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“This house is full of my mess/ This house is full of mistakes/ This house is full of madness / This house is full of fight,” sang Kate Bush in “Get Out of My House”. Now, this house is for sale: the singer’s former Berkshire home has been listed with Strutt & Parker for £11.5 million.
Bush bought the Grade II-listed Georgian mansion in the mid-1990s when she was pregnant with her son, Bertie, and lived there with her husband, the guitarist Danny McIntosh, until 2011.
Located on the river Kennet, near the village of Theale, the property was built around 1800 as a miller’s house for the nearby water mill. Standing in 22.54 acres of grounds, Shenfield Mill, as it is known, offered Bush the privacy she was looking for. “I’m really quite a quiet, private person,” she said in an interview for her biography, written by Rob Jovanovic. “It’s quite a surprise to me to think I’m a famous person.”
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After moving in, Bush converted two of the property’s outbuildings into a dance and recording studio. It was here that she wrote and recorded Aerial — her first album in 12 years when it was released in 2005 — and 50 Words for Snow. At the time, Bush said that she recorded birdsong from her garden at the house, which she reinterpreted in her voice and used in Aerial. The cover depicts the soundwave of a blackbird song.
“I’ve always been very lucky because I’ve got a lot of creative freedom when I’m working in the studio. The albums don’t cost a lot of money. It’s a very small process,” Bush told the BBC in 2011. “I’ve put a packet of bonemeal on my piano. It seems to be helping the blossoming of the songs.”
Bush sold the property to its current owners, Mike and Fran Taylor, in 2011. “Mike is a very keen fisherman,” says agent Tom Shuttleworth. “You’ve got the river Kennet and the Avon Canal, but when he saw the weir pool, he said: ‘I’ve got to have it.’”
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The Taylors undertook a four-year renovation of the house and grounds, which included reroofing and repointing the Georgian property, refurbishing the windows – and almost doubling the house’s footprint by adding a glass extension. Measuring nearly 1,200 square feet, the glass-walled extension —or orangery— overlooks the garden and river, and is connected to the house via a glass link.
“The owners literally took the home back to brick internally,” says Shuttleworth. “It was a real labour of love.”
Now, the Georgian main house measures a total of 7,384 square feet with four bedrooms, the largest of which is almost 500 square feet alone. Bush’s former dance studio has been turned into a two-storey, self-contained cottage with two further bedrooms, while her recording studio is now a three-bedroom bungalow.
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Outside, the couple reshaped the property’s gardens, reinstating the eroding riverbanks and creating a walled garden from the historic mill, which had been damaged by a fire in the late 1800s. “They enabled the water to flow through the mill once again, which helps the river Kennet to flow smoothly through the grounds,” says Shuttleworth. “What you’ve got now is a nice combination of order and nature.”
Leading from the house to the semi-formal gardens is a 75-foot steel bridge, also added by the Taylors. The real showstopper, though, is the introduction of a three-metre diameter Archimedes screw: a device which harnesses the river’s hydro energy to generate 40 kilowatts of power per hour. This is enough to cover all the property’s power needs —including hot water, underfloor heating, air conditioning and a rapid electric vehicle charging point— as well as a surplus which it exports back to the National Grid.
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“I was completely taken by the Archimedes screw. That’s not something you see every day. To provide all the electricity for a house of this size is extraordinary,” says Shuttleworth. “The home and its additional accommodation use no gas or oil.”
The Taylors have used Shenfield Mill as a family home since they bought it. But now, with their children having moved out, they are selling to be closer to them and their grandchildren.
Shuttleworth believes the property is likely to suit people like the Taylors: “Someone who clearly likes privacy, and a bit of space around them. A keen fisherman, like the current owner, would be a sensible fit,” he says. “It could suit extended family as well, with the cottage and the studio. What a fun family home.”
