Rooms with a view: eight-storey Georgian lighthouse conversion for sale in Somerset

Bought on a whim at auction more than 20 years ago by the current owner, this 1830s tower seeks a buyer willing to embrace its unique style of vertical living.
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A decommissioned Georgian lighthouse in Somerset – converted into an eight-floor home by the rookie reporter who bought it at auction on a whim – is up for sale.

Patrick O’Hagan was a young TV journalist in 1996 when he was sent to cover the auction of the historic lighthouse in the seaside town of Burnham-on-Sea, 30 miles south of Bristol. When the building didn’t reach its reserve price he went to have a look at it himself.

“It was an empty shell,” he wrote in the Guardian 12 years ago. “Just a 110ft chimney with eight floors, linked by vertical steel ladders. It had no water. No toilet.”

Having bought it, dreaming of making a family home there, he spent the next 10 years getting planning permission, converting it, installing a sprinkler system – and learning to abseil so he could paint the outside.

The 1830s building is now a quirky three-bedroom home. Round rooms offer spectacular views across the Bristol Channel to Wales on one side and Exmoor National Park on another.

O’Hagan has rent it out as a holiday let, earning £50,000 a year, using it as a family holiday home when it’s vacant.

The property is accessed by a private driveway lined with olive trees, wisteria and a fruit-bearing kiwi vine leading to a solid oak front door with a bronze porthole and the original cast-iron lock and key.

The ground-floor living room has a red-brick vaulted dome ceiling and has the original flagstone flooring and control cubicle for the white, red and green sector light that guides a ship's passage safely.

A granite and brick staircase runs up through the eight floors of the lighthouse to an en suite master bedroom on the first floor with a curved shower cubicle and a second bedroom on the floor above.

The third floor houses the family bathroom with an original fireplace and a cast iron roll-top bath on a raised plinth in the centre.

There are sea views from the fourth-floor bedroom but it’s the fifth-floor dining room where things get really interesting.

Part of the granite ceiling has been removed and replaced with a galvanised mezzanine level, allowing for an uninterrupted view up through the rest of the tower to the lantern room.

Original sections of Fresnel glass lenses, which were part of the original lighthouse optics, are mounted to the chimney stack and must be retained as part of the building’s Grade II listing.

The kitchen is on the sixth floor and can be viewed through a toughened glass floor from the lantern room above – which still contains the lantern.

The lantern room has a copper domed ceiling and a built-in curved bench and leads out onto a balcony from which most of the Severn river, Newport, Cardiff and Nash Point Lighthouse can be seen.

O’Hagan designed the house to make living on eight floors as convenient as possible. There is always a toilet within one or two floors, no matter where you are in the house, and there’s a kettle and fridge at the bottom of the house as well as in the kitchen at the top.

Nonetheless, O'Hagan says the layout does force people to adapt their lifestyle.

“You have to be quite disciplined to live vertically,” said O’Hagan. “You change the way you do things. You never go up the tower empty-handed or come down empty-handed. You hang your keys in the same place all the time. You can't put your mobile phone down.”

The house is on the market for £525,000 through Hamptons International.