Love Hall! The stunning mock-Tudor £1.8million home where tennis tycoon David Lloyd courted - and won - his young bride

It's the distinctive mock-Elizabethan home in Surrey the place leisure-club entrepreneur David Lloyd has spent the previous 12 years. 

However Cavaliers Court docket, which the previous tennis star is now promoting, additionally has a really romantic secret – it's the place he met and fell in love along with his spouse, Teo.

The 12 months was 2010 and Teo was one of many company invited to a barbecue David was holding at Cavaliers Court docket. Questioning if she may supply any assist, she wandered into the kitchen and located David in there cooking asparagus and bacon.

Leisure-club entrepreneur David Lloyd and his spouse Teo are promoting their mock-Elizabethan home in Surrey for £1.8million

It was help he willingly accepted, and it was in that kitchen that David wooed her with a spectacularly forthright – some may say cavalier – romantic strategy.

'David instructed me that I must be taught the place the whole lot was in the home as it might turn into mine at some point,' Teo says. 'I used to be flattered by his direct, if considerably distinctive, chat-up line,' she provides.

It additionally labored. 'We began courting and have been married two years later.'

Thirty-three-year-old dressmaker Teo (or Dolly, as she is affectionately identified) and David, 68, now have a son, Dennis, aged 4, and Teo has launched her personal vogue label and opened Dolly Lloyd, a ladies's boutique on London's Fulham Street, the place clients embody singer and actress Holly Valance and dancer Kristina Rihanoff.

Teo, who's from Moldova, taught herself to stitch on the age of six on an previous stitching machine given to her by her grandmother, and discovered 5 languages earlier than shifting to Britain and enrolling at Northumbria College, the place she received a level in vogue and merchandising.

David continues to throw events at Cavaliers Court docket – and having a house the place lots of people may collect was one of many causes he purchased it.

'I needed a home with loads of house for entertaining household and pals, particularly at Christmas, once we all get around the piano for a sing-song,' he explains.

The couple's different relations embody Teo's son Chris, 18, from a earlier relationship, and David's kids from a earlier marriage: Scott, 41, Camilla, 36, and Laura, 34. He additionally has six grandchildren.

The household pet is Duke, a Hungarian Vizsla, who was a Christmas current from David to Teo.

The house comes with an acre of land that includes a swimming pool and a non-public cinema constructed inside an annex

Cavaliers Court docket is about in additional than an acre and surrounded by picturesque countryside. 'I cherished the character of the home as quickly as I noticed it,' David recollects. 'The gardens are great, with a barely wild really feel.'

Courting from 1922, Cavaliers Court docket, which is close to Leatherhead, was designed to look older, with its beams, mullioned home windows and herringbone brickwork. 'Most of the supplies utilized in its development have been reclaimed and date again 400 years,' David says.

'The property combines the heat and homeliness of a interval residence with the look of a contemporary property, so we have now the very best of each worlds.'

Cavaliers Court docket – which is in the marketplace for £1.eight million with Chewton Rose property brokers – has a spacious drawing room with an open-plan fire, a eating room and examine, in addition to a household room and enormous fashionable kitchen/breakfast room with doorways to the backyard. 

There are three double bedrooms, every with its personal bathtub or bathe, with room for six or extra bedrooms, topic to planning permission. A big annexe homes a cinema and full-size snooker desk. It additionally has a foldaway double mattress, in addition to a health club, spa, sauna, steam room and bathe.

One other distinctive side of the property is an workplace house constructed round a tree within the backyard and accessible by a spiral staircase

The landscaped gardens spherical the home characteristic lawns, shrubs and mature timber. There's a wood bridge over a big pond stocked with koi carp and freshwater fish, and an out of doors eating space and enormous heated swimming pool.

David additionally has a specifically designed workplace constructed round a tree, which is accessed by a spiral staircase. 'It blends in with the principle home and is a peaceable and stress-free place to work from, with a built-in music system and TV,' he says.

The previous Davis Cup group captain additionally counts amongst his belongings Sugar Hill in Barbados – a residential improvement of greater than 100 luxurious properties – and he owns land in Thailand. 'After I bought the David Lloyd golf equipment to Whitbread, I invested in property and new constructing developments,' he says.

David, who was introduced up in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, discovered about enterprise the laborious means when his father's vogue enterprise went bankrupt.

'The state of affairs left me and my brothers [Tony and fellow former tennis player John] and my sister [Ann] to assist ourselves and get part-time jobs. I did a paper spherical, then purchased a machine to string rackets. At 14, I invested the cash to purchase rackets, which I bought in Germany as a result of the Deutschmark was robust.'

He opened the primary David Lloyd membership in 1982 and bought the corporate in 1995. David and Teo at the moment are planning to maneuver to Palm Seaside in Florida, the place they're constructing a home.

 

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