Investors looking to capitalize on the UK holiday market are snapping up UK country house hotels, with independent UK hotels worth £600m changing hands last year.
According to Knight Frank, the figure represents a 330 per cent increase compared to pre-pandemic sales in 2019, and two-thirds of sales – around £400m – were in the country house hotel market.
One of the deals is Ston Easton Park in Somerset, a listed house estate which is for sale for £6million, a bargain compared to its original asking price of £9.5million.
The Palladian mansion was the childhood home of Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. His father, William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981, bought it in 1964 and saved it from decay.
The 22,000 square foot property, offered for sale through joint agents Strutt & Parker and Knight Frank, is 13 miles from Bristol and was built in 1769 for Sir John Hippisley Coxe, a politician and distant relative of the Rees-Moggs.
Described by historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “extraordinarily magnificent”, it includes a Grade I listed gardener’s cottage, coach house and 24 acres.
It was a filming location for last year’s BBC production The Pursuit of Love, starring Lily James, and the second season of ITV’s historical drama Sanditon, based on an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, which premiered in March.
BBC1 filmed its upcoming psychological thriller Chloe there. The series stars Erin Doherty, who played Princess Anne in The Crown, and is due out in February.
Andrew Cronan of Strutt & Parker said: “In the 1950’s the local authority road authority wanted to demolish the house and put a road through it. Local historical society stakeholders saved the house by placing it under a preservation order. A large part of the Grade II listed features were the beautiful interiors and a plunge pool in one of the downstairs bedrooms – a Georgian ashlar bath set into the floor. The Georgians jump in and splash around for a minute or two. That’s apparently where the saying ‘take the plunge’ comes from.”
Rees-Mogg Sr. sold Ston Easton to Peter Smedley in 1978, who converted it into a country hotel. In the early 2000s, Andrew Davis’s Von Essen hotel group paid £5million for it. His 33-hotel chain went into administration in 2011 and the 23-bedroom property was sold for £3million in 2012 to Hamilton Bradshaw – the company owned by James Caan, a former Dragon’s Den investor. Davis bought it back a year later, but it closed in the summer of 2020. Davis placed the company under administration later that year.
All offers have so far been turned down – including two from UK families valued at over £7million who are planning to buy Ston Easton to convert it into a second home.
Last year’s biggest hotel deal was the sale of the Belfry Hotel & Resort in Sutton Coldfield, which was acquired by Goldman Sachs and Cedar Capital Partners for around £140m in November.
