When the previous couple moved out, they’d “taken everything they possibly could—the door handles, light bulbs, it was left almost derelict,” he says. So he was free to start effectively from scratch. The de Burghs removed all the ceilings and floors and installed insulation in the outer walls.

As he replaced the floors, he added radiant heat, along with noise insulation underneath the boards. “I remember being in cheap English hotels where you could hear every creak from the fellow upstairs,” de Burgh explains. “So we put in a sound barrier between the first floor and the ground floor.”

Additional Improvements
Other improvements included an elevator and a panic room with two-inch thick steel doors and a communications hookup.  They also commissioned furniture for the house, de Burgh says. “A lot of it was built bespoke for the premises.”

It would, he continues, “be great if someone walks in and says ‘Yep, I love everything in here, I’ll take it all.” (The furniture is not included in the list price.)

The house has a main reception hall, a morning room, dining room, study, and family room, along with an eat-in kitchen and a wine cellar that can accommodate 600 bottles. There are eight en-suite bedrooms and a 12,000-square-foot “leisure complex” with a screening room, a game room with ping pong tables, and an indoor pool.

Lovely as the main house might be, the indoor pool is clearly de Burgh’s passion.

“As a touring musician, I always had a passion for swimming, and I filmed a lot of swimming pools that I liked the look of,” he says.

Many of the features he most prized in others’ pools are incorporated into his own. “For example, if you’re in a pool, and it doesn’t have what’s called a level deck where the water spills over the edges, it creates a lot of turbulence in the water.”

He installed lights in the ceiling with colors that can be modified, and he commissioned an astronomer to recreate the star cluster that he and his family saw on December 31, 1999, on a trip to Mauritius. “Someday, someone might look up at it and say ‘Oh, that looks like the Southern Cross,” he says.

He avoided any decoration inside the pool itself. “Some people’s pools have a big design on the bottom, but if a child is drowning you won’t be able to see it,” he says.