The Rootless World of the Super-rich

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Excerpt:

Once, very wealthy people owned big estates in the country. Now they have homes all over the world and flit to and fro in private jets, yachts - or even submarines. Mark Palmer reports

Even before rumours began to circulate that it was haunted, David and Victoria Beckham had never ***** a night in Domaine St-Vincent, the estate in Var-Provence they bought three years ago for £1.5 million. This might seem odd for those of us who can only fantasise about a second home in the South of France, but to the money-bags crowd there's nothing unusual about it at all.

"I was at an amazingly swanky wedding in Paris recently," says Stephen Bayley, the style guru and art historian. "With my pitiable suburban reflexes, I asked another guest where he was from. He said: 'I've just flown in from Ibiza. I have a flat here in Paris, but my real home is Rio. Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to my apartment in New York.' Then he added, and this is the interesting bit, 'In this milieu, we don't commit adultery, we travel'."
 

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