Latest news with #VictorianHouse
BBC News
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Atonement film location Stokesay Court to close to public
A Victorian house which became famous as the location for the 2007 film Atonement will close to the public at the end of the house at Stokesay Court in Shropshire was opened up to visitors in the year the film came out, but its owner, Caroline Magnus, said: "It's hard work, I'm not getting any younger."She said she came to the decision after she broke her ankle 18 months grounds would continue to open for special events and fundraising, she said. Ms Magnus took over the running of Stokesay Court from her aunt in 1995 and said it took her 10 years to renovate house gained widespread fame when Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was shot there and went on to win major awards including an it up to the public had been "fantastic" Ms Magnus said, and had given her the chance to meet lots of she said when she broke her ankle, she asked herself: "Do I want to do this or do I want to sit and enjoy the house?"She said she plans to "enjoy it more as a home than a business" from now on and public visits would come to an end at Christmas. Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Glenageary Victorian five-bed rich in period detail for €2.85m
Address : 5 Arkendale Road, Glenageary, Co Dublin Price : €2,850,000 Agent : DNG A large redbrick Victorian house in Glenageary , Co Dublin, 5 Arkendale Road is truly a family house: it's where Nollaig Greene grew up, where she and her husband Ken raised their three children and where a daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter lived with them for three years until recently. Now, after nearly 60 years, this tall 348sq m (3,745sq ft) two-storey, over-ground-level five-bedroom house, is for sale: DNG is asking €2.85 million for the semidetached house halfway down this quiet cul-de-sac off Castlepark Road. The house, built in 1884, has been well cared for, with rich original plasterwork in the hall and main reception rooms, and modernised over the years. But it is also somewhat dated, and new owners will likely want to revamp it again. If Nollaig were staying in the house, she would concentrate on improving its E1 Ber rating with an energy upgrade. What she likes most about her home – which her parents bought when she was six – is the space, light (the house has many tall sash windows) and the location, a short walk to Glenageary Dart station, Killiney Hill and the sea, of which there are views from upstairs windows. And of course, the large back garden, where she has created a 'white garden' filled with lilies, roses and peonies. The Arkendale houses had generous back gardens and in 1998, Nollaig and Ken built a house at the bottom of their original garden, before swapping places with her parents and moving back into the main house. Number 5A Arkendale Road, sold in 2020 for €910,000, is tucked away behind tall walls down a long gravelled driveway. READ MORE Front garden and driveway Entrance hall Steep granite steps lead up to the front door of number 5, opening into a short front hall with ornate ceiling plasterwork. An original door with coloured glass opens into a hall, off which are four rooms: the diningroom, drawingroom, study and an upstairs kitchen. The diningroom and drawingroom are formal rooms, furnished in mainly period style. But they're both rooms the family uses, 'eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the diningroom' when their daughter's family shared the house. And during Covid, Nollaig moved her desk near to a window in the drawingroom to take advantage of light flooding in. The diningroom at the front of the house has ornate ceiling plasterwork, centre rose, a black marble open fireplace and a deep bay with three windows looking over the front garden. Diningroom The drawingroom, at the back of the house, has two tall windows overlooking the back garden, slightly less ornate plasterwork, centre rose and a white marble fireplace. Drawingroom The study, at the front of the house, is a good size. The upstairs kitchen is a legacy of earlier days when the main kitchen was located here and was useful when her daughter lived with them, says Nollaig. Study Stairs beside an exposed brick wall lead down to garden level, where a large kitchen/breakfastroom and family room are linked by a very wide arch. Downstairs hall An Aga sits in the chimneybreast of the kitchen/breakfastroom opposite an island and a large dining table. There are window seats below two tall windows looking into the back garden. The family room at the front of the house has a deep bay with three windows, like the diningroom on the floor above, an open fireplace and an exposed brick wall. Kitchen Family room Other rooms at this level include a utility room, a room well equipped as a gym, a downstairs shower room and a storage room under the front steps – a space owners of some Victorian houses have turned into a wine cellar. There is a side entrance into the downstairs hall, and, at the end of the hall, sliding glass doors opening into the back garden. Upstairs, past a landing with a tall arched window, there are five bedrooms on the top floor and a family bathroom. This is painted a vivid yellow and has a traditional clawfoot bath and a shower. The large main bedroom has a deep three-window bay with views over trees and houses across the sea to Howth, and a tiled en suite shower room. A sixth bedroom could be created downstairs, perhaps in the garden-level gym or ground floor kitchen or study. Main bedroom Family bathroom View towards Howth from upstairs Number 5 stands on 0.2 acres and has a 25m (82ft) back garden. Steps lead up from a patio stretching across the back of the house to a glossy green lawn with a pear tree near its centre. The garden, where one of the daughters got married, is private, with trees and mature planting, including the white flowers, and a herb garden in a trug. There's lots of room to park in the landscaped front garden. Rear garden Glenageary Dart station is a five- to 10-minute walk via a pedestrian lane at the end of the cul-de-sac leading to the Metals – the walkway that runs behind the Arkendale houses.
News.com.au
7 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
Buyer to breathe new life into cute Geelong West cottage
An old Victorian era house that somehow skipped the waves of gentrification that have overtaken Geelong West may finally be destined for that modern makeover. The circa-1900 house at 109 Hope St was snapped up for $703,000 amid competition between four bidders at an auction on Saturday. Wilsons Newtown agent James Wilson, who listed the 275sq m property with price hopes from $625,000 to $675,0000, said the auction took off after bidding reached the top of the quote range and he confirmed the property was 'on the market'. 'I was looking for an opening bid within the range and we ended up getting a bid at $625,000,' Mr Wilson said. 'It went in $10,000, $5000 and $1000 increments up to $675,000 and stalled a bit. 'Then I went in an sought instructions of the owners, then announced to the crowd that we're on the market.' Mr Wilson said it's an attractive property, albeit it 'needs a lot of work'. 'The street frontage was appealing to where people saw that they could improve the property, and I think get a pretty good result,' he said. 'A lot of the buyers were drawn to it because of the appealing Victorian frontage and also just the proximity to Pako and some of the amenities, which we had a mix of local buyers and the buyer that bought it was from Melbourne, looking to use it as a residence.' The property sits on Hope St between Pakington St and Sparrow Park. Records show the owners paid just $190,950 for the property in 2000. Roll-top laminated kitchen benches and a textured wall feature above an open fireplace seem to be the only signs of work on the property in recent decades. But the exterior is a period picture with an iron veranda behind a picket fence. The new owners can work with ornate skirting boards, door architraves, high ceilings and fireplaces inside. Mr Wilson said the four bidders were a mix of local builders, investors and owner-occupiers. The Melbourne buyer intends to turn it into a residence, he said.
Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Bestselling Chocolat author JOANNE HARRIS on the disgusting quip Harvey Weinstein made to her at the Oscars
Sometime in 2000, the French actress Juliette Binoche travelled to Barnsley, West Yorkshire. She was there to meet Joanne Harris – then a schoolteacher who published novels on the side. The film rights to her third book, Chocolat, had been sold to Hollywood and Binoche had signed on to play the heroine, Vianne. She asked Harris if she could visit her, to chat about the part. 'Juliette came to stay in our two-bedroom semi in Barnsley,' recalls Harris. 'We didn't have a spare bedroom, so she slept in our kid's bed, tucked up with a toy dinosaur.' Today, Chocolat – a sensuous tale of a woman causing mayhem by opening a chocolaterie selling such delights as 'nipples of Venus' in a sleepy French town – has sold some 35 million copies worldwide. That makes Harris one of the authors to have joined the elite 'millionaire's club' – writers who have sold more than one million copies of at least one of their novels in the UK (others include JK Rowling, Julia Donaldson, Helen Fielding and Kate Mosse). This week, Harris publishes Chocolat's prequel, Vianne, which is why we are meeting at her home. I imagine the 60-year-old in a Mayfair penthouse. Instead, she and her husband Kevin, whom she met at Barnsley sixth-form college aged 16 and who now works as her business manager, live in a gorgeous but ramshackle five-bedroom Victorian house outside Huddersfield. It's 18 miles from where she was born, packed with quirky objects and backs on to five acres of woodland, where Harris writes in a converted shed. 'My mother thinks it's dreadful – she says it's old and messy,' laughs Harris. 'But I see no reason to leave Yorkshire. My family and friends are nearby, and staying here has kept me grounded. 'We have a little flat in London, which is very useful as I go up and down a lot. Apart from that I don't really have any indulgences. I don't splash out on fast cars and diamonds.' The daughter of an English father and French mother – both teachers, who raised her bilingual – Harris was born above her paternal grandparents' corner shop in Barnsley. 'They spoke no French and my grandparents in France spoke no English, so it made me an outsider wherever I went.' She longed to write, but her mother was horrified. 'She showed me all these books by 19th-century French authors who died penniless and said: 'This is not a proper job.'' So, after studying modern and medieval languages at Cambridge, Harris became a trainee accountant, but within a year she failed her exams and was sacked. After that, she worked as a French teacher at an all-boys' private school. Between teaching and raising her son Fred – now 30 and working as a lighting technician in London – she wrote constantly. Her first book, The Evil Seed, was published in 1992. 'It was a literary vampire novel, read by about 20 people. I was paid about £2,000 for it.' Her second novel, Sleep, Pale Sister, similarly sank without trace. Undeterred, she began drafting a third, set in France, full of lavish descriptions of elaborate meals. She sent it to a bigwig New York agent for feedback. 'He said, 'Who the hell wants to read about some French village nobody's heard of? Why are there so many old people and no young people having sex on a bearskin rug? And what's with all the food?'' Many authors would have been crushed. Not Harris. 'Most things I do are motivated by the desire to annoy people, so I wrote exactly the book that agent told me not to write.' In four months, she'd completed Chocolat. Initially, the agent was vindicated: no publisher wanted it. Harris went on holiday to Ireland. Only when she checked in on her mother did she learn her British agent was urgently trying to reach her from the international Frankfurt Book Fair. 'I called her, she said: 'Everyone is talking about Chocolat.' First the Italians bought it, then everyone followed.' Within a week, the book was sold to 23 countries and film rights sold for £5,000 (after its cinematic release Harris received a further £100,000 in royalties). 'None of the deals were big bucks but together were enough for me to take some time off teaching.' She asked for a year's sabbatical, only for the book to become a word-of-mouth bestseller. 'I kept seeing people reading it on the tube; I thought, 'This is crazy!'' After the film's release and Oscar nomination, sales topped one million. 'I realised I wasn't going back to teaching. When I told the school, they said, 'We all knew that. We've given your job to someone else.'' Newfound fame was often overwhelming. 'I passed out at two premieres and the Baftas. One minute I'd be fine and the next… my word! I thought something was wrong with me but now I think it was just stress; after a year it stopped.' At the Oscars, wearing a borrowed red Amanda Wakeley dress, she was seated beside Sigourney Weaver and behind Clint Eastwood. Despite the glamour, Harris was bored. 'It was like a very long school speech day at Madame Tussaud's, with diamonds.' She encountered Johnny Depp, a star of Chocolat who hadn't been on the film set when she'd visited. 'People kept asking for my thoughts on him, but as I'd never met him I said, 'He's not my type.' Then I met him on the red carpet. He said, 'Apparently I'm not your type.' But he was laughing.' Harris was surprised at how nervous Depp was. 'I used to think I was the most awkward person in the room until I met him. We bonded over that. I don't think he enjoyed being a sex symbol. From his work, and from what he said to me that brief time we met, I got the feeling he was on a mission to be somebody other than who he was.' (Depp has since been mired in controversy due to his high-profile court battle with ex-wife Amber Heard. On this, Harris says: 'I don't know what happened, it sounds traumatic for everyone.') At a Bafta party she encountered Chocolat's producer, Harvey Weinstein, now serving a 16-year prison sentence for rape. 'He said, 'I'm Harvey Weinstein, when I come into a room, authors s**t their pants.' I said, 'In that case, Harvey, you'll get my dry-cleaning bill.' He laughed and moved on. I got the feeling he liked it when people stood up to him.' After the menopause and surviving breast cancer in 2020, Harris says little intimidates her. Yet she avoids controversy, declining to discuss her announcement, two years ago on Twitter, that her son, Fred, is transgender, merely saying, 'Somebody had tried to out [Fred] on Twitter and was trying to blackmail me.' (She also won't be drawn on her spell as chair of the Society of Authors, when she became embroiled in a Twitter spat with JK Rowling, who had complained that Harris had never communicated with her about the death and rape threats she'd received from transgender activists.) After selling 30-plus million copies of a single novel, many authors might have put their feet up. But in the 26 years since Chocolat came out, Harris has published 29 more books, from fantasies to thrillers. There have also been three well-received sequels to Chocolat. Now there's Vianne, which gives insights into her witch-like heroine's youth. 'I thought it'd be fun to go back and see Vianne when she couldn't cook and had never really tasted chocolate. Many people assume she is me, but I rarely invite people to dinner and if I do the food's a bit experimental as I rarely stick to a recipe. Vianne also has an itch to keep moving. I like to stay in my shed in Yorkshire and write.'
