Scottish pop sensation Lewis Capaldi has joined the ranks of Hampstead’s celebrity elite, after buying a new home in the exclusive north London area.
The purchase is something of a coup for the Someone You Loved hitmaker, who five years ago laughed off suggestions of a $10 million net worth and told Instagram fans he had £200 in his bank account.
Capaldi has spent upwards of £3 million on a new home near the ponds, into which he moved in March with his girlfriend Ellie MacDowell
“Lewis is super-friendly to all of the neighbours and is really enjoying living in the area,” a source told the Daily Mail.
“It is really quite different to where he grew up. It's such a beautiful area and not cheap – it just shows you how much money he has made in a relatively short time.”
The four-time Grammy winner was born in Glasgow but moved to Whitburn in West Lothian at the age of four.
“There's nothing further from the Grammys than Whitburn – it's the antithesis – ordinary is such a remarkable thing,” he said in Netflix documentary How I’m Feeling Now last year.
In 2020 he left the family home, which sold for nearly £400,000 the following year, for a £1.6 million farmhouse on the outskirts of Glasgow that he bought on the advice of pal Ed Sheeran.
He joked on US radio that the Shape of You singer should reimburse him as the house was a “hell hole” that stank of “cigarette smoke and dog”.
"From the outside it is beautiful, there’s sprawling hills, there’s a lake,” he told 104.3 MYFM.
"I did go and see it but I was too eager. I was like, ‘that smell of dog and smoke will go away after a while,’ but it didn’t. We have ripped that place out and it still reeks of dog and smoke.
"I have made some bad decisions over the last two years and that was one of them.”
Though sprawling hills are scarce in London’s zone 2, leafy Hampstead is loved by the rich and famous for its large plots, handsome housing stock and relative seclusion from prying eyes.
Suitably plush pads for sale include the former homes of John Constable and Esther Rantzen, plus the house where Richard Rogers and Norman Foster launched their architecture careers.
And neighbours will include Harry Styles and Hampstead newcomers Cat Deeley and Patrick Kielty, who last autumn won planning permission to transform their £5 million fixer-upper into an Alvar Aalto-inspired modernist gem.
Capaldi’s new home is said to be a stone’s throw from Styles, who spent £3.2 million on his first Hampstead home back in 2012.
Once home to George Michael and Boy George, today Hampstead’s pop royalty includes Glastonbury 2024 headliner Dua Lipa, who last year won permission for a new basement and rear extension replacement at the £6.75 million Victorian home she bought in 2020.
Capaldi announced that he would be extending his six-month career hiatus in December, after “a marked improvement” in his struggles with anxiety and Tourette’s syndrome.
In a post on Instagram he hailed the “incredible professionals” who have helped him after he struggled with tics in his Pyramid Stage Glastonbury set last June.
He also thanked fans to their support, suggesting the reaction was “[like] nothing I’ve ever experienced” and saying it has made him “more excited than ever to return to doing what I love at some point in the not too distant future”.
