Yahoo Finance For sale: a home built for a Prime Minister that comes with a £100,000-a-year business
In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen mentions the hamlet of Petty France in south Gloucestershire as a dull staging post on the road between Bath and the fictional abbey: “There was nothing to be done but to eat without being hungry,” she writes, “and to loiter about without anything to see.”
Petty France is home to just 16 houses. Its name, at least according to one theory, is thought to have derived from the Huguenot weavers who emigrated there during the time of Henry VIII.
It lies on the A46 between Bath and Stroud, on the edge of the Duke of Beaufort’s 52,000-acre Badminton Estate.
Just before Northanger Abbey was published (and possibly following Austen’s last visit), the final roofing slate was laid on a grand, 11,500 sq ft manor house. Commissioned by Charles Jenkinson, 1st Earl of Liverpool, it became the country seat of his politician son, Robert Jenkinson, Lord Liverpool, who served the country – with mixed success – as Prime Minister between 1812 and 1827.
Despite Austen’s lacklustre opinion of the place, over the ensuing decades the Manor House played host to, or was owned by, an illustrious stream of mostly aristocratic names including the victorious Duke of Wellington following the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord and Lady Bathurst and descendants of the poet William Wordsworth.
In the Sixties, the manor was converted into the Petty France Hotel, and the line of famous house guests continued to grow. They included Sir Anthony Hopkins, Edward Fox, Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, who, as local lore has it, was staying at the hotel when he landed the career-making role in Four Weddings and a Funeral. So delighted was Grant that he threw an impromptu party.
But by 2002, the house was lying empty, having been stripped of everything that could be sold, even down to the doorknobs. That’s when it caught the eye of serial reinventor Lynda Sanderson and her architect husband Gerry. “With two young children, we’d outgrown our home, which was an apartment carved out of a country house in Oxfordshire, and it was time to move,” says Sanderson. “As a Londoner born and bred, I wanted to be near a city and so we chose Bath. Then I drew a 20-mile radius around it and called up every agent who covered that patch telling them that we wanted a large country house with a garden, which cost next to nothing.”
Famous house guests included Sir Anthony Hopkins, Edward Fox, Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, who, as local lore has it, was staying at the hotel when he landed the career-making role in Four Weddings and a Funeral
Improbable though the brief sounds, the following day particulars for a “huge shell of a house” landed on the doormat from Savills in Bristol. “It was a total wreck, with scary Eighties-era pink bathrooms and it hadn’t been lived in for 18 months. My husband, usually the more rational of the two of us, said we should buy it. And so we did.”
Strapped for cash, the family began the slow process of bringing the manor house back to life, room by room. They scoured salvage yards for fireplaces and decorated on a shoestring, yet still managed to install an indoor swimming pool and hot tub. But when tragedy struck a few years later and her husband succumbed to cancer, Sanderson was left with two young children and her elderly in-laws to look after.
Having originally trained as an opera singer at the Guildhall School of Music, Sanderson’s career had already taken some unusual turns. She spent a year working on the French Riviera organising summer entertainment for holidaymakers, then later established an estate agency in south-west London – until the 1990 recession hit – and a PR firm. “After that I set up a PR agency knowing very little about PR, but I’m good at thinking out of the box,” she says.
That spirited thinking led her to come up with the concept of “Le Weekend” at the manor. “The house has 15 bedrooms, most of which we weren’t using, so I had this idea that gangs of friends could come and stay and treat it as if it was their own for the weekend. I would do all the catering – from Friday night supper by the pool, to a celebration dinner with cocktails in the reception hall on Saturday and through to a big English breakfast on Sunday.”
Sanderson set about marketing her new service, charging £199 per person inclusive of everything. It didn’t take long for the first guests to arrive and, for the first year, Sanderson was at once the patron, chef, cleaner, chamber maid, and business mind of Le Weekend.
Rarity – at the time, the concept of letting grand country houses for weekends was relatively new – and location played their parts. “We were soon booked every weekend and the concept really took off, but I was left hanging in rags managing it all on my own.”
Today, Sanderson is assisted by a small team made up of her son, Oliver, 26, her husband John Passmore, and Marcin Swiergosz, a Polish au pair who arrived at the beginning and never left. The house is now divided into four properties, each with their own entrance, and can expand and contract on demand. With an average of 95 per cent occupancy, the business earns more than £100,000 a year, for which Sanderson says she only works two days a week.
Now ready to retire, she is looking for someone else to take on the baton of the manor house, either as a going concern or a family home. Perhaps somewhat predictably, given her nature, she’s not going down the ordinary route of selling through an estate agent, and is instead marketing the property by herself for £1.795 million (01454 311462).
“We have lived very happily in the south side of the property, which has five bedrooms and wonderful living rooms, while the letting areas are at the rear of the house, with separate access along a private track,” she explains. “I think it represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a classic country lifestyle in a beautiful manor house while having the financial support of the revenue from weekend guests.”
