Property porn - my late Grandparents' house is back up for sale

[BigDraughtyHouse]

Here.

It'll be interesting to see who buys it and what they do with it. It's a very gracious house with huge rooms (not terribly well photographed) and lovely views, but it was designed to be run by an army of servants so it's not convenient for modern life. The gardens are amazing, although they are a bit run down since my Grandmother died. I think it would be a perfect place for a dedicated wedding venue.

Pay no attention to the arial shot, for some reason they have outlined a much smaller neighbouring property, which used to belong to my Great-Uncle and Aunt.

It looks amazingly lovely but why all the close ups of flowers and none of the bedrooms ??

There's no furniture in the bedrooms, and the decor is probably in a bit of a state by now. Granny died about five years ago and it's only had a caretaker living in it since then. I think there may be some damp if the roof has leaked and I know that the heating was broken for most of winter 2012-2013.

I didn't read your post before I looked at the link. I agree it screams wedding venue! Looks gorgeous, bet you had fun there as a child.

Oh yes, I have very happy memories. My parents' house backs onto one of the fields so we used to walk down and visit Granny or just roam the woods a lot. I had one of those mythical free-range childhoods.

Oh gosh, it sounds like my grandfather's place. It's in the West Country but quite close to a fairly large city, and he moved into it in 1948 and out when his wife died in 2005 or so. Many many happy memories of family holidays and running wild!

There's surprisingly few pictures of the house itself. Most of them are of the gardens. No kitchen pictures, no bathroom, no bedrooms.

I think they could really do with a floor plan. It's a very extensive house with quite a big 'service' area. There's a whole wing downstairs containing things like a dairy, a housekeeper's sitting room, a servants' sitting room, a butler's scullery, a gun room, a boot room, a laundry room etc, all of which would make good offices, storage and a generous one bed flat.

The kitchen is very outdated so not a selling point. The bathrooms also need to be done up, I think the most recently renovated one was done in the '80s. I guess the bedrooms are in quite a bad state because even without furniture most of them are beautifully proportioned with fancy plasterwork and big windows and so they should look good in a photo..

even without furniture or in need of an upgrade photos it need sphotos of bedrooms and kithchens.

What beautiful gardens - I can see that they're hoping to sell it to some people who want to cherish and maintain a historic garden, really. But on the other hand, even a garden lover wants to know what the house is like when they return to it at the end of the day.

21 acres of garden, though - that's surely 1 full-time gardener at the very least, not to mention the equipment required?

When my grandparents were living in it there was a head gardener, a groundsman and at least a couple of junior/trainee gardeners. Next to the yards/head gardeners house there is a beautiful walled kitchen garden where the beds are laid out in an intricate design and edged with knee-high box hedging and with lovely Victorian glass houses. It's nearly an acre, so the poor junior gardeners spent a lot of time doing rather dull digging-over type jobs there.

I can't imagine that it will be bought to be a home, the running costs are just huge. I think it's probably being aimed at a commercial buyer, possibly with an eye to getting the fields re-zoned as housing. The buyer who bought it from my family was a developer, who bought when the Irish property market was high and has since had all his property taken by NAMA (in UK terms it is the equivalent of a repossession, except that the Govt are liquidating it not the banks).

A bit of background from The Irish Times and The Independent