IT was a deliberate ploy by property developer Anthony Coote Sykes to make his family home look like an historic stately home.

It was in fact built in eight months for around £350,000 in the mid-1990s of breeze blocks and render as a gothic revival family home.

Anthony and his wife Harriet wanted to create something special and bought the farmland with planning permission for a more traditional looking Palladian-style mansion, complete with ionic columns, which planners thought would be an asset to the Bride Valley land.

But Mr Skyes threw those plans out and having got permission for the principle of a house in a previously uninhabited valley just outside Long Bredy set about putting his stamp on it.

It is fair to say that planners were less enthusiastic about his vision but the planning permission could not be revoked.

Since then the house has been featured in TV's The Curious House Guest when Jeremy Musson came to call, Hello magazine, Country Life, Farmers' Weekly and the Architectural Digest, among others.

Now the couple are throwing open the doors to their home for a rare opportunity to see inside to raise money for the villages of Long Bredy and Littlebredy as well as the new radiotherapy centre in Dorset County Hospital.

The house will be open on Saturday July 1 from 1pm to 5pm and there will be a traditional barn dance from 3pm to 4.30pm, a table top sale, raffle and a country tea.

Mr Skyes comes from a family of soldiers and farmers, but much of his career has been spent building up-market developments in London.

Today, the couple run the farm and its topiary nursery.

To build Bellamont 20,000tons of earth was dug out from the hill on which it was sited.

Mr Skyes, who was his own architect and project manager, decorated the interior with paintings including one of Anthony’s ancestors, Sir Eyre Coote, Commander-in-Chief of India in the 1770s.

The house is full of tricks and quirks and the agricultural barn looks more like a classical temple with its facade mirroring the style of the house.

He says the idea dates back to the 18th century when landowners didn’t like looking out on to ugly farm buildings, so they made them like temples and castles to make the landscape more interesting.

Both Mr and Mrs Skyes are no strangers to grand houses.

The Sykeses of old lived, most famously, at Sledmere House in East Yorkshire, and Harriet, a great-granddaughter of the tenth Duke of St Albans, grew up in Cumbria’s Holker Hall.

Mr Sykes was inspired by childhood stays at Alscot Park, near Stratford- upon-Avon, which had been transformed in the Gothic taste in the 1700s and by his studies of Strawberry Hill, the Gothic-style house designed and built by Horace Walpole, a six-times granduncle of his.