Scully, a house is out there

Hollywood actress Gillian Anderson has begun househunting in Notting Hill. "She's looking at mews houses and apartments with two to three bedrooms," reports a local agent. "She's prepared to pay around £1.75 million and is anxious that it should also suit her seven-year-old daughter, Piper." The star, who plays Scully in the X-Files, has fond memories of London, where she lived in Crouch End until she was 11. Last August, she revealed she was to quit the series and hopes to star in a West End production this summer.

Mollie Salisbury, the garden designer who helped Prince Charles transform Highgrove, is looking for a tenant for a cottage at her stately Jacobean pile, Hatfield House, near St Albans. The refurbished fourbedroom property, for rent at £500 a week, includes its own walled "secret garden". "It's extremely rare for a cottage here to become vacant," explains the estate office. Only discreet tenants need apply: the Georgian cottage not only adjoins Hatfield itself, occupied by Mollie and her husband the Marquess of Salisbury, but the Tudor palace where Elizabeth I lived as a child.

The scent of of stephanotis, hyacinth and jasmine may occasionally waft up to a two bedroom flat in Islington, for rent at £350 a week. It is above the florist shop of Paula Pryke, whose showbiz clientele include Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet and Jonathan Ross. "My husband [architect Peter Romaniuk] has done a grand job converting it into a very light and spacious flat," says Pryke. "And the bedrooms have direct access to a roof terrace - perfect for summer barbecues."

One of Knightsbridge's grandest houses, in Lennox Gardens, has changed hands for an estimated £15 million through Hamptons International. Builders are busy converting it from five flats into a lavish eightbedroom family home at a further cost of about £6 million. The buyer is said to be a younger member of the Getty oil dynasty. Cricket fanatic Sir Paul Getty might be intrigued to know that the MCC briefly leased the Lennox Gardens site as its ground in 1872.

Sebastian Conran, creative director of his father Sir Terence Conran's empire, is selling his double-fronted Victorian house off Ladbroke Grove for £2.95 million. This follows the recent break-up of his marriage to Habitat designer Georgina Godley, mother of his two children. Agents Domus Nova describe the six-bedroom home as benefiting greatly from its owner's creative flair. "Sebastian is looking for a smaller place in the same area. He's really into lateral living but still wants lots of entertaining space."