With 15 opulent bedrooms, a Turkish bath, hair salon and pillars carved from the same marble as the Taj Mahal, Formula 1 Bernie Ecclestone thought the property overlooking Kensington Palace would be the perfect marital home.

Within months of viewing, he 'fell in love' with it and bought it for £50 million ($110 million), making it the most expensive private house in Britain at the time, reported The Telegraph.

But his Croatian wife, Slavica, was not impressed by the property at all. Three years later, Mr Ecclestone sold it without ever moving in.

His disagreement with his 50-year-old wife, from whom he is now estranged, was revealed in documents filed at the High Court in London by a businessman who claimed he was owed a £2 million commission on the sale.

According to the papers, Mr Ecclestone told the property developer, Mr David Khalili, that 'he was not able to convince his wife to agree to the purchase as she did not like it enough to live there'.

He was said to have decided to buy the property as an investment instead, selling it for £57 million in 2004 to steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal.

Mr Khalili spent £84 million buying and refurbishing the house in Kensington Palace Gardens, which previously housed the Russian and Egyptian embassies. The project, which employed up to 400 craftsmen every day, was said at the time to have been second only in cost to the refurbishment of Windsor Castle after the fire of 1992.

Mr Khalili had hoped to sell the house for as much as £110 million, and allegedly asked a Malaysian entrepreneur, Dato Hamidi Osman, to help find a buyer in 2001 in return for a 4 per cent commission.

Mr Osman said he contacted a Monaco-based estate agent who alerted Mr Ecclestone to the property's availability.

Mr Osman claimed he introduced MrEcclestone to Mr Khalili at the Dorchester Hotel in London in April 2001, and Mr Ecclestone viewed the property the next day.

'(He) said he wanted to purchase the property as he 'fell in love with it',' MrOsman claimed in the court papers.

This article was first published in The New Paper.