“Five-star prison”

Guy Somé’s phrase “Five-star prison” describes the contradiction at the center of Lula Landry’s Mayfair home: she chose it for its security, seeking refuge from harassment and media intrusion, but experienced it as confinement. Somé’s account also reframes the apartment’s open windows. Rather than treating them only as evidence that Lula had opened them herself, he recalls her habit of opening windows to hear London and remain connected to the world outside.

A refuge chosen under pressure

Somé says he had wanted Lula to move in with him when she could no longer bear her previous home. Instead, she bought the Mayfair apartment, roughly a twenty-minute walk from Somé’s home on Charles Street. He links her decision to accumulating threats and intrusions: a stalker delivered letters through her door at three in the morning, she had recently separated from Evan Duffield, photographers gathered outside her home, and she learned that her calls were being hacked. She had also gone to find her birth mother. In Somé’s account, the apartment was an attempt to get away from these pressures and feel safe.

The building’s round-the-clock security gave Lula the feeling of a fortress: she believed other people would no longer be able to reach her there. Somé, however, calls the apartment a “mausoleum,” echoing his description of its pervasive marble. The language turns a luxury residence into an image of enclosure, making its promised safety feel close to burial rather than freedom.

Security and isolation

The apartment’s protection came at a personal cost. Somé says Lula hated it from the beginning because it cut her off from what she enjoyed. She loved color and noise, being out on the street, walking, and feeling free. The secure home thus failed to meet a need that physical protection alone could not satisfy: contact with ordinary life beyond its guarded walls.

Somé’s explanation gives the windows a particular significance. The police regarded their being open, and Lula’s fingerprints on the handles, as reasons to doubt that she had been murdered. Somé does not dispute that she opened them; he offers a different account of why. She habitually opened windows even in freezing weather because she could not stand the silence and liked to hear London. A detail interpreted as evidence about the circumstances of her death also expressed her resistance to the apartment’s isolation.

Meaning of the phrase

“Five-star prison” compresses the mismatch between luxury and freedom into a single paradox. Lula chose the apartment to escape a stalker, photographers, and compromised privacy, yet its security separated her from the lively city she loved. The phrase does not imply that safety itself was unwanted; it marks the limits of a refuge built around exclusion. In Somé’s recollection, the open windows become the clearest counterimage to the fortress: Lula kept them open to let the sounds of London reach her.