Great British bargain: Mary Berry slashes £150k off price of Buckinghamshire mansion she got through house swap with neighbour

Former Great British Bake Off judge Mary Berry has sliced £150,000 off the price off her Buckinghamshire home — listed for £4million in October last year — in a bid to find a buyer.

Mary has shared the home with her husband Paul for three decades. Originally a Queen Anne farmhouse, the Grade II-listed home has been extended multiple times over the years. It's now for sale for £3.85million.

Inside there are three reception rooms, six bedrooms and five bathrooms in the main house, plus a detached cottage and separate coach house among useful outbuildings.

More than four acres of landscaped gardens include a duck pond and tennis court.

Just up the road sits another, smaller home once owned by Mary and Paul, and it's also for sale. Called The Red House, it belonged to the couple for 18 years until they swapped homes with their friend Lady Heath who owned the larger Queen Anne-style house.

Much of Berry's early TV work was filmed in the kitchen of The Red House. Along with a dining room where Berry served 1,000 dinners, it has six bedrooms, a coach house and a self-contained annexe.

In her autobiography Recipe for Life, Mary explains how the house swap came about.

“On the Sunday evening we took Joan back to her house and…had tea in the morning room looking out over the courtyard I had always admired (and rather envied). As the sun started to set Joan turned to us and said ‘My house is going on the market tomorrow’.

“I looked at Paul and knew we were thinking the same thing…We would like to buy it,’ I said. ‘Well, I’d like to look at the Red House’, she said."

Rather than moving all their things around, the friends decided to leave everything — even the beds — in place. "We thought we got the better end of the deal as ours were a bit tatty compared with Joan’s," says Mary.

Mary and Paul are thought to be downsizing to a four-bedroom home in Henley with a separate cottage, gym, tennis court and an indoor swimming pool.

The TV star is believed to have paid £2.6million for the home in October last year and is, to Berry's delight, an eight-minute walk from the nearest Waitrose according to reports.

Mary Berry might be ready to swap Bucks for the slightly-smaller Henley home, but the Bake Off star is showing no signs of slowing down, with renovation works and greenhouse alterations already underway.