Spring sunshine encourages us all to browse estate agents’ windows. This week’s featured property, Dumfries House, looks at first glance like a rare example of value for money in an overheated market. This exquisite mid-18th-century mansion designed by Robert and John Adam comes with 1,940 acres — yet for the same price, £6.75 million, from the same agent, Savills, you could buy nothing more than a five-bedroomed townhouse with a 30ft garden in Pelham Crescent, South Kensington.
There are, however, some drawbacks to Dumfries House, leaving aside the obvious one that it’s nowhere near Dumfries, so your removal van may never find it. The estate is in fact in east Ayrshire, near Cumnock, a bleak former mining community which claims the Labour party pioneer Keir Hardie and the football manager Bill Shankly as its most distinguished sons — so it doesn’t come with quite the same social cachet as Pelham Crescent. Nor, more importantly, does it come with the unique collection of furniture that was made for it, mostly by Chippendale — for which, if you want to keep it in situ, you’ll have to bid up to £14 million at Christie’s in July; a single rosewood bookcase is expected to break records by going under the hammer for £4 million.
If you’re still not put off, be prepared for delicate negotiations with the seller, the 7th Marquess of Bute and 27th Earl of Dumfries — and whatever you do, don’t address him by these or his several other lordly titles. Having spent most of his adult life trying to shun his aristocratic inheritance, he prefers to be known as ‘Johnny Bute’, having been ‘Johnny Dumfries’ during his 1980s motor-racing career. Savills seem to have cajoled him into doing some PR for the sale, but he’s not an easy man to talk to, as I discovered when he first started selling heirlooms in 1996.
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