Orphaned lambs, bees, ten acres of South Oxfordshire, a tennis court and a rose garden planted with her mother’s favourite variety. Belles Berry designed the house around all of it, and then she listed it.
“It has everything we ever dreamed of – a fountain in the entrance hall, a games room, a tennis court and a beautiful wood for camping.” Belles Berry, speaking to Hello! in 2026.
Primroses, Taken to Henley
Every spring she goes into the woods near the house and picks primroses for her mother. The habit is inherited: “Mum used to go ‘primrosing’ to collect primroses where she grew up in Bath when she was a little girl, and now I go primrosing in the woods here in spring and deliver them to her,” she told the SWNS wire this year.
The woods belong to the house, which makes the picking a short job. The drive is the longer part.
The mother is Dame Mary Berry, born in Bath in March 1935, who moved to Henley-on-Thames with her husband Paul Hunnings in 2019. The distance between the two households is about six miles. The Bath girlhood is where the primrosing started, and it survived the move east. Sunday roasts happen at the daughter’s end, usually followed by a walk and whatever can be picked out of the hedge.
Annabel Berry, 54 and known universally as Belles, trained at Cordon Bleu, the same school her mother went to, according to the Daily Mail as cited by Hello!. She has appeared on television beside her mother occasionally rather than professionally, which in a family with that surname counts as restraint. She is the third child and the only daughter, and for most of her adult life she has been the one who lives nearby, keeps the animals and does the hosting.
The roasts are at Ewelme because Ewelme has the kitchen, the acreage and the children. The primroses travel the other way.
It is the kind of arrangement that looks effortless from outside and runs on somebody’s diary.
A Bungalow, a Shearing Shed and a 2020 Build
The site came first and it was not glamorous. Blenheim Farm had been an alpaca farm; when the family moved there in 2014 they lived in the old bungalow that stood on it. Six years later the bungalow was gone and in its place stood a house that Belles and her husband Dan designed and built themselves, overlooking ten acres of South Oxfordshire near the village of Ewelme, close to Wallingford, as SWNS reported.
Six years in the alpaca farmer’s bungalow, then the bungalow came down.
What they put up is not a restoration or a conversion. It is more than 4,000 square feet of accommodation with a fountain in the entrance hall, a games room, a swimming pool and a tennis court, plus a large shearing shed left over from the alpacas and a separate three-bedroom barn-style cottage, currently let, with three en-suite bedrooms and a loft used as extra reception space. The shed outlasted the animals that justified it. The cottage gives the holding a tenant as well as livestock.
Country Life, reviewing the listing, called it a wild fantasy of a home. The phrase is doing less work than it sounds. The woods were kept for camping. The rose garden was planted with a purpose: “The rose garden is full of mum’s favourite roses, Chandos Beauty,” Belles told SWNS.
People build dream houses for their own pleasure. This one has a flowerbed designed around somebody else’s taste.
Chutneys, Cake Mixes and a £2.5m Sale
The commercial life ran in parallel. In the 1990s mother and daughter set up Mary Berry & Daughter, which produced dressings, chutneys, cake mixes and sauces: a proper food business with the family name on the jar and the daughter inside the operation rather than on the packaging. The company was sold in 2014 for £2.5m, the Daily Mail reported, as cited by Hello!.
That year is worth holding onto, because 2014 is also when the family arrived at Ewelme and settled into the alpaca farmer’s bungalow. The sale of a food brand and the start of a smallholding sit in the same twelve months.
The Berry children went in three directions. Thomas, the eldest, became a tree surgeon rather than a cook, the one Berry career with no connection to a kitchen. William, born in 1969, died in a car crash in 1989 at nineteen; his sister Annabel was in the passenger seat and survived, as NationalWorld has reported in its coverage of Dame Mary’s public comments about her son’s death. Belles took the cooking and, eventually, the land.
She has described herself as an accidental smallholder, which is the self-deprecating version. Great British Life’s account of Blenheim Farm lists orphaned lambs, cows and ducks, and bees that supply the household honey. The lambs arrived as orphans; the bees arrived with honey attached. None of that was in the business plan, because there was no business plan.
Ten Acres, Savills and an Asking Price of £3,950,000
The house went on the market in spring 2026 through Savills. The figure attached to it is £3,950,000, per the Oxford Mail’s reporting as summarised by Newswall, which also noted the property had sat at the full asking price without finding a new owner. Most of the press rounded it up to £4m, which is what happens to a number with a nine in front of it.
Savills has had the instruction since the spring, and the number has not moved.
Coverage was immediate and warm rather than forensic: the SWNS wire went everywhere, Great British Life and Country Life ran property features, and Hello! secured the interview. SWNS reported that Belles has regularly hosted her mother at the house, including for a birthday party.
A house like this one is unusually legible. You can read the owners off it. The shearing shed says the alpacas were here first; the let cottage says somebody thought about income; the tennis court and the camping wood say three children; the roses say Henley; and the fountain says somebody had an idea early and refused to be talked out of it.
Nobody builds a fountain into an entrance hall by accident.
A 24-Year Marriage and an Accepted Offer
Belles and Dan separated after 24 years of marriage, and she spoke about it on the record for the first time in an interview with Hello! published in June. They have three children, Louis, 21, Hobie, 18, and Atalanta, 15. The house, she said, was a passion project for both of them: “We poured our heart and soul into the property,” she told the magazine, as reported by Woman & Home. Louis is older than the house.
The timing is plain enough. The property went to market in the spring. The interview ran in June.
She did not dress up the rest of it. “When you get married, you think [you’ll be] together forever… I really never thought this would happen. It’s heartbreaking,” she said in the same interview, as reported by Woman & Home on 17 June 2026. Nothing about the financial arrangements between them has been made public, and no settlement terms have been reported anywhere.
Her mother’s position was summarised in a line that will be familiar to anyone who has watched Dame Mary handle a collapsed sponge on television: “Mum is incredibly positive… She just wants me and the children to be happy,” Belles told Hello!.
The most recent public development is procedural rather than dramatic. The Cotswold Journal has reported that an offer has been accepted on the £4m asking price. No completion has been confirmed by the agent or any land record, so the sale is agreed rather than done, and the six miles between Ewelme and Henley remain six miles for now.
No buyer has been named.
