Stroll a mile from Damien Hirst’s new London residence — a palatial, neo-classical mansion overlooking the boating lake in Regent’s Park, for which he reportedly paid £34 million — and you’ll find one of the gallery-style shops he has opened to peddle his exorbitantly priced handiwork.

When I call into the store, off Oxford Street, and feign interest in a dead butterfly stuck to a turquoise tile (mine for £46,000, including VAT) and a framed white square embossed with four coloured dots (a snip at just £3,600), the young salesman tells me insouciantly that the pieces on display here were all ‘conceptualised’ by the great man himself.

He didn’t actually create them by his own hand, is the unspoken message. Much like the creator of a haute-couture fashion label, he is simply responsible for the overall design.

Customised: Artist Damien Hirst, pictured left in 2008, was seen wearing a jacket with an image of his famous diamond-encrusted skull printed on the back as he arrived at celebrity hotspot Chiltern Firehouse on Friday



The same goes for the bewildering array of trinkets available on his website: bags and bracelets, magnets, mugs and matchbooks, jigsaws, T-shirts, and £250-a-roll wallpaper — all in the dottily distinctive Damien style.

The minions who arrange the preserved insects and daub the perfectly concentric circles — leaving Hirst free to enjoy the spoils of a fortune estimated to be anywhere between £250 million and £400 million — are to be found toiling in his various factories, tucked away in less salubrious parts of the capital and in the West Country.

This week, one of Hirst’s main workshops, running the length of an entire South London street, was closed for refurbishment, and will reopen as an art complex including galleries, offices and a restaurant.

Controversial: Damien Hirst and one of his butterfly works, which was created by his minions

There was also an air of August inertia about his warehouse, on a modern industrial estate in nearby Peckham.

Two hours down the M4, however, in his newest production plant — a vast, metal hangar in Stroud, Gloucestershire — his ‘technicians’ were churning out the replicas and prints that have helped make him the richest artist in history: wealthier than Picasso, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali combined.

Whether his pieces are in as great demand as they were six years ago, when he made £111 million at a single Sotheby’s auction, and everyone who was anyone simply had to have a glass tank displaying one of his garishly preserved creatures, or one of his diamond-encrusted skulls, is a matter for some debate.

The suggestion that his bubble has burst, or at least been deflated, was supported this week by several art experts.

Julian Spalding, who has run several major British galleries, dismisses Hirst’s work as ‘con-art’.

‘He’s run out of ideas — not that he ever had many — and is a spent force,’ he told me, using the emperor’s new clothes analogy to suggest that people have finally seen through his artistic shortcomings.

Critic Brian Sewell agrees. ‘There have been a number of auctions at which his works failed to sell,’ he said.

‘The days when he could have another shark pickled and sell it for a vast sum to some Russian or Chinese millionaire who knows absolutely nothing about art, without doing any work, would seem to be over. That said, he’s still getting either side of £100,000 for his spot-paintings, so he’s hardly on his uppers.’

Indeed not. Hirst, who has frequently confessed his desire to amass a great deal of money, and was famously described by a New York critic as ‘a cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth’, is far too acute an entrepreneur for that.

Well-off: Hirst's £34 million palatial, neo-classical mansion overlooking the boating lake in Regent’s Park

His new Regent’s Park house, the second most expensive London residence sold in the past year, is the jewel in a portfolio that includes homes in Thailand, Mexico and the fabulous 300-room Toddington Manor near Cheltenham.

Then there is his ever-growing stake in the North Devon resort of Ilfracombe, or ‘Hirst-on-Sea’, as locals call it, where he owns a quayside restaurant and gallery, as well as a rambling farm. His unlovely 65ft statue of a pregnant woman, naked and with her belly dissected, dominates the prom.

Hirst seems eager to play the landed gent with not only his own country estate, but an entire town of tenants under his fiefdom.

Ilfracombe now awaits his latest grandiose vision: a new community on its southern fringes, with 750 homes, plus shops and other facilities. Quite why the one-time enfant terrible of art should wish to become an urban developer isn’t clear, but this week, land clearance for his plan was getting under way.

Meanwhile, Hirst, now 49, sober for eight years after coming close to self-destruction with cocaine and booze, and the proud father of three sons, Connor, 19, Cassius, 12, and Cyrus, seven, has been busy consolidating his business affairs.

He is involved with no fewer than 17 companies — most of which he controls outright. Until five years ago, he held direct stakes in all his businesses, and shares in his companies were registered in his name.

But then a company, Science Ltd — wholly owned by Hirst — was set up in the tax haven of Jersey, and ownership of Hirst’s main UK companies was quickly switched from his name to Science Ltd.

However, the most pressing question for Hirst concerns his personal life and relationship with long-time partner Maia Norman, the mother of his sons, who left him two years ago. Hirst and his Californian lover had been together for almost 20 years, and were thought to be inseparable.

Both rose from tough beginnings. Born in a home for unmarried girls, Hirst was the product of a holiday fling between his mother and an unknown beach photographer — ironically in Jersey.

The days he can pickle another shark or cow and sell it off to wealthy Russian buyers are over, critics say

He went off the rails at 12 after his stepfather left home, fighting and housebreaking.

Maia didn’t know her biological father either. She has spoken about being beaten up and suffering sexual abuse during an adolescence spent in feral, marijuana-fugged squalor before travelling to London, where she met Hirst.

A surf-lover, she was behind their decampment to Devon. But when Hirst went on the wagon, she admitted to finding his sobriety ‘boring’.

Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that, at almost 50, she fell into the arms of gung-ho former Scots Guards officer and mercenary, Tim Spicer. The artist was said to be devastated, but recovered enough to take out stylist Roxie Nafousi, then 22 and less than half his age.

Fast forward two years, and how have matters evolved?

Both couples have gone their separate ways. Moreover, according to close observers, in Devon this week there are even signs that Hirst and his soul-mate might get back together.

At the very least, they are on good terms. She has told how they still swap texts and she calls him ‘adorable . . .the funniest man alive.’

Hirst, for his part, is believed to have dug deep to ensure Maia, remains living close to him, in the manner to which she has become accustomed.

He's richer than Picasso, Warhol and Dalí together

Though she is independently well-off through her fashion label Mother Of Pearl, he is said to have splashed out £1.5 million to install her in Southcliffe Hall, a six-bedroom pile with scenic valley views, close to his farm, which was built for a well-heeled, 19th-century clergyman.

The house is now undergoing extensive renovations.

Having sown her wild oats with Spicer, it seems she Maia is even embracing a staid country lifestyle herself.

‘She has paid her £5 annual subscription to the residents’ association, and a friend of hers has contacted the Women’s Institute saying she and Maia would like to join,’ said a neighbour this week.

‘She is a lovely, friendly lady who spends a lot of time here and is really getting into local life.’

From marijuana joints to jam and Jerusalem.

So why has Hirst, who now gets his kicks pottering around the kitchen and strolling on the shore with his sons, splashed out such a vast sum on the Regent’s Park house?

With 18 bedrooms, after all, it isn’t exactly a cosy bachelor pad.

One suggestion is that he regards it as a canny investment. And as estate agents estimate that its value could more than double after refurbishments, he is probably right.

Another theory holds that there is a poignantly arriviste motive behind his acquisition of the finest property on a history-steeped terrace, where some of our most notable artists and writers, among them Wilkie Collins and H. G. Wells, have lodged.

That, despite his insistence he doesn’t care if many among the establishment dismiss his work, he longs to be accepted, and ownership of one of London’s finest period homes might help achieve this.

Whatever his reasons, he’s come a long way from the humble house in Headingly, Leeds, where his mother splodged multi-coloured spots on the white front door, unwittingly launching the pattern that makes him millions — without him having to go anywhere near a pot of paint.

‘What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect,’ runs a typically provocative Hirst aphorism.