IN THE best bits of London rents, like prices, are high. The typical amount paid by businessmen for a prime central pad is £1,700 a week – £88,400 a year. But the £10,000-a-week rent now raises few eyebrows among prospective tenants. So what do you get for £520,000 a year, for which you could buy a Clapham semi?

The answer is a three-storey Georgian townhouse, bristling with architectural credentials, that has just become available in Marylebone. A cupola (more commonly called a dome) is just one of the many features.

The house, in Mansfield Street, is just a stroll from hip Marylebone High Street. Within five minutes you can be munching a hazelnut macaroon at Paul, one of the street’s patisserie hotspots. The house was built in 1770 by the Adam brothers, and was fully restored two years ago. In the 20th century it was for several decades the home of Sir Edward Lutyens, whose works include the Cenotaph, New Delhi and lots of Arts and Crafts manors.

The size of the place helps to justify the £10,000 weekly rent. There are six bedrooms – not counting staff accommodation – a ball-room-sized drawing room, a dining room, a study and a library. And if you still find it hard to believe that anyone would give £10,000 a week to a landlord (£1 per square foot of the property, since you ask), consider this: a nearby house is said to be for rent at £30,000 a week. This is more than £1.5 million a year. See what happens when Madonna moves into a neighbourhood.

What the Mansfield Street house does not offer is the upscale interior-decor clichés such as leather wallcoverings and abormally large baths for which tenants of ample means are supposed to have a weakness. The owners, who are letting out the property until they are ready to move in, think the house needs no such nouveau riche blandishments. The original ceiling mouldings are the most ornate detail.

Nicholas Drake, of Benjamin Clutterbuck, the property finder that is acting for the owners, says that potential tenants include collectors looking for a showcase for their art. Mansfield Street would certainly be suitable for this. Even on a dank day earlier this week light streamed down from the cupola onto the wide black-and-white paved hallway, making the austere stone staircase look like a Tate Modern installation. Marylebone is fast becoming a favoured quarter for the contemporary art crowd, who use their homes as galleries for their latest acquisitions.

The Mansfield Street property already has associations with a work of art, but not of the Britart type. Lutyens fitted out Queen Mary’s dolls’ house, his most celebrated small-scale achievement, in the drawing room: the hall is a tiny replica of that in the lifesize house.

The dolls’ house is on view at Windsor Castle. But I thought that Paul macaroons might be a cheaper and more convenient way to let my colleagues sample life at Mansfield Street.

Benjamin Clutterbuck and Nicholas Drake: 020-7602 6321 or 07900 681260.

FACT FILE

- Rents for prime property in Central London have risen 6.8 per cent over the past year, according to Knight Frank.

- Just 53.5 per cent of these tenants come from the UK: 25.4 per cent are North American and 12 per cent European. Asia Pacific expatriates are more likely to rent than those from Russia or the Middle East, who prefer to buy up prime property.

- Businessmen and women have the deepest pockets, paying an average of £1,700 a week rent, but those in the creative industries are not far behind, paying just under £1,500. IT workers pay on average £800 a week.

Times recommends

• Analysis: frustration for everyone - except investors
• Buy-to-let: professional investors cash in on the credit crunch
• Ten things you need to know about house prices