Beachfront bungalow 'bought for £1,000' turned into luxury £5m holiday home

sandbanks-bungalow-bought-for-1000-century-ago-now-worth-five-million

A Dorset bungalow bought for just £1,000 a century ago has been turned into a luxury seaside home - and is now worth £5 million.

Dr Edward Andreae paid the equivalent of £40,000 in today's money to snap up the humble home on the now-exclusive Sandbanks peninsula in Poole Harbour back in the 1920s.

The holiday home was passed down through generations but eventually became rundown.

Then, in 2011, Dr Andreae's great-grandson, Tim Baldwin, and his father Jonathan, made the decision to demolish the building, and replace it with a luxurious beachfront home.

They spent £580,000 creating the seven-bedroom, five-bathroom pad, and it is now worth a whopping £5 million (5,000 times more than its original price).

The property, called Hook Sands, is clad in larch wood and has a garden that backs onto the beach.

Mr Baldwin, 33, an interior designer, now rents the property out to holidaymakers from April to October for up to £4,100 a week.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: "It was a very special place to me and when the bulldozers came in and the house came down I thought I would be a lot sadder, but it's all about the location and the views.

"We wanted to create a contemporary house that was going to last for another 100 years.

"I'm really looking forward to taking my daughter, who is 10 months old, to the property for holidays so she can do the same things I did as a child."

Sandbanks, known as Millionaire's Row, is a small peninsula crossing the mouth of Poole Harbour on the English Channel coast at Poole in Dorset.

It's a hotspot for the rich and famous, with Harry Redknapp and his son Jamie, as well as retired football manager Graeme Souness, owning multi-million-pound harbour-front homes there.

At less than half a square mile, Sandbanks has, by area, the fourth highest land value in the world.

Property prices in the area were knocked by the financial crisis, but are now booming again. According to the Bournemouth Echo, a Sandbanks bungalow that was bought for £1.5 million doubled in value - after it was knocked down.

The land alone, a tenth of an acre, and its planning permission to build a five-bedroom home, saw the plot on the water's edge, with its own private beach, go on the market for £3m.

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