This house would suit diehard Game of Thrones fans down to the ground. It couldn't be more of a gothic extravaganza if it tried. The story of Heathfield Hall, near Hillsborough, Co Down, begins outside, with tall antique chimneys and ornate roof finials aplenty. But it's only once you walk through the heavy wooden front door that the narrative really takes hold.
Owner Brian Bleakley and his wife Elizabeth have created a truly idiosyncratic home, the product of their shared passion for discovering architectural antiques.
It incorporates more than 100 brick, stone and wooden arches, more than 40 stained-glass windows, seven working fireplaces and two spiral staircases. The internal doors, embellished with black ironwork, are three inches thick.
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You can sleep in a four-poster bed surrounded by carved lions rampant, while twin gryphons stand guard in the bathroom. There’s a whole rank of stone gargoyles perched above the bookshelves in the study. In the hallway, a stuffed jackdaw watches balefully from under his glass dome.
It’s all madly eccentric, yet the exuberance and obvious joy with which this house has been created tempers the tendency towards excess.
Country schoolhouse
It’s hard to believe that the five-bedroom Heathfield Hall, which has evolved in several stages over the past 16 years, was once a little country schoolhouse. “It was a complete shell when we bought it, in 1999,” says Brian Bleakley. “In fact, it was being used as a sort of wildlife sanctuary – there were hares, rabbits, the odd cow living there – and everyone expected we would just bulldoze the building. But we sandblasted the plaster off the walls and we saw that the stone was beautiful. And that was the beginning, really.”
The schoolhouse remains, but now it has been translated beyond all recognition into a vaulted dining room with a 13ft-high fireplace.
At the opposite end of the house is the three-bedroom “Coach House” guest wing, often used as a self-contained honeymoon suite.
The Hall is a popular destination for wedding parties, and Brian and Elizabeth were married here themselves.
Clear idea
Right from the start, Bleakley had a clear idea in his head of what he wanted the house to look like.
“Everything was done in reverse. We went round architectural antique yards – we were buying these pieces when everyone else was throwing them into skips, and we rearranged the building around them. It was hard to put it down on paper.
“The architect ended up asking me the questions, not the other way round. We never had any trouble with the planners, they liked what we were doing, especially the idea of using all the reclaimed material – it would have been different if I was building a Spanish hacienda.”
Bleakley's proudest moment was when Heathfield Hall took an individual merit award in the BBC's House of the Year show. "Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the host of the competition, got what we were doing as soon as he walked in the door. He described it as a gothic fairytale fantasy. That sums it up exactly."
But it was always important to the couple that the house worked as a comfortable, welcoming home as much as a show-piece for their finds.
“I wanted a complete oasis to escape to,” says Bleakley. “If I was away a week on business, I’d come home, close the door behind me, and enter another world. Friends call us up and ask – are the fires lit? There are over 200 candles in the house, and when we have dinner parties, we light them all. People say that there’s just something about this place that makes you want to sit down and spend time in it.”
Fairytales
But all fairytales must come to an end, and the Bleakleys have decided to let go of the place they call “our passion, our creation”. Heathfield Hall is for sale at £795,000 (€1.09 million), and this price will include the majority of the contents.
“I absolutely love our house but my property business is in England, so that’s where we have to be now,” says Brian Bleakley. The desire to dream up another fantasy house is still strong in him, however. “In a year or two, we’ll do it all again. Where we’ll build, I don’t know. But it will definitely be gothic.”
