The Norwegian shipping magnate Andreas Ugland likes to take risks. Not only is
he a world-champion powerboat racer, he bought his East Sussex country-house
estate — with Grade II*-listed, late-17th-century manor house and 350-acre,
Repton-designed deer park — over the phone from his home in the Cayman
Islands in 1993. “I saw the house in a magazine and knew it was right
immediately,” he says. “I bought it for £1m without setting foot in the
place.”
The 10-bed, five-reception mansion on the edge of the village of Heathfield
was structurally solid, but needed a new roof and total rewiring and
replumbing. During the next two years, Ugland’s team of 100 full-time
workers carried out the necessary renovations — “though we were careful to
conserve the plasterwork, especially the cornices and fireplaces”, he says.
The team also restored the dank, dilapidated basement, built new entrance
gates and a five-car garage, repaired the driveway, constructed new stable
blocks and erected a 6ft fence within the four-mile wall that surrounds the
estate, making it practically impenetrable to intruders while keeping in the
hundreds of red, fallow, sika and white deer that roam the grounds.
On buying Heathfield Park, Ugland added his name to an elite roll call of past
aristocratic owners of the land: the Fiennes, Monceux and Dacre families
have all lived there, as did General George Eliott, the “Cock of the Rock”,
who defended Gibraltar against the Spanish during the siege of 1779-83. In
1793, the next owner, Francis Newbery, completed work on the Gibraltar
Tower, a three-storey octagonal castellated folly within the grounds,
erected in Eliott’s honour. The tower is now Grade II*-listed.
Ugland, 52, who hails from Grimstad, in southern Norway, and is resident in
Grand Cayman, the tax haven from where he runs his company, Andreas Ugland &
Sons, was still married to his first wife, Inger, a former Miss Norway, when
he bought the estate. But it never really became a family home for him and
their three children.
Instead, Ugland’s second wife, Natalie — a Canadian, to whom he proposed on a
Cayman beach and married in 2002 — joined him in the task of completing
Heathfield Park’s return to its former glory.
“I fell in love with the views immediately,” says Natalie, 44, a former
accessories designer, as she gazes out from the red damask-walled dining
room — all the main reception rooms face south — to the fountain, which is
erupting in full flow from the lake the couple put in at the end of the
formal gardens, and beyond to the South Downs.
Although their main home is a beachside house on Grand Cayman, the Uglands
travel all over the world developing properties, largely for their own use
rather than resale. “We have homes in London, Canada, Norway, Portugal,
Spain — I forget exactly how many,” Natalie laughs.
Heathfield Park was also the perfect place for Natalie to indulge her passion
for horses: she keeps about 20 lusitanos at the estate and, in the outdoor
menage, their trainer, Paolo, and her 11-year-old daughter from her first
marriage, “little Natalie”, practise dressage. Her love for all things
equestrian is equalled only by her fetish for chic footwear: the statuesque
blonde Québecoise believes she has more pairs of shoes than Imelda Marcos.
“I am obsessed,” she cheerfully confesses.
When she decorated the house — “strictly not my concern,” Ugland says —
Natalie worked closely with the interior designer and antiques expert David
Genty, creating what he calls “an English country-house feel with a French
and Italian flavour”. Tissu tendu(fabric walling) features
throughout. In the 32ft x 24ft main drawing room, which the couple refer to
as “the ballroom”, a replica of a Tiepolo mural adorns the vaulted ceiling —
“a 40th-birthday present from my husband”. However, the reception hall, home
to one of the house’s two Robert Adam fireplaces (the other is upstairs),
has Norwegian oak flooring, a nod to Ugland’s homeland.
On the first floor, the main bedroom suite is what Genty feels is their piãce
de résistance. The champagne-coloured boudoir, with gilded
panelling, Italian silk curtains and an 18th-century four-poster bed with
tented ceiling, leads onto Natalie’s bathroom, where the frescoed ceiling
bears a copy of Tiepolo’s Allegory of Venus and Time. On a chair outside its
door is a cushion with the words: “I was born free, but now I’m expensive.”
The decor becomes more masculine as you progress along the corridor. Ugland’s
private bathroom has blue boats on the blinds and a compass painted on the
ceiling. On the window-sill, there is a rare photograph of the master of the
house, which bears testament to one of Ugland’s own infatuations of the past
20 years: powerboat racing. It shows him as world champion in 1992. There
are images of his wife everywhere; a particularly startling oil painting of
Natalie, bare-breasted and in the guise of a mermaid, hangs outside the
library, part of the same suite of rooms.
Back on the ground floor, Ugland received planning permission to double the
size of the kitchen — now 26ft x 14ft, and again decorated by Genty. It has
the obligatory Aga, which Natalie adores — “We don’t have them in Canada” —
and that other country-house essential, a dumb waiter.
Leading off the kitchen — past a door behind which lurk Bruiser the doberman
and Kenza the rottweiler — are stairs to the basement, down which a previous
owner, William Cleverly Alexander, fell to his death at the beginning of the
20th century. (It is rumoured that he was pushed by a disgruntled butler.)
Here, the Uglands have built a state-of-the-art wine cellar for 1,000 or so
bottles. “We nicked the design straight from a magazine,” Natalie says.
An 11th-century chapel, around which the 17th-century house was built, can
also be found down here. A small, whitewashed room with a wall painting at
one end, it is bare, but will soon be filled with the pews that are being
fashioned by the estate’s full-time carpenter. (Other staff include a
full-time estate manager and two housekeepers.) In an unusual design
decision, a sauna and shower room lead off the chapel.
Also down here are offices, a boardroom — used just half a dozen times a year
— and a room for “gathering bits and pieces”. The couple plan to open a car
museum in the Caymans soon: Ugland owns more than 100 classic cars,
including a yellow Rolls-Royce from the 1964 film of the same title,
starring Ingrid Bergman; Elton John’s old Bentley; and Peter Sellers’s
Ferrari. He added to the collection earlier this year when he bought a
Batmobile, built for the 1960s television series, at auction for £120,000.
A tour of the grounds reveals further anecdotes and eccentricities. The
Canadian soldiers who were stationed at the house during the second world
war left coins, bullets and identity papers to be discovered by successive
owners. The Uglands have gathered these together for posterity under glass
on a delicate, three-sided antique table in the entrance hall. Some of the
soldiers even scratched their names onto the roofing outside one of the
first-floor bathrooms.
For added intrigue, there is a secret underground room, reached by a tunnel
beneath the parkland. And near one of the estate boundaries lie the broken
branches of a mighty tree — the result of an impact with a bomber that
crashed on its way to Biggin Hill airport, 35 miles to the north.
Among the plethora of buildings dotting the estate, the miniature manor house
near the kitchen garden — practically an exact replica, and known as “the
doll’s house” — is used by Natalie Jr, who boards down the road at St
Leonards, and her friends for sleepovers. It even has a mezzanine level.
And it hasn’t always been just deer that ranged the grounds: at one point,
there was a zoo, complete with elephants. Though there’s nothing quite so
exotic now, there are plenty of animals to eat. In fact, you could be
practically self-sufficient here: the property, which has a licensed
slaughterhouse, is teeming with pheasant, there are rainbow trout in one of
the many lakes and fresh eggs come from Natalie’s beloved East Sussex
chickens. “I don’t want anybody to go hungry,” Ugland says.
Yet the couple, who spend their summers in Norway, their winters in Montreal
and much of the rest of their time in the Caymans, have found they aren’t in
Britain enough to justify keeping the estate. They are selling up, but
retaining a house in west London for mini-breaks.
Aren’t they sad to leave after all their hard work? “It’s true, we’ve not left
a stone unturned in restoring the house,” Ugland says, though he thinks it’s
impossible to say how much he has spent during his 14-year stewardship of
the property.
The house, which was on the market for £8m for a few months in 2002, didn’t
budge; it’s now for sale for £12m. So who would it suit? “Someone who
implicitly understands the responsibilities that come with a place like
this,” Ugland says. “But above all, someone who will really use
it.”
Heathfield Park estate is for sale with Savills, 020 7499 8644, www.savills.co.uk
