Yahoo Finance The ultimate renovation project? Sixties concrete water tower listed for sale in Essex
If you are a would-be grand designer with a head for heights and an ambition to build a truly remarkable home then Felsted Water Tower could be just the thing.
The 1960s concrete landmark sits incongruously on the edge of the pretty Essex village of Felsted, and was once used to supply homes with water.
Now decommissioned the tower, which sits in a plot of about a fifth of an acre, is up for sale with a price tag of £325,000.
The site’s future owner could, subject to planning consent, insert floors to convert the tower into a home – perhaps using its lofty water tank as a viewing gallery – or build a house beside it and treat it as a very modern garden folly.
The tower was last sold, at auction, in November 2020.
Keen bidding saw its guide price of £140,000 smashed. It eventually sold for £202,000.
Buying the tower would be a bold move. Right now it doesn’t have planning permission to be converted and it is currently leased to a telecommunications company, which uses it as a mast tower, until 2030, earning an annual income of just over £10,000.
“We have had a fair amount of interest already,” said Danny Brewer, associate partner at the Unique Property Company. “I think that whoever buys the tower will utilise the land and build around it – not everyone can say that they’ve got a brutalist water tower in the garden.”
Felsted is in north west Essex, seven miles west of Braintree. The pub has a tearoom, two pubs, and is surrounded by open countryside. Trains from Braintree to Liverpool Street take around an hour.
Over the past three decades many water towers, built from stone, brick, steel, or concrete, have been decommissioned and they are regularly repurposed as homes.
In 2019 Knight Frank sold the 1930-built stone water tower near Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The circular tower had been bought at auction for £25,000 in 2016 and converted into a four storey, six bedroom house, which fetched circa £1.3m.
And in Ladbroke Grove the designer Tom Dixon bought a 60ft tall decommissioned water tower which he has converted into an eco-friendly, three-storey house close to the Grand Union Canal, complete with 360-degree reception room on the third floor.
