Grahame Bond positively oozes enthusiasm for England’s erstwhile grand country
houses. “Don’t you think it’s sad that posh houses are falling into
disrepair? Can you believe that rococo ballrooms are being used for
commercial furniture storage? In the 1980s, Country Life ran an article on
Halswell House — ‘Arcadia under the Plough’ was the headline. I mean, really
” Bond, the proud owner of Halswell in west Somerset, is one of a new breed
of entrepreneurs, frustrated at the lack of stately homes for sale, who have
turned their bank balances and energies to rescuing them from institutional
use.
A century ago England’s country houses were homes to the landed gentry,
playing host to royals, balls and hunts. During the second world war,
however, many were requisitioned by the armed forces. In the years that
followed, large numbers languished as schools, conference centres, hotels
and hospices. Others were divided into bedsits or retirement homes.
Now the wheel has turned full circle — the partition walls are being ripped
out, annexes knocked down and the buildings restored as private homes. It is
a trend sweeping through Britain — with dozens of country houses coming back
into family use every year.
Bond, who made his money in property, is one of this new wave of country house
buyers. He snapped up Halswell House for £1.94m; the Grade I-listed
16th-century building had been divided into a warren of bedsits, while the
state rooms were being used as a commercial storage depot. Today, after an
£800,000 restoration programme, it is an elegant 12-bedroom home again,
worth an estimated £4m.
Many would have been daunted by the size of the task — Halswell was riddled
with dry rot. Bond initially set aside £2m for restoration and hired 30
Polish builders. With all works needing to pass English Heritage’s
painstaking requirements, lengthy bureaucracy could have meant ruinous
delays. But his straight talking paid off.
“Getting through the paperwork alone was going to cost £40,000. I said I can’t
do that — by the time we get through that pile of papers you won’t have a
house left,” explains Bond.
“I put my deal on the table, outlined what I could do, and English Heritage
agreed. Luckily, the flats had been done so cheaply you could just push at
the partition walls and they fell through.”
But surely the costs of running such a house are astronomical? Not at all,
says Bond. While he lives in the main house, he also has a plan to rent it
out for wedding parties at £4,500 a pop to cover costs. Meanwhile, the band
Radiohead has hired a wing where they will record their next album.
Now Bond has set his sights on transforming Alfoxton Park, Wordsworth’s former
home, also in Somerset, used since the early 1960s as a hotel.
So what’s behind this yen for country-house living? Ann Bond (no relation), a
historic buildings inspector who has recently overseen a dozen
institutionalised grand piles in the East Midlands being turned back into
homes, sums it up: “Money”.
“There’s lots of it about right now,” she says. “Plenty of people have got
money, whether they made it in the dotcom bubble or from mobile phones or
from property dealing. And there are only so many bits of history to buy.”
Rupert Bradstock, managing director of Property Vision, a top-end buying
agency, agrees. One in five of his clients wants to build their own country
pile, he says, “but with land increasingly difficult to get planning
(permission) on, purchasing these old buildings and renovating them is a
good alternative”.
And the time and money spent on them is proving a shrewd investment. Latest
figures from estate agency Knight Frank show prices of the grandest country
houses, those valued at more than £3m, rose 16% in the year to the end of
September — equivalent to £875 a day. The forecast for next year is also 16%
growth for the “very best country houses”, double the national average.
The boom is driven largely by the same City bonuses that have already pushed
up prices in the smartest parts of central London to new record highs in the
past few months. “The phones began to ring last October and have never
really calmed down,” says Rupert Sweeting, head of Knight Frank’s country
house department. “We expect the same phenomenon this year. We will be
moving into the bonus market with very low stock level, putting even greater
strain on prices.”
It is a message not wasted on property developers. Cathedral Group is selling
the Grade I-listed Sundridge Park Mansion in Kent, a Nash-designed building
that hasn’t been a country house for 85 years, complete with planning
permission and architects’ designs to turn it from a hotel back to a private
residence. The price tag? A cool £8.5m.
Richard Upton, Cathedral’s chief executive, explains the thinking: “A couple
of years ago we bought Foxbury Manor, in Chislehurst, two miles from
Sundridge Park, which was being used as a conference centre. We sold it for
just under £7m to one of the new captains of industry, a chap involved in
health care, who spent another £2m transforming it. Now it’s worth about
£14m, maybe more.”
“Houses of this quality are just not being built any more. John Nash isn’t
designing any more houses. The first buyers who take these houses out of
institutional use can do very well.”
Ann Bond was one of English Heritage’s advisers on the project. In some of the
houses whose restoration she has overseen, the pull is more personal. Take
the magnificent 18th-century Grade I-listed Staunton Harold Hall in
Leicestershire, which was used as a Sue Ryder hospice for years.
In its glory days in the early 20th century, John Blunt’s great-grandfather
was the local butcher who supplied the 10th Earl of Ferrers at Staunton
Harold.
Today, Blunt, 71, and his wife Jackie are the proud owners of the hall, which
they bought three years ago for £2.2m. They have since spent hundreds of
thousands of pounds taking down the hospice’s white tiles, furnishing and
refurbishing the 83-room hall. Hosting 10 weddings a year in the state rooms
brings in £40,000 towards the running costs of a house now worth at least
double its purchase price.
The building’s institutional past still lingers, however. Relatives who
scattered ashes of loved ones in Staunton Harold’s grounds visit. “We ask
them to plant bulbs, not bring flowers — we don’t want the place looking
like a cemetery,” says Blunt. Every year a memorial service is attended by
up to 100 people. Nonetheless, Blunt is “loving to death” every minute of
his new home.
Blunt’s son Richard, 44, meanwhile, lives with wife Lynne and three children,
William, James and Amelia, at Clifton Campville Hall, 14 miles away. “During
the war my dad would not have believed the family could live in these grand
houses. It’s a sign of the changing times,” he says.
He bought Clifton for £230,000 in 1996 and finished the restoration seven
years later. Ask him what it’s worth now and he laughs. “A Queen Anne
country house with walled garden — I’d hate to think,” he says.
Bradstock of Property Vision, however, sounds a note of warning: “There are
downsides to starting a project such as this,” he says. “Delays with
building and restoring the property are almost always a given, as are cost
overruns.”
James Perkins, 37, a property developer, faced these problems when he bought
Dowdeswell Court in Gloucestershire for £1.6m six years ago. A 46- bed
nursing home, it had been a Rolls-Royce training college and, during the
war, an RAF college. “The QM even came on a hush-hush visit,” he says.
“It was the most beautiful house — and because it was in a sorry state I could
afford it,” says Perkins, who lived there with Françoise Sinclair, his
girlfriend. “Once we turned off the heat we had grass growing in one wing
because damp-proof courses had never been put in.” They played musical
bedrooms for months, moving their bed as the £2m restoration programme
rolled through the house.
Dealing with the local council and the paperwork was “a nightmare”. “The
council was horrified by its state. All the fireplaces had been removed
before I bought it. They took it out on me. I could not take off a door
without getting written consents and a drawing done.”
It was all worth it: the nine-bed, nine-bath house in 11 acres was sold to a
City buyer for more than £4.5m six months ago. “I made a profit as long as
you don’t cost my time in,” says Perkins.
The scale of the work has not put him off. He recently bought Aynhoe Park in
Northamptonshire, a 17th-century house that was being used as retirement
flats, and plans to magic it back into a grand country house, too, making
this one his family home. “I think it’s great that people can afford to live
in these houses again,” he says.
Sundridge Park Mansion is for sale for £8.5m with Savills, 020 7016 3717, www.savills.com,
and James Johnston, 020 8858 9986, www.jamesjohnston.com
