A restored Moray mansion with a secret chapel is for sale at offers over £2.95m

If you roll up to Letterfourie House for a viewing, don’t be surprised if a peacock greets you in the driveway. Among the boundless treasures of this magical, lovingly restored 11-bedroom mansion and 300-acre estate with views to the Moray coast is a colourful bird ensemble created by the American owners.
An aviary built on the site of a former tennis court is home to rare-breed ducks including Muscovy and Abacot Ranger and 15 different rare chickens including Silver-laced Wyandottes, French Marans, Cream Legbars and Araucana. Peacocks as well as guineafowl and moorhens roam free among the grounds. “It’s quite the collection,” says Evelyn Channing from the selling agency Savills. “There’s a lot of activity going on.”
Built in 1773, Letterfourie House was designed by the British neoclassical architect Robert Adam as a retirement home for two bachelor brothers from the Gordon family, once the northeast of Scotland’s most powerful clan. James Gordon was a wine trader who had established himself on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Alexander Gordon was a Jacobite who had been forced to flee Scotland for a time after the Battle of Culloden.
To this day the house retains fascinating traces of its original owners’ stories. Be it Spanish mahogany doors and wall panelling made using wood sent back from Madeira by James, or a discreet basement chapel (now repurposed as a creative studio) where the staunchly Roman Catholic brothers would worship in secret at a time when they weren’t permitted to do so publicly.
Letterfourie was known as a “safe house” during the Act of Proscription, which was enacted to crush the clan system in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There are stories of a hidden subterranean escape passage.
The present owners, who bought Letterfourie House in 2014, are an architect and architectural historian from New York and a landscape designer from Long Island. “They had been looking in England for about a year when they decided to broaden their search area and include Scotland,” Channing says. “They were in Mexico when Letterfourie appeared and they flew over to view — it ticked all their boxes. They were amazed that one could buy a Robert Adam house, and at a scale that worked for them.”
The couple have summoned all of their professional acumen over the past decade in “passionately restoring” the house, as Channing puts it, in a way that strikes a fine balance between the contemporary and the traditional. “Both of them, in my own opinion, have got great taste,” she adds, “and they’ve just done it beautifully.”
Work in the formal gardens in recent years has seen fountains dating from the early to mid-19th century fully refurbished, and over a million bulbs planted, leading to a riot of colour in the spring from snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells. The surrounding estate comprises 167 acres of arable or temporary pastureland and 139 acres of woodland and rough grazing. Agricultural services are provided under contract by a local farmer.
Their work all but done at Letterfourie, the American owners are “feeling the pull” of life closer to London and relishing the prospect of a new refurbishment project. Will the birds be flying south with them? “I think they’d be very happy if whoever comes in next was willing to take them on,” Channing says.Offers over £2.95 million, savills.com