Devon Home Of Rolling Stones Drummer Charlie Watts Is Up For Sale

In 2020, as the world was thrown into the suffocating throes of the pandemic, Lady Gaga came up with a way to help. Curating the Global Citizen’s One World: Together At Home concert, she brought together a host of the world’s biggest stars to perform a virtual music festival in partnership with the World Health Organisation to raise money for frontline health workers. The star act? The Rolling Stones performed ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ to an adoring crowd of at-home fans. Or at least three out of four of the band members did. 

Despite being best known as the best drummer in one of the world’s best and biggest bands, it seems that Charlie Watts didn’t have a drum kit of his own at home, or even an on-site music studio to escape to. With no snares or cymbals available to crash, he resorted to air-drumming his way through on a make-shift kit made up of boxes and a chair, while he ‘performed’ to the masses from the library of his Devon home. And now that very same property, once owned by the legendary drummer, has hit the market. 

Discover Halsdon House: Former Home Of Charlie Watts

Rolling Stones Avebury Hill, 1968, © David Bailey

Though Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the constant heart of the Rolling Stones, that heart would have had no beat without legendary musician Charlie Watts. The band’s drummer from January 1963 up until his death in August 2021, Watts took to the stage for the final time on August 30 2019. 

In contrast to his bright and bashy bandmates, Watts eschewed their more libertine excesses in preference for a quiet life, away from the spotlight’s glare. (In the summer before his purchase of Halsdon House, the band’s PR manager Alan Edwards only managed to convince the publicity-shy Watts to do one interview while on tour – in which he talked about the upcoming test matches with the Daily Telegraph’s cricket correspondent.) Where Jagger and Richards shacked up together in Chelsea – first sharing a flat, then living down the road from each other, and then moving out at the same time as each other in what can only be diagnosed as mild co-dependency – Watts kept to himself with his own base in Marylebone. During the 60s he lived in the Marylebone mansion block Ivor Court with his artist wife Shirley, while the band’s first manager Andrew Oldham lived in the same block where he’s said to have used his apartment as an office.

Watts and Shirley were together for 57 years, often prioritising privacy over the rock-and-roll lifestyle of the Rolling Stones. Eventually growing tired of the ‘madding crowds’ of London, the couple looked further afield, relocating to Halsdon House in Devon in 1983 – where they stayed for 38 years, until Watts’s death in 2021 aged 80, and Shairley’s at the end of 2022. Located in the heart of rural Devon, within a secluded position above the River Torridge valley, the quiet Grade II listed country house is enveloped in green hills and meadows, providing the Watts family with the tranquility they sought, while remaining a stone’s throw from Devon’s bustling villages and market towns.

The couple first stumbled across Halsdon House while browsing through a copy of Country Life. Despite the home being in a state of disrepair, buyers were not perturbed, with the property attracting 100 enquiries and 20 viewings in the space of just two weeks. Watts’ winning bid was ‘considerably more than the guide price of £90,000’, according to a follow-up report in Country Life, which added that the sale had included a further 20 acres of land on top of the original 14. It is said that the pair fell in love with the idyllic charm of the woodlands and the old Victorian stables – and that they continued to acquire more land, and upgrade and improve the house over the years.

Built in the 1600s with an early Victorian front, the home was once the residence of a local Devon squire, John Henry Furse. Today, the country house boasts 55 acres of private grounds, complete with equestrian facilities, stables, workshops, traditional barns and an annexe.

Inside, the traditional Devon home offers up architectural grandeur, elegant proportions and plenty of period detailing – including sash windows, high ceilings, decorative plasterwork and ornate fireplaces. Spanning 8,500 sqft arranged across three floors, the principal reception rooms are arranged around a central entrance hall. Other key features of the nine-bedroom home include a formal dining room, an informal and formal sitting room, a breakfast room adjoining the kitchen, a cellar, and the library where Watts kept a collection of rare books – and gave his impressive air-drumming performance during the pandemic. 

The gardens are a particular highlight – with the Watts family having inherited Halsdon’s original gardener Horace, who served the home from age 14 all the way up until his 90s. The grounds were tendered by him and Shirley, creating a botanical paradise of wild roses, a secret garden with a lily pond, rhododendron beds, mature specimen trees, sweeping lawns, rolling pastures, a water reservoir, woodland and colourful planted borders around the perimeter of the house. More recently gardener Casey has taken over from Horace and Shirley, maintaining it the way Shirley would have wanted it.

In a 1989 profile of the Rolling Stones in Vanity Fair, American author Kevin Sessums wrote that Watts and Shirley ‘are content to live their solitary human lives amongst a menagerie that includes fifteen Arabian horses, eighteen dogs, and two cats’. Alongside Charlie, Shirley, and their many animals, Halsdon House was also home to their daughter Seraphina  – who moved with her parents at 15, and has since raised her daughter Charlotte there as well. Seraphina and Shirley would spend much of their time riding together, with Shirley developing a particular interest in Arabian horses, following a horse fair she attended in France in the mid 1980s. Inspired, she set out to learn as much as she could about the breed from experts in Poland and the US, later acquiring a stallion, Piechur, who would pave the way for Halsdon’s so-called ‘decade of dominance’ in the show ring of the 1990s. Seraphina became an excellent horsewoman as well, going on to rescue horses of her own, and supporting many dog and horse charities, such as the Brook, and Riding for the Disabled in Bermuda.

Talking about her childhood home, Seraphina says: ‘Halsdon House has been a sanctuary for our family over the years, for my parents, myself and my daughter. As the house sits at the heart of its own grounds, surrounded by rolling countryside, the opportunities for walks and rides were endless. My parents loved being surrounded by nature and dogs, which were always abundant during their lifetimes. There were always lots of dogs around the Aga in winter and lots of tea in the gardens in summer.’

She explains that when her father was out touring her mother Shirley would often take the opportunity to rearrange furniture, bring in new pieces, paint a room a different colour or even change the floor. ‘She loved creating and designing, and making their house a home, but knew Charlie wasn’t fond of change, particularly if it involved decorators coming into the house,’ she says. ‘On his return he would look around and ask with a smile if something was different – knowing full well as he had an eye for detail and knew if a pen was out of place.’

On the market for £2.75 million. Find out more at search.savills.com