A grand Georgian villa in Cornwall with grace, charm and its own waterfalls

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Penny Churchill takes a look at Trethill House, near Torpoint in Cornwall, built by a student of Sir John Soane.

Oliver Custance-Baker of Strutt & Parker’s country department is handling the launch onto the market of elegant Grade II-listed Trethill House at Sheviock, near Torpoint, which sits in 35 acres of delightful gardens and grounds overlooking the Rame Peninsula between the sea and the Lynher River, a tributary of the Tamar.

Oliver quotes a guide price of £3m for the charming, late-Georgian villa, built between 1836 and 1840, then extended with a bay to the left in the later 19th century.

In the late 1700s, the Trethill estate was owned by Capt Samuel Wallis, a distinguished naval officer and Pacific Ocean explorer who made the first European landfall on Tahiti in June 1767. On Capt Wallis’s death in 1795, the estate passed to his cousin, Ann Wallis, who died in 1836, leaving the estate to her eldest son, the Revd Samuel Wallis, a gentleman scholar and founding fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. Wallis immediately commissioned the Plymouth-based architect George Wightwick, a former assistant to Sir John Soane, to build him a new villa in the picturesque Italianate style.

Trethill House offers more than 6,700sq ft of accommodation on two floors, including a reception hall, five impressive ground-floor rooms, including a drawing room and dining room with original fireplaces and far-reaching views over the grounds, a fine library, a sitting room and a study.

The kitchen boasts an Aga, modern integrated appliances and space for a large breakfast table. A substantial cellar could be developed into further accommodation if required.

Two staircases lead to the first floor, and six good double bedrooms, including the principal bedroom suite that has a large bathroom en suite, plenty of natural light and a balcony from which to admire the coastal views.

There are also three family bathrooms. Further accommodation is available in the detached coach house, which provides garaging, stabling and equestrian facilities on the ground floor, with a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor.

The grounds combine beautiful landscaped gardens, meadows and lawns, mature woodland, streams and waterfalls — yes, waterfalls! — and a number of paddocks suitable for grazing or exercising horses.

A wide variety of flora and fauna includes more than 150 magnolias and a scattering of bluebells, interspersed with well-placed seating areas from which to admire the views.

Trethill House in Torpoint is for sale at £3m — see more pictures and details.