Changing places

New owners can bring a new sense of style to a property, as these houses demonstrate

ALTHOUGH the house is ‘believed to date from the early 19th century’, nobody seems to know who built elegant, Georgian Chequers Manor at Cadmore End, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, which has been launched on the market through Savills in Henleyon-thames (01491 843001) at a guide price of £5.5 million. Whoever it was must have been someone of status, given the manor’s privileged setting within 67 acres of formal gardens, woodland and paddocks overlooking the lovely Hambleden valley and the surrounding Chiltern Hills.

This part of south Buckinghamshire has long been the preserve of the great and the good and, from 1961, Chequers Manor was the home of leading industrialist Sir David Brown, founder of the eponymous engineering firm and one-time owner of shipbuilder Vosper Thorneycroft and car manufacturer Aston Martin. Sir David died in September 1993 aged 89 and, the following year, retired American businessman Roger Lilly and his Iranian wife, Shahla, bought Chequers Manor.

The couple commissioned Londonbased interior designer Brian Juhos —universally admired by his wealthy international clientele for ‘the eclecticism and taste for the sumptuous that has been the hallmark of his style as a decorator’—to refurbish the 5,659sq ft manor house from cellar to rafters, at a reputed cost of £700,000. As photographs taken two