Two country properties have been transformed and converted with love over the years and now offer superior family accommodation

Although born in Edinburgh, architectural consultant and country-house restorer Mel Herman has lived in North Wales since the age of one, a fact that Cadw, guardian of Wales's built heritage, must rate as Scotland's loss and the principality's gain. Having saved historic, Grade II*-listed Llannerch Hall, Denbighshire, from dereliction in the 1980s, Mr Herman has spent the past 14 years painstakingly restoring another architectural gem, Grade II-listed Benarth Hall at Conwy, in a manner described by Cadw as ‘exemplary'.

Now, following Mr Herman's recent retirement, he and his wife, Liz, are downsizing, so Benarth Hall is on the market with Strutt & Parker (01244 354880) at a guide price of £2.35 million. But the vendors won't be moving far. They have planning consent to build a new, eco-friendly house in the hall's two-acre walled garden, which they've retained, along with 10 of Benarth's 60 wooded acres overlooking the Conwy estuary.

Benarth Hall was built in about 1790 for London lawyer Samuel Price, and probably designed by Samuel Wyatt, who was then agent for the Penrhyn estate. Price died at Benarth in 1798, the same year that Turner visited the house and sketched Conwy Castle from Benarth Point. These sketches were the basis for several Turner paintings of the castle, one of which sold at auction last year for £325,250. But the property's artistic connections don't end there-not only was Queen Victoria's favourite sculptor, John Gibson, born on the estate in 1790, but the hall was let to Sir George Beaumont, co-founder of the National Gallery, from 1800 to 1803.

 * Subscribe to Country Life and save 40%

In 1805, Thomas Burrowes, MP for Co Longford, Ireland, bought the 135-acre mansion and estate from Samuel Price's executors. The sales particulars describe Benarth's ‘beautiful pleasure grounds laid out with great taste'. But by 1848, when Dr James Edwards moved there from Chester, Benarth was already in a state of decline. Years later, his son, the equestrian artist Lionel Edwards, remembered his childhood there: ‘My nursery looked across a mile of river estuary which became mudflats and sandbanks at low water... it was haunted by duck and sea-fowl, whose plaintive cries became woven into my childish dreams.'

 Following Dr Edwards's death in 1886, Benarth was let to a succession of tenants, before being sold in 1915 to Thomas Tattershall, a rich Manchester cotton merchant and chairman of Williams Deacon's Bank. By then, the house was a virtual ruin, so Tattershall had it rebuilt and remodelled as an Italianate villa, before selling the estate in 1933 to Sir Joseph Aspden Kay, who owned sugar refineries in India. Following Sir Joseph's death in 1958, the estate was broken up and Benarth Hall bought by a development company, which wanted to create a caravan park in the walled garden.

But planning consent was refused and, in 1961, the hall was bought by Liverpool doctor Clive Arkle.
Fast-forward to 1989, when Mr and Mrs Herman bought Benarth Bach, a former gardener's cottage and boat-builder's shed on the waterfront below Benarth Hall. They restored and converted the buildings and lived there until 1996, by which time Dr Arkle's widow, Morna, was living alone at the hall. She was happy to sell the house and estate to the Hermans, who had become good friends of the family.

In typically methodical fashion, the new owners first renovated the coach house and lived there for two years while they embarked on the renovation of the semi-derelict main hall. They then sold the coach house and moved into one of two apartments created in the main house, while the restoration work, which included the reinstatement of the hall's lead domes, continued apace. The work on the hall was completed and celebrated in style with a millennium party. Two years later, the restoration of the ornate gardens was also completed.

Today, the hall's 11,000sq ft of accommodation comprises the main house with four reception rooms, a kitchen/breakfast room, three/four bedrooms and three bathrooms, plus offices, two apartments and extensive cellars. With its 50 acres of gardens and heavily wooded grounds, a transformed Benarth Hall still provides a picture-postcard backdrop to Conwy's iconic medieval castle. But why buy one historic manor house when two will do?

The launch, announced in Country Life today, of the 678-acre Arthingworth estate on the Leicestershire/Northamptonshire borders-at a guide price of ‘excess £8m' through Savills (020-7409 8882) is a rare opportunity to buy adjacent manors within the boundaries of  the estate, which is being offered either as a whole or in eight lots. The smaller of the two houses is the 18th-century, Queen Anne-style Old Manor House, listed Grade II, originally built for the Rokeby family and later the main house of the estate owned by the Wood family in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Uninhabited for many years by the time the present owner bought Arthingworth in 1954, the old manor was deemed to be too far gone to be worth restoring in its original form-and haunted, besides. In the 1960s, it was reduced in size and then reconfigured in the 1990s as a dower house with four reception rooms and four bedrooms. A new owner might consider restoring it to its previous impressive format, suggests selling agent Charlie Paton.

Meanwhile, a new T-shaped manor house-now known simply as The Manor-was created in the 1960s by converting the handsome, 18th-century former stable block, which was later extended to provide six reception rooms, nine bedrooms and seven bathrooms. The main rooms overlook Arthingworth's seven acres of splendid gardens, immaculately landscaped with significant input from local expert John Codrington (Country Life, September 29, 1988).

A magnificent walled garden encloses a tennis court, and to the south of the park, an impeccably maintained arboretum boasts a mix of rare and well-known species, including maple, oak, beech and cherry.

The farmland at Arthingworth is located within a ring fence and combines gently undulating pasture and arable land, interspersed with pockets of woodland. The land, which lies within Pytchley hunt country, extends north and east of the main houses, with good access from main roads and country lanes.