SELLER: Tom Cruise

LOCATON: Dormans Park, East Grinstead, West Sussex, UK

PRICE: £4,950,000

SIZE: 11,331 square feet, 5-6 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms plus staff accommodations

YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: An unexpected holiday missive from Flower Perfectbush, our eagle-eyed gal on the ground in the U.K., alerted us to a country estate about 30 miles south of London that’s widely reported to be owned by Hollywood heavy hitter Tom Cruise and recently put up for sale at £4,950,000, an amount our handy-dandy currency conversion contraption calculates to $7,385,150 at today’s rates. So the celebrity real estate scuttlebutt goes, Mister Cruise and his third ex-wife, Katie Holmes, picked up the bucolic property in 2006 for somewhere around $4.75 million and the appeal of the estate, dubbed Rede Place and located at the northern edge of the exclusive Dormans Park enclave near East Grinstead in West Sussex, was said to be its location just a handful of miles from Saint Hill Manor, the British headquarters of the famously secretive, highly controversial, and frequently criticized Church of Scientology of which Mister Cruise is a dedicated and outspoken member.

A stately drive passes though electronically operated gates monitored — natch — by a camera-equipped security system and snakes its way across the verdant, 14.2-acre spread’s manicured grounds before it arrives at a substantial motor court at the front of the red brick main residence. Built brand new in 2003 on the site of a pre-existing Victorian residence, the four-floor mansion measures in at a considerable 11,331-square feet with five to six bedrooms and five full and three half bathrooms. A short entry vestibule leads to a wide foyer that shares a bowed wall with a vast, 900-plus-square-foot step-down living room that features a bow-fronted fireplace and a curved bay window with French doors to the rear terrace. To one side of the central living room there’s a library/study and a secondary living room and on the other side there’s a compact family room that might be best suited for use as a formal dining room as well as a roomy if somewhat ordinary looking kitchen that opens over a long peninsula to an informal dining space with wide bay window and French doors that open to the rear terrace.

Three en suite guest/family bedrooms on the second floor each have French door access to a wrought iron railed balcony and are joined by an extensive master suite complete with a nearly 33-foot long bedroom, a separate sitting room with private balcony, two fitted walk-in closets, and a spacious bathroom where a two-person soaking tub sits rather grandly on a black marble pedestal in the center of the room. Tucked up under the eaves on the uppermost floor are two more bedrooms — or a bedroom and an adjoining sitting room — on either side of a large bathroom and, in addition to a subterranean parking garage, the finished basement includes a large laundry room, dance studio/gym with sprung floor, screening room with tiered seating on red leather sofas, and a partially paneled game room with fireplace, wet bar, and some terrifically ill-advised royal blue wall-to-wall carpeting.

The estate’s outbuildings include a Victorian era garage, a wee summerhouse in the back garden, and what listing details call “The Pavilion,” a 1,436-square-foot, self-contained residence for guests or staff that encompasses a 39-foot long central living/dining space under a vaulted ceiling and an eat-in kitchen plus two good-sized bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms. Ringed by unspoiled parklands, the landscaped grounds include extensive terracing that gives way to broad swathes of emerald-green lawn bordered by carefully clipped plantings, a heated outdoor swimming pool and spa, a tennis court, and a wooded sunken garden with an interconnected series of stream-fed ponds.

For reasons completely unknown to this property gossip, the veteran box office superstar — the “Mission Impossible” franchise has all by itself hauled in more than $2.75 billion in worldwide box office receipts — appears to be in a mad dash to lighten his residential real estate load. Almost three years ago Mister Cruise dumped his 2,200-square-foot pied-a-terre in Manhattan’s East Village — it went for $3 million — and his heavily fortified Beverly Hills estate, bought in 2007 for $30.5 million from Platinum Triangle mega-broker Kurt Rappaport, is much rumored to be quietly available as a whisper listing with an asking price of $50 million. His sprawling, nearly 300-acre Rocky Mountain compound in Telluride, CO, popped up on the open market in October of 2014 and remains listed with a sky-high price of $59 million and in October of this year (2015) he sold a freshly refreshed two-residence compound above L.A.’s Laurel Canyon for $11.4 million to “Desperate Housewives” and “Telenovela” star Eva Longoria.

Listing photos and floor plan: Savills