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| A palace fit for Her Majesty The Queen for £320 million Buckingham Palace is famous for being the most expensive home in the world you'll never be able to buy but according to cost consultants, Faithful+Gould, you could build a new energy-efficient replica for £320 million. Faithful+Gould, a part of the Atkins engineering design group, undertook a technical assessment of the current Buckingham Palace as part of a review of famous UK monuments by the Chartered Institute of Building's magazine, Construction Manager. It worked out the cost of building a replica of the Palace, using the latest construction methods and materials, would take three and half years. Using a carbon calculator developed by Faithful+Gould for the Carbon Trust the team also assessed that the new Palace would emit 400 tonnes of CO2 per year less than the original. The total build cost came in at £320 million, which included the construction of 19 state rooms, 78 bathrooms, and 52 principle bedrooms, with 775 separate areas including hallways and staircases in total. This was around ten times the original purchase, build and extension costs (incurred between 1761 and 1913) of around £33 million, in today's terms. Including land costs, which on the current 40 acre site could be around £440 million, the price tag would be a combined £760 million, making it the most expensive residential property in the world. The closest challenger is the Villa Leópolda, on the Cote d'Azur, which was bought by an un-named Russian oil oligarch in 2008 for £390 million. The other UK monuments looked at by Construction Manager magazine were Stonehenge, which could be rebuilt for £815,000, and the Clifton Suspension Bridge which came with a price tag of £52 million. write your comments about the article :: © 2010 Construction News :: home page |