A historic windmill within the English countryside that appeared alongside Dick Van Dyke and a magical flying automotive within the 1968 film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” has gone up on the market.
The black-and-white Cobstone Mill, in Buckinghamshire, England, simply exterior London, is a part of a property that additionally features a primary home, about 37 acres of land and a swimming pool. It could possibly be yours for 9 million kilos (about $11.4 million).
The mill is assumed to have been constructed round 1816 and was used to grind cereal till 1873, based on Savills, the true property agency promoting the property. Earlier than the windmill could possibly be used as a film location it wanted substantial renovations. The property had been broken by a fireplace and, based on native media experiences on the time, squatters had been dwelling in it.
Within the movie, which was loosely primarily based on a youngsters’s e-book by the James Bond creator Ian Fleming, the windmill served as the house for Mr. Van Dyke’s character, a nutty, widowed inventor named Caractacus Potts, who lives together with his youngsters, Jeremy and Jemima. Collectively together with his love curiosity, Really Delicious, performed by Sally Ann Howes, and his automotive, named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for its distinctive engine sounds, they journey to the land of Vulgaria to battle the tyrant Baron Bomburst.
However the windmill’s movie business connections didn’t finish there.
In 1971, the actress Hayley Mills purchased the property at public sale together with her husband, Roy Boulting, a movie director. Ms. Mills wrote concerning the first time she noticed the property in her 2021 memoir, “Ceaselessly Younger.”
“I acknowledged it without delay as the youngsters’s residence in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ and it was love at first sight,” she wrote, envisioning herself and her husband watching their baby play within the afternoon solar, despite the fact that the property was “totally impractical.”
Mr. Boulting then shocked her by shopping for it at public sale for 30,000 kilos (about $38,000). “It was loopy, fully, marvelously loopy,” she wrote. Whereas she hoped the windmill would develop into her dream residence within the nation, and whereas she began renovating the property to make it livable, the windmill’s renovations weren’t completed, based on the autobiography, and the couple later divorced.
The property was later owned by David Brown, an English industrialist and a former proprietor of the automaker Aston Martin. Within the Nineteen Eighties, the property was offered to the present proprietor, based on Stephen Christie-Miller, one of many realtors on the itemizing.
“It’s such a landmark whenever you drive via the valley,” Mr. Christie-Miller stated, “It dominates.”
The windmill is a Grade II-listed constructing, which suggests it’s thought of of nationwide significance and is legally protected against being demolished or considerably altered with out particular permission.
Although the value tag is steep, there was curiosity within the property, Mr. Christie-Miller stated, particularly for the often gradual month of August throughout which many potential consumers are on trip.
“So many individuals realize it,” he stated, including that he was planning to indicate the windmill to 2 potential consumers on Wednesday and had already confirmed it to at least one couple who had been, he stated, “very eager.”
Since peaking in August final yr, home costs in Britain have begun to drop. Final month, costs fell 3.8 % in contrast with a yr earlier, based on Nationwide Constructing Society, the steepest annual drop in additional than a decade.
Between the windmill and the home, the property has six bedrooms and 4 bogs, based on the itemizing. The windmill’s sails had been restored previously 18 months, based on Savills.
With views over the close by countryside, “the windmill itself could be a stunning place to have an workplace,” Mr. Christie-Miller stated, however added, “not that you just’d get any work completed.”
It’s not simply “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” followers who is perhaps excited. The windmill seems to be over the village of Turville, the place scenes from the Nineteen Nineties English sitcom “Vicar of Dibley” had been filmed.
Mr. Christie-Miller stated the itemizing stands out in his 40-year profession. “It comes up as soon as in a era,” he stated. “It was final in the marketplace in 1988. The following individual will most likely personal it for one more 30 years.”
