A house originally built for a suffragette is on the open market for only the second time in more than 100 years.

The private estate called Lords Wood stands in grounds of 35 acres at Marlow Common. It’s for sale through Knight Frank with a guide price of £8m.

The first owner of Lords Wood was the Votes for Women campaigner Mary Sargant Florence.

In 1899 she was a young widow with two children needing somewhere for her family to live. Her husband, an American, had been a music student before he died in a drowning accident.

The area surrounding Lords Wood at that time had become an artist’s colony. It attracted the Bloomsbury Group and arty types. Virginia Woolf was a regular. It’s not surprising Mary was drawn to it.

She specified her new house should be built in Queen Anne style with local bricks under a roof tiled with Westmorland slates.

By all accounts she was the original minimalist. She stipulated the interior of her new home should have bare brick walls, no doors (only curtains to cover the gap) and no plumbing.

Mary lived at Lords Wood until 1940, which was the year she wrote a book called Colour Coordination, “a work on the history, theory and aesthetics of colour.” Some who knew her during this period were surprised she didn’t change the name of her hereditament to Lady’s Wood. She was “an ardent feminist.”

After Mary gave up using the house as her principal abode, the younger generation of her family took it over and brought the plumbing up to date.

The present incumbents, a London art dealer and his wife, are only the second owners of Lords Wood since it was built in Queen Victoria’s reign.

Over the past 47 years they have given the property the wherewithal to retain its pedigree but not be stuck in a time warp. It’s Grade II listed.

Today the interior of the main house has eight bedrooms and five bathrooms spread over the two upper floors and four reception rooms at entrance level. The adjoining studio, where Mary held art classes and Stanley Spencer brushed up his skills at mural painting, is still as the famous artist who lived in nearby Cookham would remember it.

For more details of Lords Wood, contact the Henley office of Knight Frank.