Desig House: Real Homes: a Palladian gem immortalised by Nancy Mitford

Aged just 25, Sofka Zinovieff unexpectedly inherited Faringdon House in Oxfordshire. Three decades on, she and her family have made the house their own, while preserving the spirit of their predecessors

The writer Sofka Zinovieff is tall and willowy, and given to wearing vintage dresses and layers of silk. When lecturing at her home, Faringdon House in Oxfordshire, she often has a large rabbit called Barnaby cradled in her arms. You could say she is a fitting inheritor of the country house of the eccentric Lord Berners, the composer, artist and writer who was immortalised in Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love as the whimsical character Lord Merlin.

Sofka's latest book, The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, is a witty memoir that provides insight into the aristocratic and arty pre-war circles of England. It also casts Faringdon House - built in 1780 for the poet laureate Henry James Pye - as a central character. In it, she traces the events - sometimes scandalous, sometimes bittersweet and always hugely entertaining - that led to her own unexpected legacy.

The story begins with Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, who inherited the title of Lord Berners in 1918 and moved into Faringdon House in 1931 after a diplomatic career on the Continent. He made his home an aesthete's Camelot, with guests including Salvador Dalí, Aldous Huxley, Elsa Schiaparelli and John Betjeman. Perhaps his genius went into entertaining, but his music was also admired. Igor Stravinsky considered him the best British composer of his generation; Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, asked him to compose a ballet score.

Lord Berners' companion, Robert Heber-Percy, was nearly 30 years his junior and nicknamed 'the Mad Boy' for his uninhibited behaviour, which included horse riding naked through the surrounding woods. The Mad Boy was also Sofka's grandfather. In 1942, while still living with Lord Berners, Robert unexpectedly married Jennifer Fry, a lovely, high-spirited socialite whom he brought to live at Faringdon. This strange ménage a trois lasted just two years, until Jennifer departed, taking with her their baby daughter Victoria, to live at her parents' house in Wiltshire.

Eight years later, Lord Berners died, leaving the house to Robert, who continued the entertaining. It was into this eccentric household that Sofka, aged 17, came to stay with her grandfather for the first time. Her mother Victoria and father Peter Zinovieff, a second generation Russian émigré and noted inventor and avant garde composer, had brought up their three children in a hippyish way between Putney and a remote island in the Hebrides. Yet nothing in her life had prepared her for the first encounter.

'Do you see that handbag?' her grandfather asked her. 'Your grandmother Jennifer left it behind in 1944 and it has been here ever since.' That fish-shape white wicker handbag with a bamboo handle, sitting on a gilded rococo chair in the drawing room, intrigued Sofka and made her want to find out what had gone on in the house. 'The bag is an emblem of frivolity, but Jennifer left it behind at a time of misery, failure and war,' she says. It is still there to this day.

At one generation removed, Sofka hit it off with her grandfather. 'I think he appreciated that I went to Cambridge and was off doing things in an unconventional way. Faringdon and the people I met there were so different from the rest of my life; it was exhilarating to feel that I could be someone else for a few days. I suspect my grandfather enjoyed throwing me into a weekend house party as a wild card - a surprise element.' Few people knew that he had a child, let alone a granddaughter.

In 1987, Sofka's life changed. She was 25 and living above a shop on Greece's Peloponnese peninsula while finishing a PhD in social anthropology when she learned of her grandfather's death. In another one of his maverick moves, the Mad Boy had left her everything. It was an overwhelming prospect. 'I was a student, I was living abroad. I couldn't imagine what I would do with a place like that,' she recalls. And there were concerns about adopting her grandfather's unapologetic lifestyle: 'My mother was shocked that her daughter would inherit all the values that she valued least.'

Sofka's brother Leo and Annabelle, his wife, lived in the house for a few years while Sofka was abroad. She relocated to Moscow to learn about her parental roots and write about the Greeks of the Soviet Union and it was there that she met her soon-to-be husband Vassilis Papadimitriou, then press counsellor at the Greek Embassy in Moscow. The couple returned to the UK in 1992 to live at Faringdon and, following the birth of their two daughters, moved again four years later, this time to Rome, meanwhile letting the house to cover the impossible costs.

In 2001, she and Vassilis set up home in Athens, where he was foreign media advisor to the former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, and where they raised their daughters, Anna, now a singer-songwriter, and Lara, an international relations student. Sofka's 2004 memoir Eurydice Street, named for the street where they lived, is an account of her first year as an Athenian.

Since 2013, though, the family have been properly installed at Faringdon House, a building that is curious in character: an arcaded villa in the Palladian style, with vistas of countryside viewed from french windows in a 16-metre drawing room. Yet it remains intimate in its interior, with only five principal bedrooms. There are flamboyant flashes of its former custodians everywhere - such as the Rousseau-like mural on the walls of a bathroom and a swimming pool with turreted changing rooms paved with pennies embedded in cement.

Lord Berners' playful spirit prevails, and his eclectic decoration allowed for the seamless inclusion of Sofka and Vassilis's own belongings, gathered over the course of their travels. A huge bust of Lenin stands in a room in the attic, where Sofka has also made a cosy study for herself to work on a new novel. 'Vassilis is a partner in running the house,' says Sofka. 'There is no getting away from it for him, and he does much more work than me in sorting out the archives, books and getting the place in order. He's very involved with its maintenance and grounds. For both of us, it is our place of work and certainly keeps us busy.'

Interest in the former occupiers conti-nues unabated, with two devoted societies: Faringdon Appreciation of Berners; and the Pink Pigeons Trust (named after the Mad Boy's habit of dyeing birds in jewelled hues). The FAB group holds dinners and concerts on the anniversary of his birth; there was even a performance of a play about Lord Berners, written by the US playwright Bob Canning, staged inside Budgens supermarket. 'It has been lovely to be able to welcome some of the connoisseurs of the house,' says Sofka.

There are many photographs and albums belonging to Lord Berners that need to be sorted out. And with a house as old and big as this, there is always some redecoration or refurbishment to be done. Sofka does this with flair, finding papers and fabrics that were never intended to be period but are similar in essence.

Her day usually begins with writing in her study and she takes pleasure in arranging flowers for the house, mixing the more formal ones with wildflowers, wood anemones, hyacinths, tulips and fritillaries that grow in profusion in the long grass that borders the driveway. It is a short meander down the drive into the charming market town of Faringdon, where the excellent Hare in the Woods delicatessen provides Sofka and Vassilis with delicious salads for a working kitchen lunch and something for a relaxed supper with Leo and Annabelle, who live nearby.

An easy proximity to the town allows people to come by for coffee; Margaret Nairn Townsend, who runs Town & Green Jewellery, is an old friend who likes to ask Sofka's opinion on her latest designs. For retail therapy, Sofka visits the nearby workshop of Steve Hancock, whose tactile bowls and carved hearts made from oak, sycamore and ash are a favourite choice for presents.

She spends afternoons out on walks and might climb the hill with Vassilis to Faringdon's folly, a tower that was Lord Berners' tribute to his good looking and wilful companion. It is said that he hung a notice there that read: 'Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk.' Robert gifted the tower, with the surrounding woodland, to the people of Faringdon, and Sofka is now a trustee of Faringdon Folly Tower Trust. She finds it easy here to reflect on the two idiosyncratic men who have shaped her life.

'It's funny how it has all worked out,' she says. 'The inheritance hasn't changed me in the ways that my mother feared it might. I never wanted my identity to be bound up with my house and my life in Greece has saved me from that. No one there has ever even heard of Faringdon'.