Dr John Taylor is probably the most important household name you’ve never heard of. He transformed the way we make a brew in the 1970s when he invented the switch that turns off electric kettles when the water’s boiling.
Now in his mid-eighties, Taylor, a Cambridge graduate who earned himself an OBE in 2011 and is a world-renowned yachtsman, pilot, philanthropist and horologist, loves to wrap his head around intricate puzzles. Something all too evident in his extraordinary Isle of Man mansion, which he describes as ‘the most complicated house ever built’ – and which is on sale for £30million.
The most expensive house on the market in the self-governing Crown Dependency, it has a revolutionary elliptical design, and a cantilevered stone staircase with such advanced engineering it had to be stress-tested by a computer.
Known as the Arragon Mooar Estate, named after the 5,000-year-old Neolithic quartz circle that sits on the house, and built over seven years, it is a homage to Taylor’s love of the unconventional – serving as both family home and a museum to historic timepieces.
House hunters with a suitably big budget should expect the unexpected at the 23,000 sq ft steel, concrete and red sandstone property that sits on a windswept 282-acre hill, overlooking the sea, and is a 15-minute drive from Douglas, the island’s capital.
Interiors are made up of a series of oval rooms arranged around an oval dome-roofed atrium, its floor precision-engineered into the shape of a dahlia.
Secret passageways are incorporated into the layout, and chandeliers – with hand-painted copper petals – were so intricately designed they needed a new type of six-strand wiring to power them.
‘Modern architects build things in straight lines,’ says Taylor, who has more than 400 patents to his name, and who confides his original budget of £5million for the build and fit-out was exceeded several times over, ‘but the most difficult shape of all is an elliptical house. I never like to do what other people have done before. It’s the process of creating that I enjoy.’
It’s Derbyshire-born Taylor’s extraordinary attention to detail that puts Arragon Mooar in a class of its own, its design inspired by the ancient classical structures he spotted on holidays sailing around the Greek islands with his children. He later studied and fell in love with the work of 16th-century architect Palladio, and the Georgian country houses of Robert Adam.
‘I started off wanting to create a house that was faithful to these traditions,’ says Dr Taylor, ‘but executed in an entirely new and interesting, even modern, way.’
He considered building a home that rotated on a circular railway track, but decided this would be ‘a bit naff, and certainly problematic for plumbing and other services’.
Settling on his elliptical design, he called the Twickenham-based architecture firm Julian Bicknell & Associates to help, giving it three storeys and six en-suite bedrooms.
Completed in 2014, the seafront mansion also has an orangery, created in honour of Taylor’s grandfather who was a head gardener at a grand estate in Wales, and three high-spec cottages.
Every aspect of the interiors is bespoke, reflecting Taylor’s passion for perfection. A first-floor gallery houses display cases of mineral and fossil collections, carpets were hand-crafted in Thailand out of hypoallergenic bamboo, and the elliptical theme is continued in unique crockery and glassware.
Taylor, who struggled with dyslexia during his childhood, opens his house to be toured by schoolchildren, who are awestruck by his three-metre Dragon Chronophage.
A sister clock to one he designed for Corpus Christi College at Cambridge, unveiled in 2008 by Stephen Hawking, it shows the time by a dragon opening its mouth and swallowing a pearl for every minute.
Although Taylor’s three children and grandchildren love to visit, he says at the moment it is only he and Dusky, his miniature schnauzer, in full-time residence at the house – the reason he is selling up. ‘We rather rattle around a bit!’ he says.
Whoever buys it won’t have to pay stamp duty land tax, the government property tax payable in the UK, plus there is no capital gains tax, wealth tax or death duty payable on the Isle of Man.
Taylor is now downsizing and has taken on another project on the island. ‘I’ve already bought a smaller house nearby that I am in the process of adapting to be self-sustaining using green energy.’
Arragon Mooar is for sale as a whole or in two lots, savills.co.uk
More Trending
MORE: Artist who covered his £1,350,000 mansion in doodles now working on town mural
MORE: Incredible mansion that’s hosted four prime ministers up for sale for a cool £12million
