Yannons when it was one building

Here is the ITV program from before the house was split into 3 houses.

New painting article in Teignmouth News

Miniature Balmoral for sale... in Devon. Daily Mail (London)

Byline: Nick Irving

It may only have eight bedrooms to Balmorals 40-odd and have less than an acre of land round about it compared with the Deeside estates 65,000.

But for arch-royalists, or avid lovers of Victoriana, Yannon Towers could be the must-have house purchase of the year.

The mansion in Teignmouth, Devon, was built in the 1850s by Scottish banker Robert Moir at the same time as stonemasons were creating the new Balmoral Castle on Deeside for Queen Victoria.

Such was Moirs admiration for Her Majesty and her grand designs for her Highland estate that he did his best to copy her but on a much smaller scale.

The resulting mini-Balmoral was Yannon Towers, which was built with local Devon stone. Balmoral, on the other hand, was created from the near-white granite from the nearby Glen Gelder quarries.

Yannon Towers windows and interiors were modelled on what Robert Moir believed was being built in Aberdeenshire, right down to false wooden doors in some of the corridors. Balmoral Castle was completed in 1856 but because Moirs folly was finished first, its builders could not copy the distinctive cupolas of Balmoral.

Edinburgh-born Moir chose Teignmouth for his grand design because his wife Judith, who was 26 years his junior, had lived in the nearby village of Bishopsteignton. Moir lived at Yannon Towers until his death in his eighties,after which the house passed to a succession of families.

In the 1930s, the house was owned by a friend of actress Vivien Leigh and visited by film stars, including her future husband Laurence Olivier.

After the war, Yannon Towers was divided into three flats and most of its land built on by developers.

It was reunited into a single house by its current owner, Gary Molton, a 47-year-old multi-media designer, who has put it on the market for GBP 900,000. Mr Molton said: It is a very unusual house. One of its unusual features are false doors set in the corridors to make it look symmetrical.

The downstairs rooms are certainly very large and grand.

He added: We dont know much about Mr Moir but we think his family may have made their money from the slave trade.

There is a stained glass window which seem to depict African people and animals.

We may get some admirers of the royal family interested but we expect most buyers to be more interested in the stunning views across the sea