However, even her standards were not deemed sufficient to house the ego that is Simon Cowell. "It's simply not good enough, " the British music mogul and reality TV judge is reported to have said, in his characteristically blunt style, of the house he bought from J-Lo.

Last year, Cowell splashed out $10 million for the Latino star's mansion in Beverly Hills, and planned to set up an LA base with his girlfriend, the model and TV presenter, Terri Seymour.

However Cowell, a judge on American Idol and The X-Factor, has since decided he doesn't like Lopez's style and rather than redecorate has decided to tear down the mansion and build a new one from scratch, at a cost of approximately $5 million.

"I had loads of great ideas for what I wanted to do with it, so it made much more sense to knock it down and start again. The location was perfect so we decided it was the easiest thing to do, " Cowell told friends in the US.

Knocking the confidence out of most of what he sees is the man's forte of course - all making what some Irish owners are doing to their homes, in terms of radically transforming old houses into new, seem timid by comparison.