Licensed to chill
The stunning old mill where 007’s thrill-loving helicopter ‘double’ just loves to unwind...
AS JAMES Bond’s helicopter ‘ double’, Simon OliphantHope is a man who enjoys having his head in the clouds. So it’s no surprise the helicopter company boss – who provided and flew two choppers for daredevil scenes in the 2002 Bond movie Die Another Day – has created what he calls a ‘celestial sitting room’ at the top of his windmill home.
In contrast to his days as a stand-in for 007 Pierce Brosnan, and his record-breaking solo navigations of the world by helicopter, Simon loves to retire to the room under the dome of the old mill for a bit of peace and quiet.
‘We have hung it with lanterns and often sit up there with our head in the clouds at the end of the day,’ he says. ‘We take a glass of wine and enjoy the views. It’s so peaceful – there are deer in the fields below and barn owls calling into the dusk. It’s a quirky space. We think it’s magical.’
Simon, 53, bought the windmill – which is for sale for £1.1 million through Carter Jonas estate agents – from local developers in 2010. It had initially been a rental property after its conversion in 2007 and 2008.
‘I wanted to live somewhere unusual, like a windmill or a lighthouse or a water tower,’ he says. ‘I’d tried to buy St Helen’s Fort, the Palmerston fort in the Solent by the Isle of Wight, but my bid failed. As far as I’m concerned, life is to be lived so I moved on.
‘When I found this I knew it was what I had beeneen searching for.’
The property is in the e North Essex hamlet of Gainsford End, near the village of Toppesfield. Simon has turned the 40fttall mill into a tower of treats, layering a games room for his children, a wine cellarr for himself and a gym m on top of a dining room. om. The old mill itself is connected to a contemporary porary family home by a customustom-built glass passage.
But now he and his girlfriend, Victoria, have reluctantly had to relocate to West Sussex. They need to be closer to Simon’s business, Eastern Atlantic Helicopters (EAH), based in Shoreham-by-Sea.
EAH found fame in 2002 with the release of Die Another Day, which even by 007’s standards featured some extraordinary helicopter stunt work. EAH provided the chopper that freefalls out of a damaged Antonov cargo plane, making an escape pod for Bond and co-star Jinx (Halle Berry) in the movie’s final climactic moments. Another EAH helicopter featured in an earlier sequence set in Cuba and it was Simon, the company’s founder and MD, who doubled up for Brosnan in some of the short flying sequences. The aviation tycoon had planned to keep the windmill but found commuting too time-consumingtime-consum – even though he flies VictoriaV and her two children,childre aged 12 and eight, aroundarou by helicopter. SimonSim himself has three grown-upgr children. The Grade II listed p rope rtyph as five bedrooms, two of them en suite, plus a family bathroom, a drawing room, a sitting room and a contemporary k kitchen/breakfast roo room, as well as the room rooms in the windmill. It sta stands at the end of a gravel drive in roughly an acre of grounds that include a garden house, hot tub and, of course, helicopter pad.
THERE is planning permission to extend and, as Simon points out, because t he windmill was once a commercial concern it could become business premises again. If so, it would be another colourful chapter in the life of the building, which was completed in 1869 to mill local grain.
Back then, its five brick storeys were topped by four vast sails, which drove three pairs of millstones. Abandoned in 1928, by the turn of the millennium it was open to the heavens with trees growing inside. As sails turn, so do trends in houses. Buyers began to look beyond plain barn conversions towards properties with real history and romance, making the old mill ripe for conversion.
‘Windmills have real character,’ reflects Simon. ‘It’s in their every cog and gear. Here you can still see where the haywains drew up, scarring the brickwork. Inside we have preserved the original workings; they are all illuminated for future generations to enjoy.’