Georgian mansion boasts 64 bedrooms, a ballroom and 88 acres and is on the market – all for the price of a two-bed flat in one of London’s most expensive areas
Georgian mansion – It could be perfect for those with a very extended family or a hatred of leaving anyone at all off the weekend guest list.
A Georgian stately home with 64 bedrooms, a ballroom and 88 acres is on the market. Should the prospective buyer happen to own a two-bed flat in one of London’s most expensive areas, he or she will probably be able to trade up and have some change left for furnishings.
Hawkstone Hall is on an estate which dates back to 1556 and has been owned by baronets and a Member of Parliament.
The main home, built around 1700 by Sir Richard Hill, is grade I listed, and has more than 20,000 sq ft of living space including the ballroom, a Venetian saloon, numerous other reception rooms and 14 bedrooms.
The ballroom was built for Sir Rowland Hill, the fourth baronet, in 1832 at a cost of £2,400, an enormous sum at the time. He tore out the original chapel to make way for it.
After Rowland Clegg-Hill, the third Viscount Hill, died bankrupt in 1895, it passed to George Whiteley, a Liberal MP who became Baron Marchamley and made a number of additions including an indoor swimming pool.
But it was sold in 1926 on his death. Over the years parts of the original estate were sold before its final break-up after the First World War.
The wider Hawkstone Park is now a separate property, including pleasure gardens, a Norman castle, a series of follies and two 18-hole golf courses, conveniently situated for any buyer of what was once its main house.
However the hall still has extensive, landscaped grounds.
For the past 90 years, the estate, near Shrewsbury has been owned by the Redemptorists, a Roman Catholic missionary organisation, and mostly used as a seminary.
It built a Romanesque church in the grounds in 1932 to replace the lost chapel and in 1962 replaced the north-east service wing with a residential wing comprising 50 single bedrooms.
In case that is not enough space, there are two additional houses in the grounds.
Hawkstone Hall’s visitors over the years have included Samuel Johnson, the writer and lexicographer, who described being captivated by the estate in his diary in 1774.
“By the extent of its prospects,” he wrote, “the awfulness of its shades, the horrors of its precipices, the verdure of its hollows, and the loftiness of its rocks, the ideas which it forces upon the mind are the sublime, the dreadful and the vast.” In recent years, the hall has been run as a retreat for priests, but the trustees have decided to sell.
It was originally put on the market for £5 million, but the trustees have reduced the price to £4.25 million. It works out at around £97 per sq ft, one eightieth of the price of a property on One Hyde Park, Knightsbridge. The full sum could buy a three-bedroom terrace house in Queen’s Gate Mews, South Kensington, or a two-bedroom flat near Piccadilly, central London, currently on the market with Chesterton’s.
The hall is for sale with estate agent Barbers and Reeves and Partners, which expects a member of the super-rich is the most likely buyer, turning it back into a single home.
Mike Artham, the managing director of Barbers, said: “You get a lot for the price, particularly when you compare it to parts of London where the same amount of money may only buy you a small flat.
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