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
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