Seraphina Watts Opens Up About Selling Her Family’s Devon Home

Seraphina Watts put her parents’ Devon home up for sale this year, and in the process gave one of the only interviews of her adult life. Halsdon House, in the village of Dolton, sits on 55 acres and has nine bedrooms. Her mother and father owned it for nearly forty years. Both are now gone: her father died in 2021, her mother in December 2022, a little over a year later.

She is the only child of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts and his wife, Shirley, and has spent most of her fifty-eight years almost entirely out of the press, with no public career of her own ever reported. That was by design, going back to how her parents raised her. Seraphina listed the house herself this past February, at £2.75 million, and for once, talked about what it meant to her.

Raised to look ordinary

In the early 1970s the family lived on a converted goat farm in the Cévennes, in southern France, in a village small enough that they were the only English household in it. Seraphina went to school locally, in Saint-Jean-du-Gard, whose mayor later remembered the family as approachable, the kind of people who’d stop and talk in the street like anyone else. There was no nanny, and she wasn’t taken to see her father perform. When he did spend money on her, her mother pushed back, worried he was spoiling her.

It wasn’t until the family moved back to England in 1976, she has said, that she fully registered what her father did for a living, when classmates at her new school made it clear what “rich” meant.

Wanting in

Seraphina got to attend her first real Rolling Stones show at thirteen, during what she has recalled as the band’s 1981 to 1982 tour. That was enough to make her want to be part of that world full time, something her mother wasn’t keen on. It took years for her to actually get there, and when she did, at twenty-one, touring alongside her father, she pushed in far enough that her parents sent her home early. She has said since that she caused her share of trouble that year.

A smoother path for Charlotte

She had her only child, Charlotte, in 1996, during her first marriage, to a lawyer named Nick. Charlotte’s own path into that world looked nothing like her mother’s. She began travelling with her grandfather during his later tours while still a teenager, working informally as an aide to him on the road. Charlotte also inherited his eye for drawing, and later became a working fashion model.

What she was left holding

Between her father’s death and her mother’s, Seraphina inherited almost everything: the house, an Arabian horse stud her mother had spent decades building into one of the most respected in the country, and drawers full of her father’s collections, old glassware and tins she couldn’t always place. Most of the horses have since been rehomed.

The money was real too. When Charlie Watts’s estate went through probate, it was valued at £29.6 million, left mostly in trust, with income for Shirley during her lifetime and provision made for Seraphina. Her mother’s own will, made public two years later, left a further £18.3 million, naming Seraphina and Charlotte directly. Seraphina also inherited the family’s farmhouse in France outright.

She and her father had smaller rituals too. As a child, she used to sneak into his room and nudge one sock out of its careful, color-ordered line, just to see if he’d notice. He always did. In 2019 the four of them, Charlie, Shirley, Seraphina, and her husband Barry, took what turned out to be a final trip together, back to the farmhouse in the Cévennes where she’d grown up. “He rang every single day,” she has said since his death. These days, she has added, walking into the house can still feel like he’s simply away, on tour.

Why she’s talking now

That work, going through what was left behind, eventually led to the decision to sell. Halsdon House went up for sale through Savills in February, and Seraphina gave a rare interview about it to Mansion Global, later picked up across the property press. She and her family live mostly overseas these days, which is part of why executors handled much of the process. Much of what she did say was about her mother, who liked to redecorate the house whenever Charlie was away on tour, since he hated having decorators in when he was actually home.

“A sanctuary for our family over the years,” she told Mansion Global.