Jerome K Jerome's Oxfordshire mansion on sale for £6million

The luxurious nine-bedroom property named Troy in Ewelme, near Wallingford, has five reception rooms, a heated pool and stables set in 46 acres of gardens and parkland landscaped by an award-winning designer.

The recently restored three-storey house has high ceilings and large windows, along with wood panelling, and parquet flooring throughout most of the rooms as well as open fireplaces, say estate agents Knight Frank.

Built in about 1827, around 1926 it is thought that the Grade II-listed former farmhouse was adjoined to the next door cottages and barns, to create the west wing and courtyard.

Within the west wing is a self-contained one-bedroom apartment with its own access.

Writer and humorist, Jerome K Jerome, lived at the house — described in his autobiography as ‘an old farmhouse on the hill above Wallingford’ — for 10 years or more in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

His honeymoon spent on a boat on the Thames provided the inspiration for his most successful book Three Men in a Boat published in 1889.

The house had been owned by the same family for two generations until 2018.

The current owners have since fully restored the property, restoring all its original features.

It has been renovated by London-based Alex Cochrane Architects to include a kitchen by upmarket designers Plain English, a laundry room and boot room.

There are four reception rooms, a family/games room, the brand-new kitchen/breakfast room, a wine cellar and stores, a principal bedroom suite, seven further bedrooms and four bathrooms.

Outbuildings house a theatre/games room, a barn, double garage, three stables, a tack room and wood store.

The gardens and grounds were transformed with the help of the award-winning garden designer Todd Longstaffe Gowan and include a sunken garden and two thatched summer houses — one apparently used by Jerome as a writing retreat.

The village of Ewelme, which is within a conservation area in the Chiltern Hills in South Oxfordshire, is home to Saint Mary's Church, where Thomas Chaucer, Alice de la Pole and Jerome K Jerome's ashes are buried.

It is also home to the oldest continuously operating primary school, established in 1414. 

The house is currently listed for sale with Knight Frank and Savills at a guide price of ‘excess £6 million’.