Thorne Island. Photo / Piers Cunliffe, Bloomberg via The Washington Post
Thorne, a 2.5-acre (1ha) private island off the coast of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales, has hit the market for £3 million ($6.7m) with Strutt & Parker.
The Victorian-era fort was built as a defensive outpost for the naval base of Milford Haven and is accessible only by boat or helipad.
It’s been fully renovated, and the 755sqm of space includes five bedrooms and a rooftop bar. Thorne Island is completely self-sufficient with generators, solar panels and heat pumps.
The coastal landmark is currently owned by tech entrepreneur Mike Conner, formerly the chief executive officer of Appsbroker.
He bought the island in 2017 after seeing a video about it on YouTube.
It was derelict then, but he saw its potential as a project, and he was up for a challenge.
“I feel like if you’re sat in the office, sometimes you need something that’s stimulating outside your family and friends,” says Conner of his purchase of the fort.
“Thorne’s been a great stress reliever.”
Connor gushes about the boyhood sense of wonder he gleans from a trip to his island compound.
“I see it as a really expensive train set,” he says. “It’s just somewhere to go on boats and play with a crane and generators and fix stuff.”
Conner adds that he’s also had great parties on the island, including one memorable event where 80 guests spent the night.
“It’s such a different environment. No one is looking at their phones, and everyone’s very excited by the boats and being here,” Conner says.
“So even though it’s only around 300m from the land, it feels like you’re in a different country.”
The main entrance is through the historic gates, into a hall with an open-plan reception, dining and sitting room with exposed brickwork.
The bedrooms are spaced around the outer walls of the fort and feature panoramic views of the Pembrokeshire coastline.
Conner recalls days spent working from the office he created for himself on the island and watching peregrine falcons fly by and lobster fishermen sailing past his window.
“It’s just such a nice contrast to working from home and looking out the window to a street for your view.”
He says he’s put the island on the market now because his family just doesn’t get out to Thorne enough.
“We’ve got quite a nice yacht in Croatia, and my kids are 22, 19 and 14, and they prefer to boat around the Med on the yacht rather than go to Wales.”
The fort that dominates the island was built in the 1850s, during a period of British concern about the strength of the French Navy; it could house around 100 soldiers.
Its necessity as a military outpost faded with time, and the Government sold it off in 1932 and it was converted to a hotel before it was left to decline.
Conner says when he bought it, the fort was in rough shape and needed major investment. He spent about £2m on the purchase and renovation work.
The fort was waterlogged and had no electricity when Conner purchased it.
“It was the most viewed property on Rightmove that year, and it was derelict,” he says.
“The thought of restoring a building and figuring out how all this new technology - like reverse osmosis for the water supply - would work with what the Victorians had done already, just really appealed to me.”
For four years during the renovation, a construction crew lived on the original barracks on the island and went back to the mainland in rotating shifts.
Boats weren’t enough to get the necessary supplies in, Connor says, so there was “an awesome two days of heli-lifting”, during which essential materials for the renovation work were airlifted to the island.
“We had eight people on the island and eight on the mainland just hooking up different loads to the helicopters and going back and forth,” he says.
“It was truly an epic endeavour.”
The construction crew also installed a 10m crane with its own engine to help with the process.
Conner says the nature of the island made some aspects of the build particularly complicated.
“Because you’ve got an 8m tidal range outside the island, you can’t leave boats. You have to lift them out of the water. If the tide’s going out, they’ll be left hanging by a rope,” he says.
“So there’s just a whole lot of things we had to do to make the build viable.”
Ensuring the fort could function off the power grid - sustainably - was also a challenge, he says, including the process of installing a biodigester to process waste.
“The courtyard needed digging up and a very deep hole in it for the biodigester because, for the Victorians, the sewage just went straight out to sea, which you can’t do in a marine conservation area anymore,” Connor says.
The island has solar panels now and its own generator for heat and water, making it completely self-sufficient.
Thorne is now primarily a party pad for Conner’s friends and family-and a few VIPs, including the England rugby player Ben Morgan, who helicopter in to visit.
The layout has plenty of space for entertaining: The fort has a large terrace, a games room and a rooftop bar.
Conner says the next owner of Thorne could be a high-end hotelier who wants to transfer the island into an exclusive Soho Farmhouse-type property. “Or a YouTuber who wants a great background,” he adds.
Still, Conner says Thorne served its original purpose for him.
He says he’s learned so much over the past eight years, whether it’s about handling boats in storms or how to configure renewables or create reliable off-the-grid drinking water.
“There’s been endless sorts of interesting challenges,” Conner says. “It’s been so enjoyable.”