provisions in his wife's will to prevent this, and later sold it in 1848 to its tenant farmer George Wood, who also acquired the remaining one-quarter share from the Floyer family, thus bringing the estate back into single ownership for the first time in 250 years. In 1890, the house and a limited area of land, but not the larger part of the surrounding farmland, was acquired by the antiquarian Alfred de Lafontaine. In the preceding three hundred years, with the split and often absent ownership, the house had been used as a farmhouse and was in partial disrepair, with farm buildings close to it. However, this meant that it had not seen the modernisation applied to many other country houses in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and it thus retained many original Tudor characteristics including an almost unaltered facade (though the gatehouse was near collapse and had been demolished by the Woods). Lafontaine was an early member of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings and an acquaintance of Thomas Hardy, a frequent visitor to the house who following his early career as an architect had become a passionate advocate of sympathetic restoration of older buildings. Lafontaine followed this approach, cleaning and repairing rather than altering, and where he installed modern amenities he did so sensitively, with trench heating under elegant iron grilles in the historic rooms. Hardy's association with the house had begun as a teenager when his father was a stonemason who worked on the house. , at which time he painted a watercolour of the south front including the gatehouse. His description of Bathsheba's farmhouse in Far From the Madding Crowd fits Athelhampton closely (though he was also clearly inspired by nearby Waterston house); he set the poem "The Dame of Athelhall" at the house, and his "The Children and Sir Nameless" refers to the Martyn tombs in the Athelhampton Aisle at St Mary's in neighbouring Puddletown. Lafontaine engaged Inigo Thomas to create one of England's great gardens, as a series of "outdoor rooms," inspired by Thomas' extensive researches into gardens from the Elizabethan era onwards and his travels in Europe, and fulfilling his vision that house and garden should reflect one another in a harmonious whole. See details below. Lafontaine put the house up for sale in 1916 and two years later it was purchased by the Cochrane family, who built the current North Wing