Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris has an expensive mansion that he can’t sell. All of which might be great news for Iron Maiden fans.
For the past several years, Steve Harris has tried — and failed — to sell his home in Essex, England. Now, the Iron Maiden rock star has a new plan. Barring a last-minute offer, Harris is going to transform his home into an awesome rock hotel for fans.
In 2012, Harris put his luxury home for sale. Featuring eight bedrooms, Harris had hoped to sell his mansion for $8.7 million. Every year, he dropped the price on his home. However, no one made an offer. Those looking for a mansion in Essex can still purchase the home for $5.1 million.
Speaking with Swedish radio Bandit Rock, the Iron Maiden star explained that he first had doubts about selling his mansion.
“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.”
But that ‘very reasonable price’ still has no takers. Which means Harris is starting plans to transform the eight-bedroom mansion into a boutique hotel for diehard Iron Maiden fans.
The idea to open a boutique hotel came after closing down Eddie’s Bar in Portugal. He told Bandit Rock,
“In an ideal world, I’d like to turn it into a boutique hotel, and I think Maiden fans would go there. 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.”
Steve Harris spends most of time in The Bahamas where his youngest daughter goes to school. He told the Swedish radio station that he doesn’t have any plans to return back home to Essex anytime soon.
“She’s gonna have another four years of school, so we’ll be living there for at least another four years ’til she finishes school anyway and (we’ll) see what happens after that. I (also) 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.”
Speaking about his plans for a boutique hotel, the Iron Maiden star added,
“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.”
Image by ceedub13 (CC by 2.0)
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