The house still recognised by millions of TV viewers as the former home of super cake queen Mary Berry has recently been reduced by a further £200,000.

Today The Red House at Penn is for sale through Knight Frank in Beaconsfield for £2.45m.

When the present owners first put their home on the market through a different agent in July 2016 it was £3m.

The stamp duty at that time was 12 per cent as long it was the only property the buyers’ owned.

The tax totted up to £273,750. However, following the three per cent surcharge added in the 2016 spring Budget for second homes and buy-to-let properties, the government levy on the sale of The Red House would have boosted it to £363,750.

Before the present owners of The Red House dropped the price even further, the stamp duty on the previous figure of £2.65m would have been £231,750 or £311,250 if it was classed as the buyers’ second home.

At the present price, the stamp duty will be £207,750 or if the house is deemed to be a weekend home, the levy will be £281,250.

The Red House was home to Mary and her husband Paul Hunnings for 18 years from 1970 to 1988.

Mary and Paul moved to their “cottage” in Penn when their elder son Thomas was a year and a half and William, the younger one, was still in a Moses basket. Sensibly, before putting their name on agents’ lists, they’d already found a buyer for the house they’d been living in since their marriage in 1966.

In her autobiography Recipe for Life written in 2013 Mary describes how the only thing she didn’t like about the new house in Bucks 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 Red Cottage in the pretty Buckinghamshire village of Penn dropped on the mat the week before Christmas in 1969.

With their two sons in the back of the car, Mary and Paul made a detour to look at 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 clinched it for her. She could imagine the boys having a high old time in it.

On the way back to the house, the owner asked her what she thought. Mary was already planning how she’d enlarge the kitchen. She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “We’d like to buy it,” she said. “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.. 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, born the year after they arrived in Penn, moved to a larger 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, not to lose the glorious views, never mind the fabulous houses standing in their own grounds 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.

Two years ago, shortly before they decided to put the house on the market , they had a film crew there from BBC 2 for a programme, about Mary’s life story.

In this sequence she re-lived the years when she welcomed TV viewers into her kitchen and held cookery courses at The Red House, demonstrations which inspired the millions of delicious tarts and fancies cooked by families up and down the country, long before her fame reached even higher peaks when she became a national treasure as the celebrated judge of the phenomenally successful Bake Off series. She and Paul now live in Henley.

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” say the present owners. “We’ve had a very happy time here but it’s time we moved on.”

While they’ve waited to find buyers who will love the house as much as they have, the McGregors’ future plans have been in limbo. You know how some houses have soul? This one has exactly that. You can feel it. It’s a much loved family home.