In the dining room, for instance, are still centuries-old silk wall coverings. All of the fireplaces are Adam originals which, due to their value, is highly unusual, Leach says. “When you have a fireplace that’s worth more than the average two-bedroom flat, it’s difficult to justify having them in your living room. So that’s a credit to the previous owners.”

The doors are also original, as are the 18th century leaded glass window panes.

Nevertheless, after buying the home, Leach began a low-impact series of subtle renovations. He added a security system, wired the home for high-speed internet, changed the heating system, and restored plaster ornamentation.

“When we first purchased the property, we got a couple of very good stonemasons that were used to working with historic buildings,” Leach says. “They worked full-time for us for three years. We didn’t quite appreciate how much effort was going to be involved.”

The House
The result of those efforts is a nearly pristine, 18,196-square-foot mansion with seven bedrooms. (Three separate dwellings, including two stand-alone cottages, bring the property’s bedroom count to 13.)

Even though the house is designed to look like an old Scottish castle, “internally, it looks like a stately home,” Leach says. “It’s very sumptuous, and it’s very spacious.”

Visitors enter through a large, enclosed courtyard, which is flanked by two wings. The majority of entertaining rooms are in the main building; the dining, drawing, and morning rooms occupy most of the ground floor. The east wing has stables, a bar decorated to look like a traditional pub, a cinema room, and a three-bedroom detached apartment; the west wing, in turn, has an additional three bedrooms, a gym, and living areas.

There’s also something Leach calls a “hideaway,” where “if you go up a very small staircase, you’ll find yourself in a discreet little double bedroom with an en-suite bath and skylight,” he says. “You can see the stars.”

The house itself has a substantial footprint. “I think we were probably in the property for a month before we discovered an additional room we didn’t know we had,” Leach says. Because the house is divided into wings, “we like that we could close down a wing if there was no use for it.”

The Property
For such a large house, the size of its land— 13.5 acres— is comparatively modest, which Leach says was another major selling point. “We weren’t interested in a 500-acre estate that required an army to manage,” he says. “We didn’t want to deal with that, but we did want enough land and grounds to have a security threshold around us, and so 13 acres was perfect.”