Home for now is a stunning block in Holland Park, west London, where even a modest three-bedroomed apartment costs £8.5 million and the pick of the crop is around double that.
The new development is a hymn to restrained good taste, all taupe and cream and Purbeck stone. The facilities include 24-hour concierge, full-time security, a gym, spa and underground parking, plus a library, wine cellar and a courtyard garden.
It is here that multi-Grammy award-winning singer Adele has been hiding out for a few weeks now, having discreetly bought the flat in 2022.
At first, she barely used it – having relocated to America in 2016, it had just been a pied-a-terre when she was in town, appearing on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show or similar.
But now it looks as if that is all changing. Multiple sources close to the 36-year-old say that – despite her hatred of British taxes, and her ‘seasonal depression’ which she blames on the lack of sunny weather – Adele is indeed planning to come back home, for good. Her co-manager and assistant, Rose Moon, has already relocated and Tottenham-born Adele is planning to do the same.
Multi-Grammy award-winning singer Adele, 36, is said to be planning to come back to Britain for good
So far she’s quietly spent the summer in the UK. She has been seen courtside at the O2 arena, watching basketball with her partner Rich Paul. She travelled to watch the Euros semi-finals in Dortmund with thousands of other England fans at the start of July.
Last week, she went for dinner in London at the Chiltern Firehouse and she’s also been seen at Mayfair’s Daisy Green cafe, where gourmet frozen yoghurt is a speciality.
Up next is a residency at a bespoke arena in Munich in August, followed by the tail-end of her Vegas residency, Weekends With Adele, at Caesars Palace in October and November.
But why is she thinking of quitting Los Angeles when she bought an eight-bedroom mansion in Beverly Hills for £44million as recently as February 2022?
She’s still in the middle of renovating that home, which previously belonged to actor Sylvester Stallone. She also owns at least two other homes in California, one of which is occupied by her ex-husband, charity boss Simon Konecki, where he spends time with their 11-year-old son, Angelo.
Which brings us on to the big question that hangs over Adele’s move to London: what it will mean for her relationship with Rich Paul?
Despite reports that Mr Paul proposed last Thursday while the couple were in London together, I’m told ‘nothing has changed’ between them.
He is a successful sports agent who has built up a massive empire thanks to his professional relationships with basketball players, most notably LA Lakers star LeBron James.
He also has three children from a previous relationship, all of whom live in LA. I’m told there is ‘no way’ he can relocate with Adele to London. The plan seems to be to shuttle back and forth on private jets, as schedules permit. They both think it can work, although not everyone is convinced.
One source says: ‘I can only speak for Adele’s London friends when I say that people think it’s not such a bad thing if she and Rich spend time apart.
Adele has been seen courtside at the O2 arena, watching basketball with her partner Rich Paul
‘I’m afraid that he has a reputation for being kind of arrogant and something of a social climber. Some of her friends don’t like him. At all.’
Even so, Adele is smitten.
They started dating in early 2021 after connecting at a post-Oscars party. ‘I was a bit drunk,’ Adele told Vogue. ‘I said, ‘Do you want to sign me? I’m an athlete now’.
‘He’s just so f***ing funny,’ she added. ‘He was dancing. All the other guys were just sitting around. He was just dancing away.’ He invited her out to dinner and said it was a ‘business meeting’. ‘I’m like, ‘A business meeting about what?’ she said.
‘And then it was the first time we ever hung out only on our own… So that was a very natural way, I think that’s how people would normally meet each other in real life.’ Adele has also described him as ‘very, very smart’ and that it was ‘incredible watching him do what he does’.
She also told Elle magazine in 2022: ‘I’ve never been in love like this. I’m obsessed with him.’
At the Brit Awards that year, Adele wore a huge pear-shaped diamond ring on her engagement finger, although in an interview she denied being engaged and said, ‘I just love high-end jewellery!’
By September 2023, though, she was referring to Mr Paul as her ‘husband’ in conversations with fans. The following month she was at the taping of a TV show where the host asked the audience if anyone had got married recently. ‘I did!’ said Adele. So was all of the above just her wishful thinking or hint-dropping?
From Mr Paul’s side it’s unclear – he declines to speak about her in interviews. But Adele is already planning more children. Speaking from the stage of Caesars Palace earlier this year she said: ‘Once I am done with all my obligations and all of my shows, I want to have a baby. I want a girl because I’ve already got a boy.
‘With me as her mother and Rich as her father, she’s going to be a bossy little queen, isn’t she?’ Paul did recently let slip that he was looking forward to being an older father and Adele says they have been discussing baby names. So is all of this talk of moving because Adele wants any subsequent children to be born here, as Angelo was?
Adele’s £44million eight-bedroom Beverly Hills mansion which the singer purchased in February 2022
Tottenham-born Adele is a proud and sentimental Londoner and is determined to never lose her London accent
I’m told, in truth, it is because Adele thinks it is best for Angelo, who has lived in LA for almost his whole life. As he reaches secondary school age, it seems Adele is keen for him to return ‘home’.
Adele is a proud and sentimental Londoner (as Foreign Secretary and her local MP, David Lammy, once said of the singer: ‘She supports Spurs and grew up in Tottenham and is sort of wonderful’).
The tragedy of the Grenfell fire – which happened a stone’s throw away from her current home – is something she felt deeply. She has been involved in supporting the Grenfell community financially and in their search for justice.
And Adele is determined never to lose her London accent.
‘She feels that it’s time to move,’ says a source.
‘Her best friends are in London, her mum is here, her cultural roots are here.’ I can reveal that she came very close to moving in time for the start of a new school year in September 2019, but got cold feet at the last minute. This time – post-pandemic – she is determined to make it happen.
Ultimately, the novelty of life in Los Angeles has worn off.
The city’s gated communities, high crime rates, high taxes and racial divides are beginning to grate. She was apparently horrified to learn that, in America, gun violence is the leading cause of death in children.
And while she is not a political person, the prospect of Donald Trump being re-elected president appals her.
The more puritan American attitude to alcohol also doesn’t chime with Adele.
Although she told an audience at her Las Vegas residency show last October that she had been sober for three and a half months, she is still said to have ‘cheat days’ on a Sunday when she gets ‘hammered’ on white wine spritzers.
After telling the crowd that she had stopped drinking, she lamented: ‘It’s boring. I mean, I was literally borderline alcoholic for quite a lot of my 20s, but I miss it so much.’
So important are those British attitudes and culture around drinking to the singer – whether she is imbibing or not – that she is even having a replica of an East End boozer constructed at the specially-built concert venue for her upcoming gigs in Munich.
A move home would also bring her closer to mum Penny, who raised her alone after her alcoholic father Mark Evans walked out on them when Adele was three years old.
Despite offers from her daughter, who is worth £165million and is her closest confidante, Penny has never joined Adele in Los Angeles.
The singer bought her a £1million home in Battersea, south London, a few years ago and they are in constant contact.
Angelo also spends time with his father Mr Konecki, who he remains close to despite his parents separating a year after their marriage in the spring of 2019.
Konecki and Adele have managed to navigate a happy relationship as divorced parents, and she revealed in 2021 that she calls him ‘Simon the diamond’ and would ‘still trust him with [her] life’.
The singer described the Old Etonian as ‘grounded’ and says she is forever grateful that she had him at her side during her stratospheric rise to stardom.
‘I feel like him and Angelo were angels sent to me. He came at such a moment, where the stability that he and Angelo have given me, no one else would have ever been able to give me. Especially at that time in my life.
‘I could’ve easily gone down some dodgy paths, sort of self-destructive from being so overwhelmed by all of it. And he came in and he was stable, the most stable person I’ve ever had in my life up until that point.’
It was also important to Adele that her son has the father she never had. ‘Simon is so invested and so interested.
‘He gets onto [Angelo’s] level in anything. Whatever Angelo is into, what he wants to watch, where he wants to go and play, his new f***ing playground games that change every week – he is a big child in that sense of being so curious with him.’
She added: ‘I was like: I’d be a f***ing damn fool to walk away from this man being the father of my child compared to any other man that I encountered before or after… I would’ve regretted that, for ever!’
Mr Konecki, who comes from a wealthy family, has another child living in Brighton with his first wife and business interests in the UK.
Having both children in the same country will no doubt be helpful for him, should Adele move.
One thing which is clear is that this upheaval means Adele’s fans shouldn’t expect any new music from her for quite some time.
‘My tank is quite empty at the minute. I don’t have any plans for new music at all,’ she revealed to a German interviewer.
‘I want a big break after all this and I think I want to do other creative things just for a little while. You know, I don’t even sing at home at all. How strange is that?’
