The house known to millions of TV viewers as the family home of Mary Berry and her husband Paul Hunnings from 1970-1988 is for sale with a guide price of £3m.

The author of countless cookbooks was a TV superstar even before her fame rose to even greater peaks following her coronation as Queen B of the phenomenally successful Bake Off series.

When she and Paul moved to the “cottage” in Penn after selling the first house they bought after their 1966 marriage, their eldest son Thomas was a year and a half and William, their younger son was still in a Moses basket.

In her autobiography Recipe for Life written in 2013 Mary describes how the only thing she didn’t like about the new place after she went to view the Georgian property with her father was its name. Paul had been too busy at work to go with them.

The Hunnings had been looking for a house with more space for the boys for some time.

The agent’s details about the Red Cottage in the pretty Buckinghamshire village of Penn turned up the week before Christmas 1969. The couple with their two small children in the back of the car made a detour to look at it from the outside on Christmas Eve on their way to Bath to spend the festivities with Mary’s parents.

She recalls how the price of £25,000 “seemed an awful lot of money” but they’d sold their London house for £18,000 having paid £9,000 for it four years earlier so the Penn house “was quite good value.”

In her memoirs, Mary remembers her father, a surveyor, jumping about on the floorboards and checking for dry rot, while she followed the owner into the garden. The garden evidently clinched it for her. She could imagine them her young family loving it,

On the way back to the house, the owner asked her what she thought. Actually, replied the upwardly mobile cook already planning how she’d enlarge the kitchen, we’d like to buy it. I know my husband’s going to like it.

On the way home she says her father gave her “a pointed look.” This is not how you go about buying houses at all, he told her sternly. What about the survey?

The only fault Mary could find with her future home was its name. “It was too big to be described as a cottage. I much preferred Red House.” She went to meet the village postmaster who told her: You can call it what you like. I only deliver the letters.

From there on in, life at The Red House seems to have been a bowl of roses (naturally picked straight out of the glorious garden ) until the tragic day in 1988 when William died in a car accident not far from their home.

Not long afterwards, Paul and Mary with their son Thomas and daughter Annabel who had born a year after they arrived in Penn moved to their present house barely a few hundred years from The Red House. The owner Lady Heath had recently been widowed. Her husband, Sir Barrie Heath DFC was a Battle of Britain pilot – one of The Few. After the war he became group chairman of the industrial conglomerate GKN. Effectively Lady Heath and the Hunnings swapped houses. It wasn’t the first time neighbours had part exchanged houses with those glorious views in that elevated part of Penn.

The present owners of The Red House, David and Debbie McGregor, bought the house from Lady Heath in 2005.

They’ve recently had a film crew there from BBC 2 for a programme, about Mary’s life story. In this sequence they relived the years when she welcomed TV viewers into her kitchen and held cookery courses at The Red House, demonstration which have inspired the millions of delicious tarts and fancies cooked by families up and down the country ever since.

The present Aga at The Red House isn’t the one the Queen of Cakes used. It was bought by the present owners.

“The kitchen has been changed since Mary lived here” confirmed the present owner on Monday. “We’ve had a very happy time here but now we’re planning to move to Dorset.”

Consequently their three storey six bedroom house and the converted coach house in the landscaped grounds is for sale through Savills in Beaconsfield.