The Sunday Daily Mail features a colorful spread on fashion designer, owner of the Max Studio upmarket fashion chain, Leon Max, or Leonid Maxovitch Rodovinksi, “one of a clutch of rich Russians buying up chunks of Britain.” The piece recalls another billionaire, Roman Abramovich, who bought the London Chelsea soccer team. But instead of buying soccer clubs, Max has purchased “a spectacularly beautiful English stately home.” Love those Jews and their wonderful money…
The spread headline is long enough to serve as a story all by itself: The Russian billionaire, his six-foot tall blonde muse and the stately pile he’s bought from a hard-up English aristocrat
At the end of a long green alley stands a mini-Versailles, nine windows wide, approached by a pair of billowing stairs. Cream stone façade, stone lions caged on the roof by a four-square balustrade – Easton Neston looks like the home of a Renaissance prince. The house was built in 1702, by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Unusually for such an exquisite piece of architecture, it’s never been open to the public.
The new estate cost Max a very pretty penny: £25 million (that’s just under $40 million to you and me).
The Mail reports that During the hunting season Max hosts in his lovely little home the likes of the Earl and Countess of Albemarle and society actress Georgina Rylance. I have no idea who they are, but the Mail appears very impressed.
Then comes this paragraph:
Into the drawing room strides the six-foot-tall blonde Katia Elizavora, model and face of Max’s fashion line, who was spotted aged 14 in the street in Saratov, a town south of Moscow.
According to the Mail, Max fled Russia as a teenager in the Seventies, using a visa to Israel. Instead of changing planes in Vienna, he claimed political asylum and ended up in New York City. The rest is fashion history.