A house from 1481 on the market for the first time: a wedding gift with no electricity that became royal Britain's loudest address

The house is called The Old House and it was built in 1481. For five and a half centuries it was somebody's home, somebody's gift, somebody's stage. Now, for the first time, it is for sale - for close to five million euros.

It stands on the Nymans estate in southern England, on around 2.2 hectares, and it is no ordinary old house. It is the place where Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, the first Earl of Snowdon, spent the most dazzling stretch of their marriage. And the place The Crown used as inspiration for an episode, because what went on there was too good not to film.

A wedding present, with no electricity

Armstrong-Jones received the house from his uncle Oliver Messel, the celebrated stage designer, as a wedding present ahead of his marriage to Princess Margaret at Westminster Abbey on 16 May 1960. The gift sounds lavish until you learn the condition it was in: at that point the house had neither electricity nor running water.

What followed is the story of a man who knew what to do with a space. Snowdon turned a crumbling structure into a refined retreat, and then into an address people came to. The parties there gathered royalty, aristocrats, artists and intellectuals - the milieu that in 1960s Britain meant everything.

The lake that was a photographic studio

His most ambitious project was the lake. Digging it out took an entire winter of work. It was not decoration - Snowdon used it as an open-air studio, and photographed Bianca Jagger there, among others. This also includes a scene that sounds invented: Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother took part in a ceremonial crossing over stepping stones above the lake, with the rite led by the Bishop of Horsham.

What is inside

The entrance is a rustic oak door leading into a hall with exposed wooden beams and a gallery - an atmosphere straight out of Tudor times. The main living room has a working fireplace and connects to a wood-panelled Georgian drawing room with its original fireplace preserved and a bay window.

The kitchen is bright and looks out over the gardens, with bespoke fittings blending contemporary and historic. There are four bedrooms in total, the main one with its own bathroom, and some of them have exposed wooden beams.

The bathroom with Wallis Simpson on the wall

There are four bathrooms, and one of them is a joke that has lasted sixty years. Instead of wallpaper, the walls are covered with newspaper cuttings - and among the faces on them is Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom Edward VIII gave up the throne. So in a house belonging to members of the royal family, somebody decided to put the very person who shook the crown on a bathroom wall.

That is a detail that says more about Snowdon than any biography. He was inside the institution, but he never stopped mocking it.

The garden that has nothing to do with the house, and is everything

The Nymans estate is one of Britain's most famous gardens, created by Ludwig Messel, a German financier, starting in 1890. His son Leonard and daughter-in-law Maud continued the work, and in 1953 the gardens were handed to the National Trust. Oliver Messel, Leonard's son, inherited the stewardship - and he is the man who gave the house to his nephew.

So the whole story is a family one: a German banker buys an English estate, three generations build it up, and in the end one part of it lands with a man who will marry the queen's sister.

An Ascot box, relocated to a garden

In the grounds stands a small pavilion with a balcony rescued from the royal box at Ascot racecourse in the 1960s. There is also a heated private pool with its own building. This is not decor - this is a man who took a piece of royal ceremony and put it in his garden as furniture.

The marriage that did not last

Margaret and Snowdon separated in 1978, after nearly two decades. The house remained, the parties stopped. The rest we know from series and biographies, which is precisely the problem: an entirely true story is now remembered through the actors who played it.

What the price means

Five million euros for a house from 1481, with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a pool, a lake and a history that international productions film - in London that would buy a two-room flat with a view of another building. The market for historic property runs on its own logic: you pay for square metres, but what you are actually buying is a story.

The question is who buys it. Someone who wants to live in it, or someone who wants to own it? For five centuries the house was a home. From now on it can also be an investment.