An auction is off the table, but Henry Giugni still hopes there is a buyer out there who wants an English-style “castle” in northern Illinois.

Giugni and his wife, June Giugni, announced in September 2024 that they were looking to sell the mansion the couple built outside of Harvard. Working with an auction house, the opening bid was set at $5.5 million.

But more than a year later, the couple has been unable to find a buyer for the property.

“The property is 105 acres. I only want to sell 52 acres,” Giugni said. “The house, the back side with the ponds ... that is what I have for sale.”

However, offers have come in only for the entire property, not the smaller, divided section, he said.

The couple started construction on the 8,770-square-foot, seven bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath home in 1999 and finished it in 2005.

While building the home, Giugni also built up the property. He added an 18-acre lake and hand-dug streams and planted thousands of trees in what once were cornfields. The streams are stocked with fish, and Giugni, a former exotic bird importer, brought in trumpeter swans for the lake.

The house now is too much for the couple, and Giugni wants to split the property to build a smaller house on the other side of the pond.

That is the problem, Giugni said.

“There have been a few people with offers – that are not good – but want the entire 105 acres. I don’t want to let go of the whole thing," he said.

The home – what the couple calls Somerset Manor – and half the acreage is listed on landandfarm.com for $4.39 million. Giugni said he’d consider selling the entire property, “if there is a really good offer.”

June, who built a makeup-by-mail subscription business starting in the 1970s, has suggested they move to Switzerland, where he grew up, Giugni said.

“June says, ‘Sell the whole thing,’” he said. “But I like to do things, I still do a lot of work outside. In Switzerland ... it is limited on what you can get. They don’t have the open [land]. It is still beautiful.”