A gorgeous French Chateau located in the hills above the French Riviera has been ordered to be demolished after a 15-year court battle over the property finally came to an end. Patrick Diter bought a rundown 2,000-square-foot home on a huge parcel of land and started to expand on it. Chateau Diter, as he calls it, had been abandoned for years and regularly squatted in before he bought it. When Diter bought the property, a permit was obtained to put a small expansion onto the house. The problem is, Diter took it much further than that and over four years, the ramshackle 2,000-square-foot house grew to 32,000 square feet. Diter also put in a pool, a lake, heliports – everything you could possibly want or wish for in a property. There was only one problem – he never got the right permit for all those additions.
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A £48million mansion nestled in the hills above the French Riviera must be demolished after a court ruling brought a 15-year legal standoff to an end.
Property tycoon Patrick Diter built a 32,000 sq ft Italianate palace, dubbed Chateau Diter , on the site of what was once a modest 2,000 sq ft farmhouse without first obtaining planning permission.
The building work started in 2005 and in 2009 a group of disgruntled neighbours, led by British millionaires Stephen and Caroline Butt, took Mr Diter to court, deciding the building frenzy had to stop .
In 2015 an appeal court in Aix-en-Provence ruled that the chateau must be demolished. Only the small original house was spared.