When bookmaker Denise Coates clicked on the eBay ‘buy’ button for the £25,000 domain name for her once Portakabin-based bookies, she may have wondered if it would ever pay off. 

Two decades later as the 53-year-old workaholic boss of Bet365 it has and she has just paid herself £469million -the biggest salary in UK history.

Her lightbulb moment in 2001 – that the future of gambling was judi online – took her from that Portakabin to almost unimaginable wealth and the brink of completing a futuristic fortress home in Cheshire.

The space-age home has almost become a reality after she spent £5.5million buying up hundreds of acres of farmland.

It was dreamt up with the world-renowned architecture firm Foster and Partners, usually best-known for skyscrapers, airports and commercial buildings.

The sprawling home is set in 52 acres of Cheshire parkland and will include an artificial lake, sunken tennis courts, as well as stables, ornamental gardens, workers’ cottages and a boathouse.

It is in keeping with the private company head, who rarely gives interviews on account of her ‘not enjoying the attention’.

Her extraordinary success is a far cry from her years as a teenager she learned the trade working in her father’s Stoke based Provincial Racing outlets but could see where the industry was heading.

She convinced him to use them to secure a £15m loan from RBS, which she poured into developing Bet365.

By 2006 it had become so successful she sold those branches to rivals Coral for £40million.

Brother John, Denise and father Peter Coates of Bet365, which has handed out £607 million to managers this year alone

An artist’s impression of how the palatial home of Mrs Coates will look, complete with grass terrace near the roof

Designs for the planned house show an incredible palace of glass and steel in the making with work now well underway

The futuristic glass home is complete with a 7,000 square metre artificial lake, a boat house, a sunken tennis court, stables, walled gardens, a cycle path and a glass lake house on the water (pictured)

In December 2018 it was revealed that Ms Coates spent a staggering £5.5 million buying up hundreds of acres of farmland which surround her new space age home, snapping up 12 separate plots of land since 2014 

Concepts for the palatial property are found in the visualisation made by designers, which show a waterside paradise

The design is incredibly modern and can be seen on public planning application papers lodged with Cheshire East Council

Anyone for tennis?

The incredible designs feature a full-sized tennis court and what appears to be a viewing shelter

The property will also feature a modern outdoor space with stone chippings and glass play area surrounded by trees

The incredible property is well underway and could be seen being built earlier this morning, already looking like its design

Her father’s faith in what was then a risky concept has never been forgotten by her.

In one interview she admitted: ‘I am hugely indebted to my father for always believing in me and to my brother John who runs the business alongside me.’

The success story nearly never happened after she first trained as an accountant, following study of econometrics at the University of Sheffield.

She hated it and was said to have ‘jumped’ at the chance to take over her father Peter’s shops Provincial Racing.

One of her colleagues Debbie Tatton told the

The payday means that, between April 2019 and March 2020, she earned the equivalent of £1.3 million per day

Denise Coates pictured with father Peter (left) and brother John (right) in a business publicity shot back in the early 2000s

‘We became a lot more professional, a lot more customer-focused.

‘A lot of younger people started coming in, as well as a lot more ladies.’ 

It was working in an office above one of the shops in Tunstall, Stoke, in the late 1990s that she had the idea for Bet365.

The chain was turned round into healthy profit under her stewardship and it was a car park near to one of the branches Bet365 was born.

Her brother John remembered it well: ‘She just kept saying: ‘This is what we’re going to do, this is what we’re going to do.

‘The internet was there and she just felt sports betting was the thing.’ 

Working from a Portakabin, Mrs Coates created the brand but at first did not succeed in the way she may have predicted. 

Mrs Coates pictured with her father Peter, who is also a director of her betting company and who ‘always believed in her’