The £6m bargain
This 19-bedroom pile near bath was once the Rees-Mogg family home. Now, with a £3.5m price cut, it’s a steal – for those with deep pockets, says Gary Parkinson
Ston Easton Park is a quintessentially English country house: the sort of Palladian country pile you can imagine the young Jacob Rees-Mogg skipping around in shorts before being called in for tea by Nanny.
It’s not just an idle fantasy. Ston Easton Park was indeed a childhood home for the young Rees-Mogg, part of a 250-year history involving dilapidation, redevelopment, reuse – and, recently, Covid-caused money problems that have slashed its asking price by £3.5m.
The house was built some time in the 1750s on the site of an existing Tudor dwelling. The owners, the Hippisley family, had already been lords of the manor of the nearby village of Ston Easton and surrounding swathes for two centuries since the dissolution of the monasteries, that lucrative and sweeping side-effect of Henry VIII’s marital plans which passed so much property from Church to crown and thence to private ownership.
Ston Easton Park remained in the Hippisley family until the 1950s, when crushing inheritance tax forced its sale. Threatened with demolition, it was given a preservation order – these days the house is Grade I-listed, the gardens Grade II – and in 1964 found a sympathetic buyer in William Rees-Mogg.
Soon to become editor of The Times (and, in 1969, father to Jacob), Rees-Mogg spent 14 years lovingly restoring it before selling to Peter Smedley, who converted it into a hotel and wedding venue later briefly owned by former Dragon’s Den presenter James Caan. But COVID-19 losses sent the hotel into administration and in early 2020 it was listed at £9.5m.
Now available at a substantially lower £6m, Ston Easton Park is ripe with possibilities. While it still has C1 permission for hotel use, it also holds C3 permission for residential use, so it could be reconverted into a truly stately home.
Either way, the potential is obvious from the moment you swish between the stone pillars with their pedimented iron gates and make your way up the long tree-lined drive between landscaped gardens: among its 28 acres of land it has 12 acres laid out by the renowned 18th-century designer Humphry Repton.
The house itself is typically Georgian in its tasteful symmetry and classical proportions. The main entrance has a three-storey central facade with Tuscan Doric portico, the attic storey ornamented by a relief of the Hippisley arms; the central block is flanked with twin two-storey square pavilions below pyramidal roofs.
And then there are the rooms, dozens of them, with period architectural decoration dutifully complementing the classical exterior: the drawing room has a central ceiling relief of an eagle. The dining room, breakfast room, sitting room and morning room form an enfilade – a series of rooms with aligned connecting doors, the better for separating and perhaps stratifying one’s guests – overlooking the garden, which is accessible from the morning room.
On the upper two floors there are no fewer than 19 luxe bedroom suites, one with its own roof terrace. The lower ground has a billiards room, games room, studies and the original kitchen, now pleasingly Edwardian.
Then there are the auxiliary buildings. The detached Gardeners’ Cottage, with stepped gables and river frontage and itself Grade II-listed, offers another three bedroom suites, while the single-storey Grade II*-listed Coach House needs renovation but has planning permission for conversion to a function suite.
You can see why Ston Easton Park was described by architecture historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “exceptionally sumptuous”, and has been used for historical location shooting including Robert Altman’s 2001 film Gosford Park and the recent TV series The Pursuit of Love. This is, after all, the sort of place that has a separate drive for tradesmen: a country house to make a short-trousered Rees-Mogg skip for joy.
• Ston Easton Park, £6m, struttandparker.com
Originally published in Metro, 18 Jan 2022
