Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2007 | Page 24

life INTERVIEW Big Brother paid well, but not enough to buy Arreton “At some point I’d wanted to have a house and garden open to the public – only I expected it to be when I was older,” said Andy Gray-Ling, the current owner of Arreton Manor. You might expect these words to be competing with a mouthful of silver spoon, but in fact it is a boy from east London who is sitting in his manor house, lord apparently of all he surveys. Who’d have thought it? Andy and Julia Gray-Ling are the people responsible for re-opening Arreton to the public, to popular local acclaim after it had been kept private for seven years. They bought the house with what some of their forebears might once sniffily have been called ‘new money’. And that’s right. The fortune that maintains the beautifully proportioned creamy stone house is not just new money: it is brand spanking hi-tech state-of-the-art money. At Arreton these days the creakingly old blends with the pin new with surprising ease. The reality as to how the boy from Leyton ended up owning Arreton is behind slatted blinds 24 obscuring the view into an old outbuilding. This is Andy GrayLing’s studio: one of the most hi-tech recording studios in England. It is this technological wonder housed in a 17th century cottage which sums up the new owner of Arreton. Andy is a record producer and writer, a veteran music man of 22 years. He was responsible for some of the household names of 80s music, such as Human League, Tori Amos and Gary Newman. He writes film scores too – Sword Fish was one of his – and is now producing a new generation of acts which include Ian Brown, Korn and Republica. If they don’t yet ring any bells with you – and Andy is adamant that the latter are to have a worldwide smash – one of his more notorious commissions was for the theme tune for Channel 4’s Big Brother – though he is quick to quash any thoughts that the latter had a bearing on funding Arreton. . “That didn’t pay for this,” he snorts. “Now if it had been ITV not Channel 4 it might have done”. “I made the decision nine or 10 years ago that I could make money as an expert in new technology, and it was the right move,” he explains. Because it is such a high-end studio, he and his family can be where they want to be: and that, firmly, is the Isle of Wight. He and Julia had long outgrown their London house – “I had a living room stuffed with equipment” – and had moved out to Hertfordshire, doing that classic eighties thing of buying a converted barn. A 17th century converted barn. “I have a passion for 17th century architecture and furniture,” Andy explains. “We were on holiday on the Island and my dad spotted a house for sale in Bembridge which seemed very cheap. Then on the day we were due to go home we heard Arreton had been on the market though it wasn’t any more. I looked it up on the internet and wrote to the owner. Within two months we’d bought it.” That was in September 2003, when the chasm between Island prices and those of the southeast mainland was rather larger than today. But even so, the Gray-Lings got a good deal. The previous owner, Julia explained, had spent more than he paid for the house on doing it up and during the process had decided he didn’t like the island. “Before him, owners had done little more than tart the house up – it was all bodged. But I walked in and everything had been done, and by big contractors on the island,” said Andy, “I met every one of them. I had a structural engineer look at it – the walls look like Island Life - www.islandlife.tv