A Washington Banking Dynasty's London Penthouse, Now for Sale.
A Rare Three-Level Private Penthouse inside the Savoy — Carrying the Provenance of Washington’s Most Storied Riggs Banking Family — is Now Privately Available
Every great Washington fortune eventually finds a second home somewhere more forgiving than Washington. For the family that controlled Riggs — the bank that carried the accounts of twenty-three American presidents — that place was London, and the address was one of the most famous in the world: a three-level penthouse residence high inside the Savoy, set above the Strand with the Thames unspooling below.
I’ve spent my career selling the houses where Washington power actually lives, and I’ve learned the best properties aren’t sold on square footage. They’re sold on story. This one has an extraordinary one — a penthouse rising across three levels near the top of the building, with the river on one side and the whole apparatus of the Savoy at the door — and after years out of reach it is now privately available through our colleagues at UK Sotheby’s International Realty.
Riggs was never just a bank. For the better part of a century it was the private banker to the American establishment and to the embassies of half the world — the institution that liked to call itself “the most important bank in the most important city.” In 1981 the Texan Joe Allbritton took control, adding it to an empire that already spanned television, insurance, and the newspaper Washington read at breakfast. A man who banks the world’s embassies needs a foothold in the world’s capitals, and no city rewards that instinct like London.
Within London, there has never been an address quite like the Savoy. Richard D’Oyly Carte built it in 1889 on the profits of his Gilbert and Sullivan operas, above the Thames on the Strand — the first hotel in Britain lit throughout by electric light. He hired César Ritz to run it and Auguste Escoffier to cook, and effectively invented the modern grand hotel. Its guest list is the twentieth century itself: Edward VII, Churchill, Chaplin, Monroe, Sinatra. And since a 1903 expansion it has quietly held Britain’s first private serviced residences — homes inside the building, with the full run of the hotel’s service and kitchens, that have housed permanent occupants from Sarah Bernhardt onward. To hold the penthouse among them is to live not in London so much as at the very center of it.
I’m keeping the particulars where they belong on a property of this caliber — behind a private conversation rather than a public price. But I can tell you what it represents. Homes come to market constantly. Provenance like this — an American banking dynasty, a British national treasure, a penthouse view of the Thames from inside the Savoy — surfaces perhaps once in a generation.
The Allbritton era at Riggs eventually came to a close, but the London residence outlasted it, as the best real estate often does. Buildings keep the story long after the institutions that built them are gone.
It’s available again, privately, through UK Sotheby’s International Realty. If it speaks to you, let’s talk. Please reach out for any additional information, brochure ect.
Jim Bell - JBE@Sothebysrealty.co.uk
202-607-4000 Cell/ WhatsApp
