There is something of the high camp diva about Higham Park, near Canterbury in Kent. Aloof, ornate and architecturally grand, this Grade II listed 18th-century mansion, for sale for £7.5 million, has a history riddled with tales of excess and tragedy.

It has bewitched people for centuries. “That was certainly true in my case,” says the current owner, Jane Debliek, a property developer in her mid-fifties. “I used to drive past, taking my daughter to school in Canterbury and there was something so incredibly romantic about it that I longed to own it one day.”

That day came in 2005 when she swapped life in a three-bedroom apartment in Herne Bay for Higham Park's Palladian style, 24,000sqft of internal space and 23 acres of grounds.

It was an acquisition inspired more by blind infatuation than logic. Certainly, her first viewings of the interior - her chance to see the grand old house without its stage make-up - would have put off a less determined buyer. “It was a cold and heartless place, giving off the stale aftertaste of a long party,” she says. “But I could see that beneath the dust this was a beautiful house and I wanted to bring it alive again.”

The chequered history of Higham Park stretches back to 1320, when a house at this spot was ceded to the de Hegham family by Edward II. In 1534 the house was acquired by Thomas Culpepper, who had an affair with Catherine Howard, wife of Henry VIII, for which they were both executed.

In the late 1700s the Hallett family bought the estate, developing the house's artistic connections. Gainsborough painted his masterpiece The Morning Walk here, depicting the family walking through the summer garden. Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra visited, as did - it is claimed - Mozart. More riotous days followed with Countess Margaret Zborowski's acquisition of Higham for £17,500 in 1910. The Countess died only three months later and left the house to her son, Louis, then aged 16, together with £11 million and a considerable amount of real estate in the United States, including seven acres of Manhattan and several blocks on Fifth Avenue. Count Louis did what most teenagers would do in the circumstances - he partied, drove fast cars and made a lot of noise. Young Louis was particularly keen on pyrotechnics: a favourite game was to blow up statues in the garden to impress his many house guests. Indeed, bits of a garden temple that he blew to smithereens were found, it is said, a mile away.

Louis also built one of the country's first aero-engined cars, which he drove one day at Brooklands when the 12-year-old Ian Fleming was among the crowd. Years later the car was the model for Fleming's own fictional Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Ian Fleming connection continued after Count Louis died at the age of 28, when he hit a tree while racing in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. The author, by this time in his twenties, was a frequent visitor to the house when it was in the hands of its new owner, Walter Whigham, a merchant banker and a Governor of the Bank of England. He used to travel there from London on the Dover bus - the 007.

During the Second World War, Higham Park was controlled by the War Office. Later, in the 1950s, it became a hospital. By the time Patricia Gibb and Amanda Harris-Deans bought it for £1.5 million in 1995 it had been abandoned for several years and was in a sorry state: windows were nailed up, the roof leaked and the Portland stone flagstones of the hall were concealed under cement. The pair did a marvellous job of saving the house, but Debliek wanted to add the finishing touches. “I wanted it to be a romantic family home again,” she says. “I wanted it to ring with the sound of friends and parties and laughter.”

Debliek has spent well over £100,000 on carpeting throughout the house, adding curtains, painting the walls and installing a new kitchen. She has added bathrooms for the 14 bedrooms, and she has trawled the county's auctions rooms and antique sales in search of furniture which would not be dwarfed by the enormous reception rooms.

Now you enter to a wonderful pillared reception hall with magnificent scagliola (marble-effect) columns. The beautiful panelled music room overlooks the rose garden, as does the drawing room with its ornate fireplace and modillion cornice ceiling. The art deco morning room is octagonal-shaped and the dining room is Debliek's favourite. “We have had 24 sitting around here, with music playing and wine flowing,” she says. “It was unforgettable.”

The grounds are also spectacular. It takes five gardeners to manicure the different areas, including the sunken rose garden, the pergola walk, the secret garden and the Italianate water garden, which is reputed to be the longest lily pond in England.

Yet now, sadly, with the break-up of her relationship with her long-term partner, the house has become too big for Debliek. “I'd love whoever buys it next to really take it back to its former glory days,” she says, “to make Higham Park a party house again.”

Cost of living

Edward Church, a partner at Strutt and Parker in Canterbury and the agent for Higham, says: “Higham Park is about twenty times the size of a normal house. It follows that it costs twenty times as much to maintain.”

He estimates the annual running cost of a country house the size of Higham at £105,000. The typical breakdown is: gardeners (two full-time or more if part-time), £25,000; two housekeeping staff, £30,000; oil central heating, electricity and other utilities, £40,000; general maintenance, £10,000.

Higham Park is for sale for £7.5million: 01227 451123, struttandparker.com

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