Gogglebox’s Steph and Dom bid farewell to £5m dream pad
THEY shot to fame on the Gogglebox sofa at The Salutation, the seaside hotel and family home they spent five years renovating.
But now Steph and Dom Parker are saying goodbye to their £5 million dream property.
I can reveal that the wine-swilling Channel 4 stars have accepted an offer on their 17-bedroom Queen Anne mansion.
‘We just fell in love with the place,’ says Dom, 57, who paid £2.6million for the house and 3.5-acre walled garden on a whim in 2004. ‘It was like finding gold in a river. We just thought, “Oh my God. We must have it.” ’
Dom and Steph, 54, spent several million pounds restoring the Sir Edwin Lutyens-designed Grade I-listed property and Gertrude Jekyll gardens in Sandwich, Kent, to their former glory, before leasing it to John and Dorothy Fothergill in 2017 to run as The Salutation hotel.
Guests included Nigel Farage, Hollywood star Emily Blunt and Prince Andrew. The hotel’s restaurant was run by Michelinstarred chef Shane Hughes, and its team of gardeners won gold at the 2016 Chelsea Flower Show.
But the hotel closed before the pandemic hit, after the Fothergills amassed debts of £1.8 million. These debts included £1.4million owed to ‘investors’, £88,000 to the taxman, £114,000 in staff wages and the rest owed to dozens of creditors for supplying the hotel with food, drink and services. ‘I knew things were not going well when they defaulted on the rent,’ Dom tells me from their holiday home in Spain’s Canary Islands. ‘They owed us some £40,000.’ The Parkers, who left Gogglebox in 2016, have now taken back the keys. Dom laments: ‘Our lives have changed and moved on considerably and we are not in a position to move permanently back to Sandwich.’