Stunning mansion that was part of a Titanic love story hits the market for £4.25m
On a quiet stretch of Boston Spa, a grand Georgian house carries a story that reaches far beyond Yorkshire.
Fairseat House, on the market for £4.25m, was once home to Maria Robinson, fiancée of Wallace Hartley, the violinist who led the Titanic’s band to their final, haunting performance as the ship went down in 1912.
Wallace, who spent much of his life in Yorkshire after his family moved to Dewsbury, played violin with the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra before joining an agency that placed musicians on transatlantic liners.
The German rosewood violin he carried onto the Titanic was a 1910 gift from Maria, given to mark their engagement.
Fairseat House was part of that story. It is believed to have been the last place the couple saw each other. “I didn’t know anything about the connection before we bought the property,” says Sharon Walton, who has restored the home with her husband, Dan.
The house, which is over 200 years old and originally known as St Ives, had faded from its status as one of Boston Spa’s grandest residences. In the 1970s, it was carved into four apartments, two of which eventually fell into complete disrepair. By the time Sharon first saw it, the shutters were fading and the building was tired, but even then she knew it was special.
She and Dan, who run development firm Red Tree Developments, had admired the house long before they owned it. “We moved in nearby and when I saw this most beautiful house that had blue shutters on, and was in total disrepair, I said, one day we're going to buy that house,” she says.
When it came on the market, they moved quickly. What followed was a two-year restoration project - a labour of love and, at times, frustration. “It was not in the state it should have been. It was quite upsetting to see that everything had been ripped out. So we tried to put it back to the grandeur that it actually deserves,” Sharon says.
They stripped out the remains of four apartments and set about returning it to a single six bedroom residence of almost 9,000 sq ft.
Sharon admits she had hoped the process might reveal some physical trace of its past. “You would think in such an old building that we would find things in there, but there just wasn't. So we tried to put all the ceiling roses back in, put chandeliers in and just make it feel something like it would have done a couple of hundred years ago.”
Today, Fairseat House is a gleaming, classically styled home with a cinema room, games space, sauna, gym, sweeping staircase, vast family kitchen and a south-west facing terrace. Mature trees edge the grounds and a long pebble drive curves in from the electric gates.
Despite its size and splendour, Sharon insists it still feels like a home. "We wanted to make sure it had a big living kitchen for the modern family, and a proper dining room for Christmas that overlooks the garden.”
Fairseat is on the market with Croft Residential for £4.25m. Tel 01904 238 222.