When Iya Patarkatsishvili first set eyes on the house in April 2018, she knew she had to have it.
A sprawling, gated Victorian villa in London‘s stylish Notting Hill, boasting its own spa, swimming pool, wine room, cinema and library, as well as a one-of-a-kind ‘snoring room’ for a peaceful night’s sleep, Horbury Villa truly was a fairytale mansion.
But Iya, 41, and her husband, Yevhen Hunyak, 50, wanted to be sure. With a price tag of £32.5 million, this was not a decision to be taken lightly.
So over the next 13 months, the couple – and people working for them – visited the property another 11 times, fastidiously checking everything from drainage pumps to noise from a nearby pub. During one visit, they brought a sound engineer and insisted on total silence while they looked around.
Eventually, in May 2019, they were satisfied, stumping up the eye-watering purchase price (plus £3.7 million in stamp duty) and moving in with their two children, Adrian and Amelia.
At first, it seems, life at Horbury Villa truly was the domestic idyll they’d imagined.
Pictures on Iya’s social media over the years show the wealthy family of four posing by a twinkling, 12ft Christmas tree in the sitting room, snuggled up together beside an ornate stone fireplace, and frolicking with their pet labrador in the leafy back garden.
But behind the scenes, they now claim, their privileged existence was far from perfect.
In evidence submitted to the High Court this week, the couple say they have been subjected to an ‘infestation of extreme proportions’ – in the form of moths which have wreaked havoc, and caused thousands of pounds of damage, in their new home.
‘Millions’ of the flying pests have become a constant scourge, they claim, with Yevhen, a paediatric dentist, having to kill between 35 and 100 of them a day.
At its worst point, they have alleged, insects were landing on the children’s toothbrushes, found floating in glasses of fine wine and flying onto plates of food.
Their designer clothes, they say, had to be packed in hermetically-sealed bags to protect them from the plague, with moths eating through £50,000 worth of garments.
‘This was far more extreme than an ordinary domestic experience of moths,’ the couple’s barrister John McGhee KC told the court this week.
‘Moths were flying around at night whenever someone was using a screen, clothes had to be packed in hermetic bags, carpets and furniture were damaged, numerous items of clothes were eaten, moths got in wine and food, and on cutlery and toothbrushes.’
It is as a result of this infestation ‘amounting to millions of moths’ that Iya – the daughter of late Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili – and Yevhen are asking the judge to reverse the sale of their house on the basis of alleged ‘fraudulent misrepresentation’ by the previous owner.
At the very least, they say, getting rid of the pests for good will set them back £9.7 million – the cost of ripping out the wool insulation from the walls, where the moths are believed to be nesting.
On the other side of this unpleasant row is William Woodward-Fisher, 68, a high-end property developer and former British rower, whose team competed at the 1977 World Rowing Championships in Amsterdam.
William and his wife Kerry, 64, bought Horbury Villa – previously owned by the actor and writer Martin Starkie – in 2011 and embarked on renovations costing £10 million, including tripling it in size to 11,000 sq ft and building a luxurious basement, before moving in in 2013.
During the building work, they installed the wool insulation which would – though they didn’t know it at the time – go on to become a very expensive problem.
While living at the house in 2018, it has been revealed, Kerry, an interior designer, was ‘bothered by clothes moths’ and enlisted pest controllers to kill them off.
They conducted such an extensive spray of the property that the couple – and their dog – had to move out temporarily and checked into a nearby hotel.
By July of that year, their lawyer told the court, they ‘appeared to have succeeded in their task’ – and there was ‘no visible moth problem’ at the time of sale.
William, for his part, says he never had an issue with them; if it hadn’t been for his wife, he wouldn’t have felt the need to do a thing.
If there is a moth problem, he says, Iya and Yevhen are to blame for ‘neglecting’ the property he spent so long restoring, and resorting to small-scale solutions such as traps and sprays from Amazon, rather than an effective extermination.
His barrister has also queried the lack of photographs of the alleged ‘infestation’, with just five items of hard evidence – including a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a holey shirt and a moth-eaten suit – submitted.
‘It is possible when reading some of the evidence in this case to imagine being inside the property like being in an insect house at a zoo,’ barrister Jonathan Seitler KC told the judge.
‘However, any given level of moth presence can bother one person whilst not bothering, or even being noticeable to, another.’
But at the crux of this legal debate is a pre-sale enquiries form, standard in any house sale, which William and Kerry completed in February 2019.
One of the questions on the form asked the Woodward-Fishers if there had been a previous ‘vermin infestation’ at the property. They answered ‘no’.
William says he told his solicitor at the time that they had experienced problems with moths, but was reassured that ‘moths were not vermin and therefore not relevant to this enquiry.’ And that, he believed, was that.
Now, almost five years later, he finds himself accused of negligence (at best) or fraudulent misrepresentation (at worst), for failing to disclose the previous pest issues during the sale.
Moths are notorious around these parts, where the streets are lined with grand, crumbling mansions and Victorian terraces full of draughty rooms and dark corners where they can lay their eggs and hatch their larvae.
Neighbours say they aren’t surprised to hear about the infestation, though neither party involved was available to comment on the ongoing case.
One neighbour says moths are ‘endemic’ in this part of the capital. ‘We had a moth infestation,’ she adds. ‘The carpets were brand new but because they had not been treated, the moths came.’
Another says she ‘sympathises’ with both sides, adding that builders ought to be aware of the ‘huge problem’ with moths here.
‘It’s the builder’s responsibility more than the owner’s,’ she adds. ‘The material they’re using should be sprayed with something that will repel the moths.
‘I do not think it’s the fault of anyone who sold the property. When they refurbished it from top to bottom, [the builders] should have taken preventative measures.
‘If moths have got into the insulation, they’re in a difficult position.’
Another local, who didn’t want to give his name, admitted that ‘older homes’ do have a problem with moths in the Notting Hill area.
‘£10 million?’ he asks, referring to the amount Iya and Yevhen claim it will cost to pull out the moth-infested insulation. ‘That’s expensive moths.’
Matthew Blackwell, a pest control technician with 16 years’ experience, whose company, Project Multi Pest, covers London and Kent, has seen all sorts – but says this seems a steep estimate for getting rid of moths.
‘It wouldn’t even cost that to get rid of moths in a tower block,’ he tells the Mail.
‘If they’re in the walls, I’d recommend heat treatment, because that’s the only way you can treat the area without causing any damage.
‘But it’s going to have to be really hot to get the inside of that wall to the desired temperature [at least 50C] to kill the moths. So this may cause damage of its own.’
William Woodward-Fisher’s counter-estimate of £162,652 to fix the moth problem, he suggests, seems far more reasonable.
The moths at Horbury Villa, Matthew explains, are likely to have been active in the house for at least a year before the owners noticed them. Once Iya and Yevhen saw them flying around, the infestation would already have taken hold.
‘Anything is vermin when it disturbs your quality of life,’ he adds.
For their part, Iya and Yevhen, who say they first spotted the winged invaders within ‘days’ of moving in, did pay for an extermination in 2020, which improved matters for their family.
But, they claim, these particular ‘vermin’ remain a daily plight.
It’s not the first time Iya, a political activist and director, whose debut work, The Unseen, a harrowing play about a totalitarian regime, is currently on a limited run in London, has made headlines because of property belonging to her family.
Last October, a £10 million mansion owned by her mother, Inna Gudavadze, dramatically burned to the ground just a day after a three-year, multimillion-pound refurbishment was completed.
Eight fire crews were called to the country pile in Leatherhead, Surrey, which was reduced to ruins in just a few hours – leaving Inna, 68, who had been staying in London with Iya and her sister, Liana, 44, ‘crushed’ by the loss of her ‘dream home’.
The three-floor, nine-bedroom property was built on the same £20 million estate as Downside Manor, where Inna lived with her late husband, Badri, and their two daughters, from 2006, and had since turned into a base for her staff and security.
Georgian businessman Badri, a sworn enemy of Vladimir Putin and the former business partner of exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, died at the manor house in 2008, after suffering a sudden heart attack at the age of 52.
Initially, there were fears he had been poisoned like Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB spy, whose death two years previously sent shockwaves around the world.
Police even tested his bedroom for radiation poisoning, and not without cause: Badri, who once had 120 bodyguards, said in an interview about his political opponents just months before his death: ‘I believe they want to kill me’.
Despite a definitive coroner’s report, rumours continued to swirl – and in 2018 Georgian prosecutors accused the country’s former president Mikheil Saakashvili, a bitter rival of Badri’s, of ordering his assassination. Saakashvili denied the charges.
The 2023 fire at his widow’s house, it seems, was nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence – but a painful one for the Patarkatsishvili family, who have fought hard to retain their wealth through troubled times.
Iya, her sister and their mother spent several years in court after Badri’s death, battling his business associates for their share of his estimated £9.5 billion fortune.
Having made his money in oil, gold mines, TV, casinos and property in his native Georgia, where he dabbled in politics and became one of the richest men in the country, Badri died intestate, sparking one of the largest legal battles in UK history.
At one point, Inna’s bank accounts were frozen, leaving the family ‘so short of cash that they could not even afford to pay for a funeral’, court documents say.
Supported by her daughters, she fought legal cases around the world – from Britain to Georgia, America, Gibraltar and Lichtenstein – and eventually won significant control of her late husband’s assets. Today, she’s worth an estimated £650 million.
Money, clearly, is no object in Iya’s family.
As a case in point, last year the Patarkatsishvilis donated £1.6 million to doctors in Ukraine – the country in which Yevhen, who co-owns a chain of dentist clinics in London, was born.
Getting back the huge sum they paid for their family home, plus compensation on top, seems to be a matter of principle; not necessity.
The same cannot be said for William Woodward-Fisher, whose barrister told the court this week that he ‘can’t afford to re-purchase the property’.
What was once a much-loved family home for he, his wife and their three children has, it seems, become something of a financial nightmare.
He and Kerry, who also own a £1.5 million riverside property in Wargrave, Berkshire, were seen grim-faced outside court this week, the case clearly taking its toll.
And as for the pests that have blighted both parties’ lives?
Moth expert Matthew Blackwell warns that even the most expensive extermination is unlikely to get rid of them for good.
‘It’s a bit like having mice,’ he says. ‘Whatever you do, chances are, they will come back.’
