An extraordinary 1960s house, designed so that the owner could drive his Aston Martin up a ramp straight into his the first-floor parking bay and turning circle, has come on the market with a guide price of £12m.
The Hampshire property includes a lake, four hectares (10 acres) of gardens, and a private 18-metre mooring pontoon on the Beaulieu river.
The James Bond fantasy home (which might demand a resident villain stroking a white Persian cat) was designed by the architect Seymour Harris. He used it as his own home, living there for six years from 1962.
Half a century later his creation still looks so extraordinary it swivels heads among passing river traffic, this being, especially, a wealthy, conservative, part of the world where country house invariably means a portico and a brace of labradors.
In 1962 it shocked the neighbours into choking on their gin. "I am afraid most of the neighbours thought it dreadful, since they were accustomed to a more prosaic style," Harris's widow, Joan, told the Guardian in 2009. "I do seem to recall that it was called Hollywood on the Beaulieu river or some such."
James Crawford, of Knight Frank estate agents, agreed the place was startlingly different from most of the properties in his portfolio. "Somebody will come and see it, and buy it on the spot. It is a very unusual and highly individual property, an amazing house."
The house is named the Tukal, after a type of traditional Ethiopian roundhouse, in memory of Harris's time in Ethiopia in the 1950s. He was commissioned to design a city when Emperor Haile Selassie was contemplating moving the national capital from Addis Ababa to the shores of Lake Tana. The plan was abandoned and the dream city was never built.
The Tukal retains a swimming pool and cinema, and a gigantic curved glass-walled space described as a "gallery/ballroom". Sadly it has neither a heliport nor giant underground chamber from which to plot world domination.
The Aston Martin ramp is gone, like the original pink marble and vertical aluminium fins of the exterior. In fact, the Tukal never got listed building status, unlike many of the outstanding survivors of the period, because it had lost so many original features as it passed through different hands after the Harris family left England and moved on to new building projects in the Bahamas. Harris's equally spectacular geodesic dome house there is now owned by the magician David Copperfield.
The most recent owner of the Tukal was Mike Browne, founder of the Snow+Rock chain of ski and sports equipment shops. Confined to a wheelchair after a skiing accident, he became a passionate sailor and competed in the Paralympics; he found the house when he was looking for somewhere with convenient mooring.
The house is freehold, but the pontoon mooring is on a 99-year lease – at two guineas a year.
Browne is now moving to somewhere cosier than this 20,000-sq-ft property, but in his years in the house he stripped out layers of insensitive additions, and spent a small fortune on employing the architect Nic Bailey (designer of the sleek egg-shaped capsules on the London Eye) to restore features or create new ones in keeping with the original architecture. The pink marble, though, was beyond even his resources, and most of the exterior walls are now glass.
"It is all looking absolutely gorgeous in this weather," Crawford said. "To be able to walk from your front door on to the pontoon and on to your boat – well, that's the dream, isn't it?"