Zaha Hadid leaves estate worth £70m, reveals will

Photograph: Mary McCartney

Details of the late Zaha Hadid’s will have been revealed with the architect leaving an estate of £70m.

According to public documents obtained by Architects’ Journal, the British-Iraqi architect owned an estate worth £70,784,564 at the time of her sudden death last March. The documents also revealed that business partner Patrik Schumacher is the only non-family beneficiary named in her will.

As well as being a beneficiary of a a lump-sum immediate gift of £500,000, Schumacher is one of four executors that include her niece Rana Hadid, artist Brian Clarke and property developer and former Serpentine Gallery chairman Peter Palumbo.

The four executors, who are also the trustees of charity the Zaha Hadid Foundation, have been given 125 years from the date of Hadid’s death to distribute her estate.

If the executors fail to agree on how the wealth should be distributed within the allotted term, the sum will be given to the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

The bulk of the £70m estate comes from the value of Hadid’s assets in the UK, including Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), for which she was the sole shareholder, her other companies, plus her own private wealth, such as her penthouse apartment in Clerkenwell, London.

As well as the £500,000 Hadid gifted to Schumacher, she left a further £500,000 each to three named family members and £100,000 each to another two.

Just two months before hear death, Hadid was awarded the RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal for her liftetime achievements in architecture, the first woman to have been awarded the medal in her own right. She was also the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize for architecture, in 2004.

She was the architect of two Stirling Prize-winning buildings – the MAXXI in Rome won in 2010, and the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, south London, in 2011.