The last house built by Edwin Lutyens, an Oxfordshire masterpiece with 27 bedrooms and its own cricket pitch, has had a £3 million price cut
The Grade I-listed Middleton Park is a monumental work that was the vision of one of Britain's greatest 20th century architects.
'It takes quite a lot to make me stop and say wow, but every once in a while there is a home that achieves the feat.' So wrote Country Life's James Fisher last summer in his piece on Middleton House, simultaneously discussing one of England's great country houses, and one of the little downsides of a job which involves an awful lot of looking at those country houses.
This is, as you'd expect from James's words, quite a house — if that's even a word you can use when describing a vast, Grade I-listed Oxfordshire masterpiece property that comes with 86 acres of land, a string of lodges (like the main house, designed by Edwin Lutyens) as well as several cottages, an 18th century ice house, outbuildings, and even a cricket pavilion. With cricket pitch, naturally.
The asking price for this beauty and glory was originally £18 million — but it's since been reduced by £3 million to £15 million. The vendors are also happy to split up the wider estate, with the main house plus 'only' 38 acres available at £9.75 million.
No prospective buyer should be worried about that cut. Pricing great country houses — and castles, and estates, and properties that haven't changed hands for centuries — is as much art and science, as Lucy Denton brilliantly explained last November. Even then, things change; we live in a rapidly changing, globalised world now means that the old rules of who can and can't afford Amount x for House y are changing all the time. An Nvidia executive could probably fly over from Taiwan and drop the asking price for Middleton House with his or her last quarterly bonus.
Taking a turn around your new estate might take an hour or two at Middleton Park.
So what lies in store for whoever takes on Middleton House? This is no medieval pile with centuries of history, but instead the creation of the aforementioned Lutyens, one of the 20th century's great architects, who worked alongside his son Robert to create this home of 27 bedrooms, 24 bathrooms, and almost 30,000 sq ft of living space.
Lutyens was commissioned by the 9th Earl of Jersey, and the house was completed in 1938. As if to prove the earlier point about an ever-changing world, just a generation later in the 1970s, the main house was converted into 18 very tasteful flats. If you — or the Nvidia executive you're bidding against — wish to turn Middleton back into a single home, significant work will need to be done, and given the listing status all that will need to be done in consultation with Historic England.
Wrinkles such as these aren't insurmountable, but they'll take a lot of work. This is a home that'll need patience, tenacity, good solicitors and deep pockets.
There's no question that the work will be worthwhile. This is one of the finest privately-owned buildings in Oxfordshire — and since that £3 million price cut, is now only the second most expensive on the open market in the county at the moment. It's £1 million less than Newington House, which is a smaller but prettier, less grand but perhaps a little more charming — Middleton is like an Oxfordshire Versailles, whereas Newington is more of a Tuscan palazzo. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Middleton House is for sale via Savills at £15 million for the whole estate — see more details.
