In 1802, he bought Piercefield House, Chepstow from Colonel Mark Wood, after agreeing to buy it for £90,000 over dinner. Wells added to Piercefield until it reached almost 3,000 acres (12 km²). He continued the tradition of allowing visitors access to the grounds of his estate, among them the landscape painter Joseph Farington, who having met him in 1803 noted in his diary: "Mr Wells is a West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro".