fridge magnets. With a digital photo album, you can shoot and display pictures of all your envious friends with their broken-down cool boxes filled with sadly wilting lettuces and leaky ketchup bottles. A state-of-the-art cookbook means you can choose dishes by country and the fridge automatically re-orders when you run out of your favourite items. Another must is the red light that appears when something is miserably out-of-date, saving on lawsuits from those you have accidentally poisoned due to your bad housekeeping.

Aspinall says the hardest part of renovating upperscale properties like Chester Row is deciding what to spend money on. He tells harrowing tales of some buyers ripping out lovingly chosen features and reconfiguring carefully thought-out spaces even before the packing cases have been unloaded. "Where do you draw the line? What is important to some people is of no significance to others."

But some things appear to be "standard" in urban mini-stately homes of this calibre. Oak and walnut throughout is de rigueur, as are the Krups cappuccino machine, electronic scales set into the green-flecked granite worktop and the housewife's latest accessory: the Fisher & Paykel double-drawer dishwasher that holds two sets of crockery. If you are throwing a party, you don't want to wait for your china to get through that final cycle when you are short of the odd saucer or two. This presumes, of course, that you have more than one set in the first place.

Eliza Leigh from Knight Frank, the selling agent for Chester Row, believes the house will appeal to an international buyer, probably a young couple or bachelor. "It is on at an ambitious price, but once viewers get through the front door they are so impressed with what they are seeing."

Peter Young from John D Wood is not convinced the house is worth its hefty price tag, however. "You can have the Taj Mahal behind, but they are similar façades out front." He recently sold the house next door for £2m and reckons they will be lucky to get £5m, despite the fancy trimmings and attention to detail.

36 Chester Row is for sale through Knight Frank (020-7591 8600) and Ayrton Wylie (020-7730 4628)