The house where a young Stephen Fry fell in love with Norfolk is for sale, and it's a charming (and enormous) family home filled with character and warmth
Booton House, in the open countryside between Norwich and the coast, is seeking a new owner.
'You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't,' Stephen Fry once said of the county where he grew up, and still lives. 'It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.'
Fry, naturally, gets it. And so would you, if you'd spent your formative years at a house as beautiful, and as beautifully-situated, as Booton House. It's on the market through Jackson-Stops with an asking price of £1.3 million, and it's full of beautiful character touches that were probably here when the young Fry was still scampering about the place.
Born in Hampstead, and with early years spent in Buckinghamshire, it was in 1965 that the family moved to this home — in the village (a hamlet, really) of Booton, near Reepham, and roughly half-way between Norwich and the north Norfolk coast (both are roughly half an hour's drive). This is the Norfolk of open fields, huge skies and endless streams dotting the landscape.
It's also the Norfolk of great property bargains, because the asking price delivers an awful lot for the money. The house is over 7,000sq ft set over three floors, with seven bedrooms, separate dining room, sitting room and snug as well as a huge kitchen diner that leads off to both a conservatory and a pantry.
The gardens aren't huge at around an acre, but they're clearly much-loved, beautifully planted and ringed by mature trees to give a lovely sense of privacy.
Putting aside the celebrity connection, the decor within is probably the greatest attraction, though. Almost everything you see has a lovely look and feel which harks back to the house's turn-of-the-20th-century origins.
There's a wonderfully-graceful wooden staircase in the hall, gorgeous period tiles on the floors of both kitchen and hallway, pretty wallpaper in many of the rooms, a Beatrix Potter-inspired mural in one of the children's bedrooms, original fireplaces, old-school chunky radiators and a fantastic feeling of space.
The snug alone — essentially set up as a library, with a wall full of books behind cabinet doors on one side — is the sort of space that could sell a house.
Portrait of the national treasure as a young man: Stephen Fry, aged 14.
In short, it's not hard to see why Fry's love affair with the county began when his family moved here.
'Norfolk is home, that’s the real truth of it. I feel at home here,' the actor, writer and comedian said in an interview a few years ago. 'I can justify it by pointing to its beauty, the “do different” quirkiness, the ideal isolation from smug Home County cosiness, but the real truth is that it’s home. And there are few finer words than that in the whole language.'
Booton House is for sale via Jackson-Stops at £1.3 million — see more pictures and details.
