Steve Harris says that he would like to turn his English house into a boutique hotel for IRON MAIDEN fans.
The IRON MAIDEN bassist has been unsuccessfully trying to sell his eight-bedroom mansion in Essex for the past five years. He originally put the home on the market in 2012 for £6.75 million (approximately $8.71 million), but that price came down in 2013 by £0.9 million to £5.85 million (approximately $7.55 million) and in 2015 by another £0.9 million to £4.95 million (approximately $6.39 million).
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After floating on the market for almost four years, the nine-acre property had its price reduced last year to an even lower guide price of £3.95 million (approximately $5.10 million).
“It was a little bit crazy to start with, because when I first put it [on sale], I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to sell it,” Harris told Swedish radio station Bandit Rock. “‘Cause I was [moving] abroad, and I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’m gonna really wanna stay abroad,’ so I put it at a silly price, and I thought if somebody wants to pay silly money for it, then they’re welcome to it. But then I brought the price down. It’s actually a very reasonable price now.”
Assuming that he can’t sell the place at the current asking price, Harris has a possible back-up plan in mind. “In an ideal world, I’d like to turn it into a boutique hotel, and I think MAIDEN fans would go there,” he said. “I mean, I had a small bar in Portugal — called Eddie’s Bar — which is no longer open; it closed a few years ago. But people used to come from all over the world just to go to that little bar, and I think maybe they would go to the house. ‘Cause we recorded some albums there, too, in the studio — ‘Fear Of The Dark’ we recorded there and a few others — and there’s lots of memorabilia there and everything like that. So… I don’t know. That would be a nice plan. A boutique hotel… It means I could still stay there as well, which would be great. It’d be an ideal world for me, really. Yeah, it’d be nice.”
Harris, who made headlines in 2013 when more than $8,000 worth of goods and electronics was stolen from his Bahamas property, revealed that he has been living in the former British colony “for the last ten years. My youngest is still in school there,” he said. “She’s gonna have another four years of school, so we’ll be living there for at least another four years till she finishes school anyway and see what happens after that. That was another reason as well — I had so many problems with my back, and I thought I’d go somewhere warmer and get better, and it’s actually made a big difference.”
Via Blabbermouth.com