Our eternal obsession with the literary property

The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘And Everything Will Be Glad To See You’

There are many reasons why a person might want to hang on to a stately home for the everlasting rent of £5 a week. But it takes a certain kind of person to explain that — far from being just about the money — it’s about the art. The current residents of Evelyn Waugh’s former home Piers Court, paying £250 a year, claim to be the author’s “superfans”, friends of the family and, in some senses, curators of his legacy.

That Piers Court “takes a lot of living up to”, as Waugh wrote in his diary, seems undeniable: eight bedrooms, six bathrooms and a £3.16mn price tag. Prospective buyers had to bid sight unseen, since the sitting tenants paying their peppercorn rent refused any viewings before the auction.

And yet it’s hard to ignore that the tenants have a point. If it was all about the money, the rest of us wouldn’t care. Bankruptcies, sitting tenancies and disputes are always part of the real estate equation. But we care about the Piers Court sale because Waugh lived there. Literary houses are a hot ticket. The Financial Times listed five notable properties this summer, including Hogarth House — home of Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press — and a 1920s mansion, complete with pool house, on the site of Mark Twain’s country pile. Even the childhood homes of authors such as Dorothy Sayers are of interest, selling for a genteel £2.35mn. 

For those without two or three million knocking around, an apartment formerly comprising part of Jane Austen’s Bath home is now on Airbnb, and offers fancy soaps. Rudyard Kipling’s south coast manor, also on Airbnb, boasts a new and improved hot tub.

To Hitchhiker’s Guide fans, half the houses for sale in Islington have a claim to literary fame: the local estate agent, Hotblack Desiato, is named after Douglas Adams’s intergalactic rock star. Copies of Richard Adams’s strange, allegorical bestseller Watership Down were reputedly handed out to buyers of the upmarket new-build complex on the edge of the author’s hometown in Berkshire. The development is, of course, called Watership Place and access is via Richard Adams Way.

In an age when we frequently attempt to separate the art from the artist, why do we care where authors wrote their notable works? Perhaps it’s the fame factor: something notable happened here, which makes me notable for owning it (or, in the case of the Piers Court tenants, living in it). And yet it seems like something more. It’s something magical: an alchemy between the authors we love, even after their death, and the lives they led, and the work they made from those lives.

There is an undeniable, human thrill that comes from the things great artists really touched, really used, really saw. It makes those authors real to us; which makes their characters doubly real. It’s as if the physical reality of their houses lends itself to their words, and the two together make something even greater than the sum of their parts. The authors and their properties become characters and settings in the stories we tell ourselves about art, and what it means, and how we make it.

Sylvia Plath, moving out of the family home after Ted Hughes’s affair, rented her own personal dream home: 23 Fitzroy Road. “It is WB Yeats’ house,” she wrote, “with a blue plaque over the door, saying he lived there”. And yet her own blue plaque, unveiled by her daughter many years later, is on 3 Chalcot Square in Primrose Hill. “My mother died [in Fitzroy Road],” Frieda Hughes said. “But she lived here.” Standing outside both these houses I feel the same spark. The author was here. Something of the art was here. The magic was here, even briefly, and if I stand here long enough, perhaps a little will land on me.

And if not? Not all is lost: that blue plaque — according to a study from the University of Leeds — adds a full 27 per cent to the price of any property it touches. It seems that money and art do, after all, go hand in hand.