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).
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.”
