‘We bought a £2.5m fire-ravaged estate to make it the Buckingham Palace of Dorset'

Telegraph

20-04-2025

Spending £2.5m on a house with no roof and 139 acres may seem like madness, but not to James Perkins. The house restorer fell in love with Parnham Park, the Grade I-listed country house near Beaminster, Dorset, as soon as he visited.
The property had been ravaged by fire in 2017 and its owner, the Austrian banker Michael Treichl, was found dead in Lake Geneva just two months later. At the time of his death, he was on bail following his arrest for starting the fire and is thought to have taken his own life.
It is a tragic episode in the house's illustrious history. During the Second World War, the property was requisitioned by the US military and used as an airbase by the Americans – and President Eisenhower visited while preparations for the D-Day invasions were being made.
After the fire, the remains of the house went up for sale for £3m. It had no roof, the floors had caved in and its gardens were overgrown – all the money the Treichls had spent doing it up in the early 2000s had been wasted. Still, says Perkins, 'I thought, 'this is such an enchanting, special-looking house – why don't we go and have a look at it?'.'
He rang the agent, who told him that it was going to best bids on the Tuesday, so he went down on Monday, with his now-wife Sophie, to look round. They both fell for Parnham.
A month later, having heard nothing, Perkins rang up again and asked if the house had sold. It hadn't, and it was going to best bids again in a fortnight. The couple went back to Dorset.
'Sophie fell in love with the place,' remembers Perkins. 'I thought, 'this is going to be nightmare'.' Eventually, in March 2020, they bought it for 'about' £2.5m.
A project like Parnham would faze even the most experienced DIY-er, but not James Perkins. Over the past 20 years, he has made a name for himself as a slightly eccentric restorer of country houses.
In 2004, he bought the dilapidated Aynhoe Park on the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border for £3.5m and repurposed it, filling it with his eclectic artistic tastes: a 10ft statue of Hercules under the stairs, a taxidermy giraffe suspended from the ceiling in the orangery.
He lived there for 17 years, running it as a party and events venue, all the while doing up other buildings: Dowdeswell Court near Cheltenham, Howsham Hall in north Yorkshire, and the castellated Round Tower in Cirencester.
'I've always wanted to immerse myself in that dream, restoring these houses and then passing them on when my work is done,' he says.
When Perkins spotted Parnham, he hadn't planned on moving his family from Aynhoe. Indeed, 'we were looking to have our busiest year, but someone made us an offer that we couldn't refuse', he says. That was in mid-2020, and the following January, they hosted a departure contents sale at Aynhoe.
Parnham has presented a rather different challenge, thanks to Treichl's best efforts: 'He had 60 cans of paraffin, he did a good job – but if it wasn't for the fire, we wouldn't be here.'
First on the to-do list was to get in 'an army of gardeners'. There followed a team of electricians and boiler engineers, since 'you could see your breath in the house – there was only a tiny bit of it that you could use', Perkins recalls. They put the roofs back on first, and began building a relationship with the local authority, laying out their plans.
These are certainly ambitious. Having created a home for themselves in the west wing, they aim to build an estate business where people can come and stay and have fun – eat, drink, sleep, get married, holiday. A place where, as Perkins describes, 'you could talk to the owners, somewhere with a genuinely organic approach which could be based on wellbeing, a living, breathing estate'.
In August, they opened a restaurant in the walled garden and, in time, there will be 40 bedrooms available to guests – 'the right number to make a business, though we probably need more like 55', he says.
Local authority permission has been granted for a boathouse, and a clutch of river lodges as holiday accommodation, but overall progress has slowed as they await further planning consents. However, Perkins' spirit has not been dampened by the delays.
'We could have a lot of fun here. We could be the next Buckingham Palace of Dorset. It could be amazing for tourism, for people coming wanting to see what an eccentric British country house could look like. This is a very special house that should not have been allowed to fall into this disrepair.'
Perkins' pattern of collecting and restoring also involves selling. On May 13, auctioneers Dreweatts will sell 448 pieces from his collection – from a damask and ostrich feather four-poster bed (est. £8,000-12,000) to a two-metre tall, four-metre wide late Cretaceous period fossil (est. £100,000-150,000).
Most country house contents sales, of any scale, involve strife and misery, but Perkins has gone into the endeavour willingly, keen to host an auction. He buys a lot, and is equally happy to sell things.
'If you don't feel a little bit of pain, then you can't expect anyone to do the same – you can't give people your secondary bits, you've got to sell them your treasures. I'm not beholden to anything.'
The funds will go towards the restoration of Parnham, which, all told, Perkins estimates will cost in the region of £25m – 'it's sounding quite expensive, the prices have all gone up'.
But is Perkins' buy-restore-sell empire sustainable? He is confident.
'I'm sure there's better ways of making money,' he says, 'but you've got to enjoy doing it. I've enjoyed saving these old buildings. So many of these houses get turned into second-class venues where they get a dollop of gloss white, and that's not why they were built.'
He certainly believes in the idea of the country house as a show house. 'You've got to have the heating on and fill them full of quirky, eccentric, wonderful specimen pieces – exactly as someone would have done when they were on their grand tour.'
Both he and Sophie love hosting, 'and watching these buildings become powerhouses full of treasure'. When I ask where their three children fit into all of this, he laughs: 'The kids just merge in like guests. They're getting to an age where they'll be working for us soon.'
As for the business side of things, he says: 'You've got to put yourself in the right mindset. You've got to make people want to come and visit – you've got to make them feel at home. They can stay up late if they want to, as long as people are respectful of your home. We like having guests anyway, so it's an extended version of having house guests – just this time people pay.'
'When you do it gives back to you. These buildings are meant to be enjoyed.'