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Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead mansion sold for £3m

The Grade II*-listed Cotswold mansion where Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited has sold at auction for £3.16m despite buyers being warned that sitting tenants are paying a weekly rent of £5 a week – are refusing to leave the property.

Piers Court, at Stinchcombe, a village about halfway between Bristol and Cheltenham, was sold to an unnamed bidder in an online auction on Thursday after the owner defaulted on a loan secured against the eight-bedroom, six-bathroom property.

The Guardian first reported the sale went ahead despite the tenants, who described themselves as “Evelyn Waugh superfans”, refusing to vacate the mansion they rent for just £250 a year in a deal with its previous owner, Jason Blain. The former executive for BBC Worldwide and Sony Entertainment bought the property for £2.9m in 2019 through a company called Winston’s House.

However, the company defaulted on a £2.1m loan from the historic London bank C Hoare & Co, which appointed receivers to sell the property at auction.

Blain, who was earlier this year sued by the Mandarin Oriental hotel over the £1.24m cost of an eight-month overstay in the hotel’s £4,725-a-night penthouse, appointed his friends Helen Lawton and Bechara Madi to the board of Winston’s House and agreed on the cut-price rent deal with them.

Prospective buyers were warned by the auctioneers that: “The mansion is occupied under a common law tenancy at a rent of £250 per annum. A notice to quit was served on the occupant on 19 August 2022, and a copy of the notice was affixed to the mansion gate on 22 August 2022. Prospective purchasers should take their legal advice regarding this and will be deemed to bid accordingly.”

Madi said this week: “It’s our home, for the short and long term. We will put our Christmas tree and decorations up in the next few days. We are going nowhere.

“We have spent a lot of our own money on the upkeep of the house, it’s our home, and we have no plans to move,” he told MailOnline, adding that they had put a share of their money into the company that bought the house. “We are not tenants; we have a major share in the house and have put in hundreds of thousands of pounds of our own money.”

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