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A Mini-Castle, Saved From Ruins, Now Fit for a New King

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A roofless folly built to show off fossils sat abandoned for decades — until a Spanish architect turned it into a three-story home with a roof terrace.

Dinton Castle, tucked into the Buckinghamshire countryside near Aylesbury, spent most of the last century as a crumbling curiosity on English Heritage’s “at risk” register. Built in 1769 by Sir John Vanhatten of nearby Dinton Hall as an ornamental “eye-catcher” — and as a display case for his fossil collection, with giant prehistoric ammonites embedded directly into its limestone walls — the Grade II-listed folly lost its roof long ago and stood open to the sky for decades. Architect Jaime “Jimmy” Fernández and his wife, Mimi, bought it in 2016 for £100,000 and spent the next 18 months turning it into a livable, if unconventional, home.

• Fernández and his wife purchased the roofless, Grade II-listed folly in 2016 for £100,000 and spent more than £300,000 restoring it between January 2017 and June 2018.
• Built in 1769 by Sir John Vanhatten, the octagonal folly incorporates actual giant ammonite fossils into its limestone walls — a nod to its original use as a showcase for his fossil collection.
• The finished three-story home — featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs in September 2018 and honored with a Design Award from Aylesbury Vale District Council — went on the market for £765,000 after an initial £850,000 asking price.

An Eye-Catcher Built for a Fossil Collector

Dinton Castle was never meant to be lived in. Vanhatten commissioned it purely as a “folly” — a decorative structure meant to be seen from a distance, dressing up the grounds of Dinton Hall while doubling as a literal display cabinet for his fossils. The ammonites set into the stonework aren’t ornamental carvings; they’re the real thing, pressed into the limestone nearly 250 years ago. That detail is part of what made the building historically protected, and part of what made restoring it so unusual — Fernández wasn’t just fixing a ruin, he was working around specimens that couldn’t be replaced.

Eighteen Months to Rebuild a Ruin

By the time Fernández took it on, Dinton Castle had no roof and irregular, centuries-old masonry that didn’t conform to any modern blueprint. His team used 3D laser-scanning technology to digitally map the walls before cutting a single piece of material, allowing bespoke joinery and stonecraft to be CNC-cut offsite and fitted into the octagonal core and circular turrets with precision. The centerpiece is an asymmetrical helicoidal staircase, engineered to spiral up through the tight confines of a turret void that was never designed to hold one.

£100,000 for a roofless ruin, more than £300,000 to rebuild it — and the result is a three-story home built inside walls that still have fossils in them.

The Actual Results of Restoration

The finished house keeps the folly’s original silhouette while functioning as a genuine two-bedroom residence: a ground-floor kitchen and sitting room, two en-suite bedrooms above, and a rooftop terrace looking out over the Buckinghamshire countryside. The project earned a Design Award from the Aylesbury Vale District Council and drew national attention when it aired on Grand Designs in September 2018 — the kind of recognition that tends to follow when a “hopeless” listed ruin gets a genuinely workable floor plan instead of a token renovation.

Back on the Market

Despite the acclaim, Fernández and his wife listed Dinton Castle for sale, dropping the price from an initial £850,000 to £765,000. The reason is practical rather than dramatic: the compact, three-story footprint that made the restoration so clever also made it too tight for their growing family. It’s the same trade-off that runs through the whole project — preserving an 18th-century eye-catcher meant respecting a floor plan that was never built with modern family life in mind.

Whoever buys it inherits a house where the walls are older than the United States and the fossils in them are older than that — plus a roof terrace Vanhatten never got to enjoy, since his version of Dinton Castle never had a roof to stand on in the first place.