Anne downsizes from her £3.5m mansion to a cottage

By BRENDAN MONTAGUE, Daily Mail

Last updated at 09:53 07 August 2006

She may be worth £ 60million, but Anne Robinson has decided she no longer needs a showpiece home to match her wealth.

The acid-tongued TV presenter has decided to downsize from a £3.5million mansion to a decidedly more bijou retirement cottage worth only a sixth of that sum.

She has just sold her eight bedroom pile in Gloucestershire for a considerable profit. She bought the property, then a small farmhouse, for just £200,000 and spent thousands on extensions and renovations.

The luxury home quadrupled in size and eventually boasted a 43ft kitchen, games room, tennis court and even had an outdoor swimming pool complete with underwater speakers. But now Miss Robinson, 61, and her journalist husband John Penrose have decided to swop the life of Lady and Lord of the Manor for a cosier retirement in their new £600,000 home.

Rose Cottage, which has four bedrooms, is in a quiet village close to her grand old home Field House. Despite downsizing, she still wanted to have a place in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside.

The new home is undergoing £400,000 of renovations so Miss Robinson can continue to live the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed, but without the drawback of more than a dozen rooms to keep spick and span.

The Weakest Link star said last night: 'All I ever wanted was a cottage in the Cotswolds with roses around the door, somewhere I can lock up when we want to go travelling around the world. Now I have found it - and amazingly, it's even called Rose Cottage.'

Her husband added: 'We love the Cotswolds. We wanted somewhere smaller to live as we get older - many people will understand that.

'This is what everyone's dream is, a cottage with roses around the door, and that is what we now have for the rest of our lives. We will be in Gloucestershire until we dribble.'

Miss Robinson has made a small fortune from dabbling in the property market.

She bought Field House when it was just a chalet-style property with two bedrooms and employed architect John Cresswell-Turner to renovate it. Her original investment grew 17-fold in just over a decade. The former journalist also bought a £5million London home in Holland Park - only to sell it at a profit months later.

The renovation work on the cottage is expected to take between six and nine months, with the couple living at a second Cotswolds home and a property in London until it is completed.

They also have a property in New York, close to where Miss Robinson's daughter, Emma, lives.