Mike Oldfield didn’t get where he is today by thinking small. His most famous
work, the 1973 album Tubular Bells, was the fruit of laborious composition
and overdubbing. It was an instrumental epic on which Oldfield, then only a
teenager, played more than 20 musical instruments himself. The British rock
icon not only followed that with a series of other epics – including Tubular
Bells II and III – but also, dissatisfied with the primitive quality of his
original opus, recorded the whole thing over again from scratch in 2003. In
his spare time, he has learnt to fly aeroplanes and pilot yachts, and has
had an asteroid named after him. Recently he completed his first
all-classical album, Music of the Spheres, for which he assembled “about 86”
musicians at Abbey Road recording studios.
So when he laid eyes on Old Down House, in Tockington, Gloucestershire, in
2005, Oldfield wasn’t the type to balk at the scale and grandeur of the
place. The sprawling property, set in 54 acres, with its expanses of
Cotswold stone, its curvy gables, its tall mullioned windows, its coach
house, stable, staff apartments, walled garden, outdoor swimming pool, lily
pond, fishing lake and, of course, staggering views, immediately felt like
home.
At that time, Oldfield, now 54, and his French-born wife, Fanny, 30, were
living in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Giles, in a slightly
less grand property called Roughwood Croft. “We wanted more land for our
horses,” he tells me. “One year, it rained for six months solid, and the
paddock became a mud bath. It just seemed time to move on. I was actually
looking in the New Forest, but I couldn’t find anything there, so one day I
was looking on the internet. I was looking everywhere in the country. I
stuck the cursor north of Bristol – ‘What about there?’ – and up this house
popped, Old Down House. A big house with lots of land. So that day we got in
the car and drove up there.”
The property, originally known as Fern Park, had enjoyed mixed fortunes. Built
as a neo-baronial pile by a well-to-do Victorian, Thomas Johnson-Ward, in
the 1850s and 1860s, it survived for nearly a century before being gutted by
fire in 1952. It was extensively rebuilt in the 1970s, when much of the
interior was also modernised, which is what you did to period properties in
the sacrilegious 1970s. For a while it became Old Down Country Park, a
commercial attraction open to the public. You could pick your own fruit,
visit animals at a petting zoo and take tractor rides around the grounds.
“The old signposts were still there when I bought it, for the gift shop and
the tearoom and all that,” Oldfield says.
With part of the building destroyed by the 1952 fire, the east wing had become
separated from the main house by a stretch of land, which had been turned
into a car park. “The house was in bits,” he says, “but when I saw it, I
thought, ‘Ah, I’ll just join it all up to make a nice big house.’ ”
Oldfield’s work is distinguished by his ability to bridge disparate passages
to create long pieces of music; it seems he was now simply applying this
method in an architectural setting. Initially, he explains, he was thinking
of covering the existing outdoor swimming pool. Then inspiration struck, and
he decided to kill two birds with one stone and create a new indoor-pool
building over the car park, reconnecting the east wing with the house.
“I decided the new pool should be a wooden building, because there’s so much
stone in the house already.” Further south, he connected the old coach house
to the main building with another wooden-framed structure: a conservatory.
An old garage in the coach house was to have a new life as the essential
space within any Mike Oldfield home – the recording studio – and a smaller
adjacent room became his favourite place for composing. Reflecting other
Oldfield passions, the tearoom became a garage for the multimillionaire’s
collection of motorcycles, and an area of the grounds was furnished with
equestrian jumps – useful for Mrs Oldfield, who teaches horse-riding.
It comes as no surprise that Mike Oldfield, this sensitive musical
pastoralist, has enjoyed the views from Old Down House over the Severn
Estuary and the Bristol Channel. “It feels to me as if the place is right on
the edge of England,” he says, “because England stops at the Severn, and
then you’re in Wales. And being on the edge of something is rather nice, I
think.” The isolation of the place also ticked one of Oldfield’s boxes.
The first property he bought, in the mid1970s, was “a place called the Beacon,
which was like a shack on top of a very windy hill in Kington, in
Here-fordshire”. It cost £12,000 – which his boss at the time, Richard
Branson, deducted from his royalties.
But there were problems when it came to recording his third album, Ommadawn.
“There were neighbours all around, and they turned up en masse one
afternoon, complaining about the noise. It was a bit like the Frankenstein
movie, when they all come to get the monster. I put it up for sale the next
day. Ever since then, I’ve lived where there aren’t any neighbours.”
But the sun that beats down on Oldfield’s 54-year-old face today as we talk is
not the chilly autumn sun of England. This is el sol, the warming
sun of Spain. The capricious composer has decided to leave his homeland,
together with Fanny and their young son, Jake, and live somewhere in the
Balearic islands. “I’m looking for a smaller property this time,” he says.
“I’ve slowed down – I’m 7½ips [inches per second] instead of 30ips, in
recording-studio terms.”
Today he has been motoring around one of the islands on a BMW off-road
motorbike. He knows the Balearics well. “I’ve been coming here since the
1970s, because Richard Branson had connections here. I used to go and visit
Richard’s family in Minorca and stop in Mallorca on the way.” Two decades
later, he came to live in Ibiza, where he had a £2m house built after seeing
a plot of land advertised in this very newspaper. While he was there, he met
Fanny, and started work on Tubular Bells III – inspired by the dance music
he had heard in the island’s famous nightclubs.
Oldfield’s new Spanish life means that Old Down House requires a new owner; it
is on the market for £3.5m. Oldfield admits that the house is that rare
thing, a creative project he has left unfinished. “The whole place needs a
face-lift, really. I spent months agonising about the main staircase. The
one that’s there now is very 1970s. I spent some money getting various
designs done, and I’ll pass those on to whoever buys it.” Sadly, none of
those designs is tubular or features a bell motif. “I was going to refurnish
the whole place as well, but with a three-year-old child, there’s not much
point in refurnishing, because he puts chocolate sauce on everything.”
The property is not listed, with the exception of some fine wrought-iron
fencing with decorative stone piers outside in the grounds. “So, for
somebody buying the house, it’s a fabulous opportunity to create a bespoke
home,” says Richard Brooks, a director of Savills, which is handling the
sale.
“You could probably even make a golf club out of it, with all the land it
has,” suggests Oldfield, “or a health spa.”
A Sunday tabloid claimed last week that the musician was leaving Britain
because of the smoking ban in public places, portraying him as a
Hockney-esque grump. “No, it’s not just the smoking ban,” he says. “That’s
only one of lots of reasons. There are too many CCTVs, and Britain has
become a violent place: you can’t go out on the streets. But the number-one
reason is the weather. I don’t think I could live in a cold climate again.
It just affects my whole mood. You get the odd cold day here, but the rain
doesn’t set in like it does in the UK because of the Gulf Stream.” His pale
eyes twinkle as he guffaws. “I’m doing a bit of a Reggie Perrin, I suppose.
You know, ‘I’m selling everything! I’m off!’ ” The next Oldfield generation
will thank him for the move, he thinks. “We have another son coming in
January, called Eugene. We talk to him as if he’s already there. And it’s a
lovely thought that Jake and Eugene will grow up in the sunshine and learn
to speak Spanish.”
Perhaps it’s too much to expect highly creative people to be 100% consistent,
but I recall my interview with Oldfield just five years ago. Why, I asked
him, did he suddenly decide to leave Ibiza and return to the UK? “I wasn’t
happy,” he replied. “I missed England and the rain and the seasons.”
I’m not convinced that rainy England has seen the last of Mike Oldfield and
his family.
Old Down House, Tockington, is for sale for £3.5m through Savills Clifton,
0117 933 5803; www.savills.co.uk
Mike Oldfield’s new album, Music of the Spheres, is released in February
2008
