Now Julian’s creating his very own Downton!
CLEARLY the perfection of Downton Abbey has influenced creator Julian Fellowes’s own pastoral dreams, as he is spending millions trying to restore his rural idyll by buying swathes of land around his Dorset home.
Lord Fellowes is passionate about the plight of English country houses and is on a quest to restore his estate to its 1850s boundaries by buying back chunks of land that were carved off – protecting them from unsightly development.
The screenwriter – who is planning a movie version of Downton Abbey – has been quietly buying land on the borders of his 16th Century manor house.
He tells me: ‘We bought back some of the land that used to be attached to the house before the War, to protect the house and the village. We would be interested if any more of the house’s former farmland came up for sale.
‘But we are not opposed to change and in fact support a proposed development which is currently planned for the village.’
Since buying Grade I-listed Stafford House for £1.5million in 2002, Lord Fellowes has forked out a further £4.4million to buy neighbouring properties, including a 355-acre farm.
The Tory peer is said to be aware that another manor house, which comes with 20 acres of land, is up for sale next door for £3.5million – and some are hoping he will buy it. This would take his total spending to nearly £10 million and the size of the estate to more than 400 acres. If successful, the multi-millionaire will have effectively created his own Downton-style estate in the pretty village of West Stafford.
And Lord Fellowes’s neighbours are thrilled his spending spree means the Wessex countryside that inspired Thomas Hardy will be protected from developers.
One neighbour, Susan Marsh, tells me: ‘Everyone is just glad he’s here. Because if he wasn’t, God forbid, the developers certainly would be.’ Another resident, Linda Kemp, 65, said: ‘He’s a terrific asset. He keeps the village the way he and we want it.’