Photography: Emily's café
Where better to curl up with a cup of coffee and copy of Wuthering Heights than at the childhood home of British writer Emily Brontë – now for sale as a café.
Emily’s, as the community café is known, takes over the Grade II*-listed Thornton home of Emily, Anne, Branwell and Charlotte Brontë, who were all born in the Yorkshire property’s dining room, now the café’s main space.
‘We stripped the property back to a shell and redid it,’ says Emily’s owner Mark De Luca, who acquired the UK property for £120,000 after repossession, and spent £70,000 on refurbishing it.
But plenty of Brontë-era period features remain inside the writer’s home, including fireplaces, a timber staircase and stone slab flooring, which leads into the former drawing room, papered with pages from Wuthering Heights.
The Brontës lived in the Thornton property – which is just four miles from Bradford – from 1815 to 1820. Since then it’s been used as a butchers, restaurant and was a Brontë Museum from 1997 to 2006, run by crime novelist Barbara Whitehead.
Most recently however, it was divided into rental units before the De Lucas family converted it into a café and two-bedroom family home, with its own private entrance.
The café and home are for sale privately, for offers in the region of £250,000. Emily’s (which is currently open four days a week) brings in around £49,000 per annum.
