Grand design is up for sale

6:50pm Sunday 26th October 2008

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A palatial home in Summertown, which featured on Channel 4's Grand Designs programme, has gone on the market — for a cool £2.95m.o Property developer Henry Chopping bought the plot in Middle Way for £500,000 in August 2005 with the intention of building a home he could live in with his family.

But less than a year after completing work on the Walled Garden, Mr Chopping has decided to put the six bedroom, six bathroom house on the market.

Mr Chopping said: "I just want to do something else. I think this is a great time to get into the next challenge and it was such good fun doing the project.

"I really enjoy creating properties and creating houses that are special and specifically designed for where they are."

Mr Chopping, who has a wife, Danielle, and two children, Mia, four, and Roman, seven weeks, spent more than £1m building the house, which was constructed from high quality materials including Cotswold limestone and copper for the roof.

He insisted that £2.95m was not an unreasonable price when taking into account that it covered 6,000 square feet.

He said: "There are plenty of lovely houses in Oxford, but if you bought one of the nice Victorian houses, to get it up to the internal specifications of the Walled Garden you would probably have to spend £1m. Houses in Summertown are selling for between £500 to £1,000 per square foot, so the lower end of that is £3m — so it is actually cheap for Oxford in terms of square footage."

The Walled Garden, which is built on a single-storey with a huge basement and an annexe with many of the rooms built in decagons, was inspired by the Radcliffe Observatory at Green College.

Mr Chopping said he already had his eye on other Oxford properties, which could become his next project, but would not be drawn on where they were.

He said: "There will be nothing I will ever do that will be the same as the Walled Garden, it is an entirely unique property, but the next one will embrace the particulars of that site, its opportunities and challenges.

"We have created something which is a legacy, maybe in 50 years people will say 'this is a Chopping house'."

Mr Chopping, who is the director of Oxford Homes, said he had lived in six different houses in the 15 years he had been in Oxford.

He added: "It was never a home for my children to grow up in, I knew we would not be there for a long stretch of time because I know what I am like."