Louise and Joolz McDonnell inside their unusual family home in Belsize Park

ESTATE agents often say a home is light-filled, well proportioned, or has a unique history.

But while sales pitches might not always stand up to scrutiny, such phrases can comfortably be applied to an unusual house for sale in Belsize Park.

The home in Glenilla Road is on the market for the first time in more than 50 years – and stepping inside the house reveals a monument to Belsize Park’s artistic past.

The property, which was owned by the McDonnell family, is up for sale after Gina McDonnell recently passed away aged 90.

Her son Joolz, a filmmaker, and daughter Louise, a musician, are reluctantly selling the home they grew up in. It gives someone with more than £1million to spend a chance to own a truly exceptional place.

The house boasts a huge light-filled living area and that’s the first clue as to what the building was originally intended for. Built in 1912, it was designed as an artist studio and was used for many years as an art school.

Louise and Joolz

In 1967, Gina and her husband Peter moved in and raised three artistic children there.

Joolz and Louise’s brother Terry, who died in 2020, was a well-known painter and sculptor. The family hope to host an exhibition in the house before they hand it on to a new owner. Gina was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1932 had grown up under Mussolini’s fascist regime.

The house in Glenilla Road

She recalled as a child being forced by police officers to line a street as a cavalcade of cars drove past.Adolf Hitler was among the convoy and she never forgot seeing the genocidal Nazi in the flesh.

She moved to London after the war and met Peter McDonnell, a structural engineer. The couple married in 1957 and moved for a time to Regent’s Park Road, where they had a flat beneath the actor Richard Briers.

They moved to the Belsize Park house, buying it from a “Colonel Morgan” who owned the studio and a building next door. Julian said this week of his childhood: “We had single beds up on the mezzanine – all five of us squeezed in.”

The siblings outside the home with their father

He recalled Gina loving the light and having a series of plans for what the huge main room could be used for.

He added: “She had a romantic idea of being an opera singer or a ballet dancer and that was reflected in her plans for the main room. “Mum always wanted to hang a trapeze from the rafters, install a snooker table, put in a trampoline.”

A home for aspiring painters during the 1920s and 1930s, in 1941 Italian sculptor Emanuel Manasse moved in – and from its light-filled room he sculpted a famous bust of Winston Churchill. He would leave the building in 1945, at which point Colonel Morgan took on the property.

Glenilla Road was at the heart of the area’s artistic community. Barbara Hepworth, Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Sir Herbert Read were all close by, while around the corner in Belsize Park Gardens lived Jack Pritchard, who designed the Isokon Building in Lawn Road. Louise said she had enjoyed a happy childhood in Glenilla Road.

“It was an eccentric place to grow up in,” she said, “always full of love. It was a very happy place and we are sad to say goodbye. It is full of memories.”