Even in today’s troubled real estate market, the challenges facing Updown Court stand apart.

A 50,000-square-foot English estate originally designed to resemble a Middle Eastern palace, Updown Court took 18 years to construct, with the last flourishes added in 2005. Among other features, the estate boasts 103 rooms (including 27 bathrooms), a 30-person home theater, five pools, a guesthouse, a gatehouse, a squash court, a snooker area, a tennis court, and a stable. (View a slideshow of more multi-million dollar homes that can't find a buyer.)

But the home’s most outlandish feature is surely its price tag: $139 million. That figure makes it both one of the highest-priced houses ever built on spec (without a committed buyer) and one of the world’s most ungainly white elephants. It has yet to attract a single acceptable bid in three years on the market. Its original developer went to jail. The new developers, Leslie Allen-Vercoe and Alan Mackinnon, both Britons, have tried in vain to unload it by periodically making changes in the hopes of attracting billionaires of different nationalities. The British tabloids have dubbed it the “house of horrors.”

Selling Updown Court wasn’t supposed to be this hard. When Allen-­Vercoe bought the unfinished estate out of receivership for $40 million in 2002, Middle Eastern wealth was well ensconced in London. The duo even hoped that Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, who has a summer home across the street, might make a bid (he never did). Allen-Vercoe’s plan was to borrow an extra $70 million, finish the place, then let the bidding begin.

But as the real estate landscape shifted, so did the execution of the blueprints. To catch the eye of the newly wealthy Russians who started moving to Britain, the men refashioned a gilded sultan’s throne room, adding heavy wood paneling. They also installed a spiral staircase modeled after the one in designer Gianni Versace’s Miami Beach mansion, a marble mosaic of Mount Fuji, and a heated marble driveway. The American architect was replaced, and a bevy of Italian workers were imported to make the bathrooms more European.

The construction drew so much attention that the estate was featured on a VH1 program, where it inspired a high-schooler from Missouri to form an Updown Court Facebook group (among those posting: George Penza, who says he is the mailman for Updown Court).

“At the end of the day, you can’t make anyone buy it,” says David Carter, a director at Country Houses U.K. for Hamptons International, one of the listing agencies representing Updown Court. He adds that there has been little domestic interest. And that’s putting it mildly. “It has more of an international flavor, so it’s not really worked from the English-buyer point of view.”