The saga of world’s most expensive house started over at luxuo with Updown Court, the most expensive mansion in the world and the100 Million Dollars Trump’s Palm Beach Mansion.

As a matter of fact, one of our reader, who left a comment, was right : some villas on the French Riviera might be even more expensive !

Various sources said Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend Daria Zhukova have just bought a home in France for $500 million. The home in question, La Leopolda, is an elaborate villa located on the French Riviera… which has become the world’s most expensive house !

British Airways is going to buy the French all-business airline l’Avion for 54 million pounds ($107 million) as it steps up efforts to take advantage of the recent liberalization of transatlantic travel.

The privately owned airline flies two Boeing 757 aircraft with 90 seats each between Paris and New York. L’Avion has flown 65,000 passengers since its January 2007 launch.

The deal, which includes £26m of net cash on L’Avion’s balance sheet, will allow OpenSkies to raise its Paris Orly-New York flights to three per day. Both carriers use reconfigured Boeing 757 aircraft.

A seal of the Chinese emperor Kangxi sold at auction in the southern French city Toulouse for 4.7 million Euros (USD 7.2 million), a world record price for such an object, the sale`s organisers said on Saturday.

It is a world record for a seal and a European record for a Chinese object. It was bought by an unnamed buyer or buyers from China bidding by telephone.

The three kilogram (six-and-a-half pound) beige soapstone seal was one of 130 personal seals used by the emperor Kangxi, who ruled between 1662 and 1722.

Hotel Everland, the creation of Swiss artists Sabina Lang & Daniel Baumann, on the roof of Palais de Tokyo is an art consisting of an actual one-room hotel. It offers 1970′s-style glamour, a turquoise-tiled bathroom, a record player with a collection of vinyl discs, & a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower but remember no TV.

If you are interested in the room in the hotel, you can actually stay in it & is offered at a price of 333 Euros per night during weekdays & 444 Euros at weekends. But do remember it will remain atop the Palais de Tokyo until the end of 2008 only.

Via Crooked Brains

Krug, the French champagne house, has come up with a new way to attract luxury consumers by offering the world’s most expensive balloon rides, available in locations all over the world ; in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Tuscany, France – and Gloucestershire.

Besides the obvious trip up in a luxury balloon (gleaming hardware, basket lined with premium white leather) you also get gourmet dining complete with champagne and butler service while you’re in the air for a price tag of €50,000 for a group of up to 8 people.

Faced with surging demand, France’s champagne producers have decided on a very simple way to boost production by widening the vineyard.

A decision made by a French agricultural body on Thursday will allow producers to extend the area in which they are allowed to make the world’s most famous sparkling wine, until now restricted by a law dating back to 1927.

Sparkling white or rose wines are made in many parts of the world but only producers in a designated region of eastern France have the right to call their product champagne, under laws that establish it as a “controlled term of origin”, known under its French acronym AOC.