Savills agent Ben Rivett calls Saham Lodge, in the village of Saham Toney, ‘the rare commodity of a fully renovated country house, with scale and style, not to mention privacy among the 17½ acres’, which seems to sum up this Grade II-listed country house to a T.

Other words you could use to sum up this home would be ‘white’, ‘in Norfolk’, ‘elegant’, ‘immaculately presented’ and ‘quite large’, which are all things we are big fans of here at Country Life. The property is for sale with Savills for £2.35 million.

The renovations weren’t merely superficial and saw the entire house re-plumbed and re-wired, windows replaced or reconditioned, the roof overhauled and the entire exterior painted. The joy of finding a country house in such condition is a rare one, and the fact that it is effectively ‘ready to move into’ surely makes it one of the finer propositions on the market.

‘The finer elements of the project are a triumph, with complete interior decoration,’ state the details and, indeed, every reception room, from the dining room to the drawing room, as well as the kitchen, is painted in a harmonious blend of hues, as are the eight bedrooms and six luxury bathrooms.

The property is a real country-house classic, featuring a pantry, library, second (butler’s) pantry, all elegantly arranged in an L-shape over two floors and with more than 7,000sq ft of living space.

In clement weather, paved terraces enable al-fresco dining and the chance to admire the views, for this Georgian house sits in the centre of its own grounds, where a sense of peace is ever-present A range of outbuildings includes the original mellow brick stabling with half-moon windows, a car lodge and garage, workshop and barn.

The situation is ideal, as beyond the perfectly manicured garden and grounds, the property sits on the edge of Saham Toney, a west Norfolk village that features its own pub, primary school, village shop, golf course and tennis courts. Further amenities can be found in nearby Swaffham, while Downham Market station is 19 miles away, providing a direct line to London’s Kings Cross in 1hr and 45mins.

Saham Lodge is for sale with Savills for £2.35 million. For more information and images, click here.

Not every old house lets you feel its age; but those that do are often all the more charming for it. That's certainly the case with the Grade II-listed Shelley Priory, on the market in Suffolk through Jackson-Stops and Savills at £1.4 million.

The house as it stands today is, in essence, a charming 18th-century farmhouse, though it's a property that has much earlier origins.

This classic Suffolk-pink house is built of painted brick under a peg-tile roof with four gault brick chimney-stacks.

The house's distinctive colour is said to date from the 14th century, when natural substances — such as elderberries or pig/ox blood mixed with buttermilk — were added to the more porous traditional limewash to protect walls and window frames during the harsh Suffolk winters.

For the past 28 years, Shelley Priory has been the much-loved family home of the present owners, who are now looking to downsize.

That brings opportunity for a new family who need the amount of space seen here — for this is a big house, with more than 6,200 sq ft of light-filled accommodation on two floors.

There's an entrance hall, a kitchen/breakfast room, four reception rooms, a study and a vaulted family room. It's in these spaces that the home's history really shines through: the ancient beams are a striking feature that being centuries of history to bear.

One of the original buildings is effectively set up as a party barn in a separate but connected wing, with its own kitchen and mezzanine floor, as well as huge windows to light the place up. This space could have any number of uses.

There are also six bedrooms, four of which are en-suite, plus two further bathrooms.

Outside, it's a joy of a home, with fine gardens, a swimming pool and a series of other buildings. There's an outdoor pool, and a pool house with a bar, a big TV and — it must be said — the boldest sofa we've seen all year.

The village of Shelley was described in the National Gazetteer of the UK & Ireland (1868) as being ‘of small extent, situated on the River Brett [another tributary of the Stour] and wholly agricultural’.

Today, despite the enormous changes seen in farming, the village website points out that ‘we still have lovely green fields throughout Shelley, no doubt due to some extent to the streams that flow down and underneath the hillsides’.

‘This idyllic spot within the Dedham Vale is known locally as “Happy Valley” because not only are the houses lovely, but the people are lovely as well,’ says agent Tim Dansie of Jackson-Stops in Ipswich.

Shelley Priory is for sale via Savills — see more details.

In the heart of mid-Suffolk, Mark Rimell of Strutt & Parker is handling the £2.95 million sale of the handsome, Grade II-listed Darmsden Hall.

That buys you a wonderful home in 55 acres of truly magnificent gardens — though it's £2.87 million more than when the house appeared for sale in Country Life back in 1941. Ah well — at least the 2026 buyer will benefit from the modern pool that's been added, which is an utterly wonderful addition and among the prettiest we've seen in a while.

With historic barns and outbuildings set in 55 acres of magnificent gardens and grounds near the hamlet of Darmsden, in the rolling wooded hills of the Gipping Valley, the historic town of Needham Market is only two miles away, with Ipswich an eight-mile trip.

Originally built as a farmhouse in about 1830 with an earlier 16th-century rear wing, the hall has been extensively modernised, extended and refurbished in recent years.

Today, the house still incorporates many period features, including exposed timbers, mullion windows and open fireplaces. Yet it's a modern home, too, with more than 6,000sq ft of stylish living space.

There are six reception rooms, five bedrooms and bathrooms in the main house, with a dressing room on the second floor, and a further bedroom and bathroom in
a separate guest annexe.

Highlights include a light-filled reception hall, a panelled drawing room overlooking the valley, a spacious library, a charming morning room and a bespoke Plain English kitchen that opens onto a large family room.

Lovingly created by the current owners, the gardens and grounds are a mix of landscaped private areas, formal hedging and planted borders that extend around the property, interspersed with more than 12,000 newly planted specimen trees and areas of wildflower meadows, paddocks and lawns, all of which offer unfettered panoramic views over the undulating countryside beyond.

To the south-west of the grounds, the aforementioned swimming pool and pool house, enclosed by yew hedging, make an excellent setting for outdoor entertaining. Sporting amenities include a tennis court and a fully stocked fishing lake.

Darmsden Hall is for sale through Strutt & Parker — see more details.

The dreamy River Stour forms most of the county boundary between Essex and Suffolk as it passes through a tranquil rural landscape of few towns, but many unspoilt ancient villages on its way to the North Sea at Harwich.

Today, much of the lovely Stour Valley is part of the Dedham Vale National Landscape, an area of rare beauty immortalised by the artist John Constable, who grew up beside the river at Flatford in Suffolk, where his father was the miller.

Now, as Constable’s native county celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth, East Anglian agents are marking the event with the launch onto the market of some classic Suffolk houses in sought-after villages within the Dedham Vale or the wider catchment area of the River Stour.

Barclay Macfarlane of Savills country department (07779 905904) quotes a guide price of £5.5 million for Grade II*-listed Polstead Hall in the charming rural village of Polstead, Suffolk, three miles north-east of Stoke by Nayland, five miles south-west of the medieval market town of Hadleigh and nine miles north of the commuter hub of Colchester in Essex.

This impeccably restored Georgian country house, set in 13 acres of formal gardens, parkland and woodland overlooking the valley of the River Box, a tributary of the Stour, enjoys superb southerly views over the Dedham Vale towards Stoke by Nayland village and its Grade I- listed, 15th-century church of St Mary, the 125ft-high Gothic perpendicular tower of which dominates the landscape for miles around.

According to Suffolk historian H. R. Barker, Polstead Park was held in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Waldegrave family. They were succeeded by the Brands, wealthy clothiers from nearby Boxford, who lived there until 1814, when it passed by marriage to the Cooke family. According to Barker, the present house is largely the work of the Yorkshire-born architect William Pilkington, who, between 1816 and 1819, transformed the previous house into a substantial Regency mansion by remodelling the façade and adding a new 100ft-long wing to the north and a ballroom of similar dimensions to the south.

Having served as a school ‘for the sons of nobility and gentry’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and as a hotel between the wars, the 1960s saw the hall drastically reduced in size, when the ballroom and outbuildings were demolished and the north wing scaled down to half its length. Polstead Hall was again a private residence when, in 1997, it was acquired by the current owners, who embarked on a complete overhaul of the entire property, commissioning Newmarket-based garden designer Jonathan Pringle to lay out the splendid formal parterre and landscape the rest of the gardens. They also built a tiled swimming-pool complex surrounded by flowerbeds to the north-west of the house.

Approached through a former deer park, elegant Polstead Hall offers more than 9,200sq ft of well-organised family accommodation, including, on the ground floor, reception and inner halls, a fine cantilevered staircase, four main reception rooms, a snug, boot room and a Shaker-style kitchen and breakfast room with cellars below.

A notable feature of the dining room is an original fireplace that was sourced from a Pilkington house in Norfolk. The first floor houses a grand principal bedroom suite, four further bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a staff apartment and four unconverted attic rooms on the second floor.

Polstead Hall is for sale with Savills for £5.5 million. For more information, click here.

At Country Life's last count back in 2021, there were around 40 working windmills left in Britain. They're spread around the country — Sussex, Lincolnshire, and even Brixton — and each one has a tale to tell. It's not often that they change hands, but when they do it's a fascinating opportunity to take a look. And one is on the market right now: Bardwell Cottage and Windmill, in Suffolk.

This working windmill — which runs of wind when it can, and electricity when the weather is still — is coming up for auction on March 25, with a guide price of just £350,000-£400,000. It'll be the first time since 1987 that the windmill has changed hands; we told you they don't often change hands.

The windmill itself, which is Grade II*-listed, is described in the details as having been 'extensively restored', and 'fully operational'. The cap was renewed in 2000, while the sails and fan were renewed between 2010-2014. Over that entire period the windows and doors were also renewed, with everything done in keeping with the original style.

That work extends to the flour milling machinery, which has two sets of French burr stones (ideal for fine grinding, apparently). The north stones are turned by the wind, whilst the south stones are turned by the electric motor. In short, it's the ideal place to live out your Camberwick Green or Trumpton fantasies.

While the mill itself has been totally overhauled, the same can't be said for the Victorian cottage that's also part of the sale. The word 'tired' doesn't really begin to tell the tale; the pictures here, however, do.

In short, the house will need an awful lot of work to be done, though it does all seem perfectly liveable for those keen to live on site while working through the job list. As always with buying a house at auction, any potential buyer will have to go in with their eyes open, and to take expert advice before raising a bidding paddle.

That said, there seems to be huge potential here. As well as the cottage and mill, there's also a workshop of almost 600sq ft. The village of Bardwell itself is a busy little place, with a post office, primary school and a couple of pubs; Bury St Edmunds, around 10 miles away, is the nearest big town.

Bardwell Cottage and Mill are up for auction with a guide price of £350,000-£400,000 — see more details.

For a family to produce an iconic figure in the fight for equality is impressive. For the same family to produce two is truly exceptional; and that brings us to the Garretts of Aldeburgh.

Newson Garrett and his wife Lousia (neé Dunnell) met and fell in love in London in the 1830s, but moved to Suffolk in 1840 with their four young children (the first four of what would eventually be ten). Garrett set up a business that started off shipping barley for brewing, but moved on to malting. Determined and hard-working, he quickly made a huge success of himself — and both Newson and Louisa were keen that their children do the same, regardless of their sex.

The house they lived at is the one on this page, a beautiful Georgian home right opposite the church in the centre of the seaside town of Aldeburgh, where Garrett's business was based.

Here the family spent 11 years from 1841 to 1852 — formative years in particular for two of the family's daughters, Elizabeth and Millicent, spent — before the Garrett's business became successful enough for them to build a new home, Alde House.

The Garrets old house became the Uplands Hotel in the middle of the 20th century, but was recently converted back into private accommodation. The agents, Bedfords, have just sold it, but they've kindly allowed us to use several pictures here which give a real feel of the character of the home.

Elizabeth, the elder of the two, was sent to a boarding school in Blackheath but her education seemed set to go no further until she heard of Elizabeth Blackwell, who had recently become the first female doctor in the United States. Her battle took years, saw her refused access time and again to medical schools across Britain, but eventually managed to join the British Medical Association in 1873 (a move so appalling to many of its members that the membership voted to block any woman trying to follow in her footsteps for almost 20 years).

She eventually won the battle, co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women, and held all manner of other posts, from president of the East of England region of the BMA to mayor of Aldeburgh. That latter role made her the first female mayor in Britain.

Meanwhile, her little sister Millicent was blazing a trail of her own, becoming a leading light of the Suffrage movement in 1867 when joining the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the organisation she would lead for many years.

A calm and constant voice who always advocated for peaceful argument ahead of militant action, she took a deputation to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, in 1917 that paved the way for the Representation of the People Act of March 1918.

Exactly a century later, she became the first woman to have a statue erected in Parliament Square, London, where she stands alongside the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

The Cambridgeshire cottage that was once home to the Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir has come to the market with Cheffins.

Born on a farm in the Orkney Islands in 1887, Muir married Willa Anderson in 1919 and the couple spent a few years living in Prague, then in Czechoslovakia, Dresden in Germany and Salzburg and Vienna in Austria. Together, they worked on influential translations of German-language writers and were the first to translate works by Franz Kafka into English.

Priory Cottage, in Swaffham Prior, was Muir’s home for the last three years of his life and it was where he wrote some of his best-known Cold War-based poems. He died in 1959.

His wife wrote about finding the cottage in her book, Belonging: ‘Most old English cottages are cursed with very small rooms and as soon as we walked into [the sitting room], we nodded to each other and said: “This is it.”’

The new owners of the cottage will no doubt want to stamp their own decorative mark on the property — and it is ripe for modernisation (see: the avocado bathroom suite).

It has four bedrooms (one on the ground floor), an established walled garden, a garage and off-street parking and 'numerous character features'. These include original windows, such as in the dual-aspect dining room, a 'stunning' inglenook fireplace with herringbone brickwork hearth and wood-burning stove, exposed walls and timber ceilings.

Despite its size, there is also ample space in which to put things: a cellar; a study with built-in storage; and a kitchen that is charmingly outdated, but does come with plenty of cupboards.

Situated in the heart of the village, overlooking its two churches, Priory Cottage is a mere five minutes from Newmarket — the 'home of horse racing'.

Priory Cottage is on the market for £680,000 through Cheffins — see more details.

Concert pianist, courtier, close friend of the Queen Mother, and grandmother to one of the most famous women of the 20th century: Ruth, Lady Fermoy, lived quite a life.

Born in 1908, Lady Fermoy was for many years a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen Mother, whose famed warmth and radiance were shared by her closest circle. 'Effortlessly polite to all comers, they acted as a team, and every afternoon, at the appointed hour, the Queen Mother's courtiers took tea together to mull over the events of the day,' wrote Hugo Vickers in Lady Fermoy's obituary in The Independent in 1993. 'As early as 1937 the lady-in-waiting to Queen Ena of Spain complimented Queen Elizabeth on being surrounded by some of the nicest women in England: "the sort of women who ride in buses, pay their bills and are nice to old servants".'

A lovely image, and seemingly a family trait passed on to her daughter and grand-daughter, Diana, Princess of Wales, who was also famed for her ability to connect with people from all walks of life.

Lady Fermoy was born in Scotland and was a hugely talented pianist who studied at the Paris Conservatoire. Spent much of her later life in and around Clarence House in London, but for many years she lived in her country house in Norfolk: Uphall, just outside the village of Hillington, where she and her husband Maurice Roche, 4th Baron Fermoy, lived with their three children. It's currently on the market for £2.25 million via Sowerbys. And it, like its former owner, is effortlessly charming.

From the moment you step into the bright, spacious hallway of this eight-bedroom Georgian home, it's a place that is grand, beautiful and cosy. There are open fires and huge windows, polished floorboards and elegant rugs, cosy sofas and pretty wallpaper.

Lady Fermoy may be long gone (she left in the 1970s), but her skill at putting people are ease seems to have rubbed off on Uphall. It's the sort of place where you'd feel comfortable enough to plonk down on one of the kookily mismatched sofas without your host even having to invite you to do so.

The space on offer is superb, with a sitting room, drawing room, dining room, family room and large kitchen on the ground floor, plus a snug and a utility room below.

The 11 bedrooms (11!) are split across the first and second floors, most of which have en-suite facilities, and there are six bathrooms in all. Many of the rooms could be configured flexibly as studies, offices or games rooms.

The grounds and gardens aren't huge — four and a half acres — but they are a real joy, and back on to the Sandringham Estate.

As well as lawns, kitchen garden and plenty of mature trees, there's also a tennis court and an original Victorian swimming pond that's a rare find (and 'an idyllic setting for wild swimming and peaceful reflection' as the agents describe it). There are also several outbuildings and a coach house.

Hillington itself is a pretty little village, and a local inn called Fflokes, which describes itself as a 'hotel, spa and pub', and which has its own little crazy golf course where a round and a pint costs £10.

The village also has easy access to the main road to the market town of King's Lynn, eight miles away, from where trains to London take around an hour and 40 minutes. Sandringham, the beach at Hunstanton, and RSPB Snettisham are all even closer than that.

Uphall is for sale via Sowerbys at £2.25 million — see more details and pictures.

Lavenham's ancient high street is world famous — mostly for it's extraordinary collection of buildings that are, for want of a better word, wonky. It's a place 'where colourful timbered houses leaning drunkenly at impossible angles', as Flora Watkins put it in 2022, when interviewing the couple who live in The Crooked House, a home that's arguably the wonkiest of the lot.

For those worried about whether buying one of these 600-year-old houses makes sense, there's good news: the biggest danger comes from getting splinters from the 14th century beams. 'It’s incredibly strong,' Oli Khalil-Martin, who lives in The Crooked House, told Flora. 'A structural engineer who came to look at the ceiling said it’s four times stronger than any commercial building today.'

All that is great news for anybody keen to buy one of the prettiest homes for sale in Lavenham, today; The Old Grammar School, which is on the market via David Burr at £1.1 million. What's even better news is that the house was, as you might have guessed, once a school — a school with very famous ex-pupil: John Constable, one of Britain's greatest-ever artists.

Originally a wool merchant’s house, this building on Barn Street was once the site of the school that the young Constable attended. It was the site of Lavenham Grammar School between 1647 and 1887.

The artist's time at the school was right in the middle of that period, in 1777 — but it wasn't a happy part of his young life. He was sent to the school as a full boarder at the age of 11, but complained of receiving ‘unwarranted beatings’ from the teachers (the brutality of that won't surprise anyone who's read Tom Brown's Schooldays). His parents pulled him out of the school and he was dispatched, as a day boy, to the Royal Grammar School in nearby Dedham.

It proved to be a wonderful move. The teachers encouraged his interest in calligraphy and drawing, and the daily walk between his home in East Bergholt and the school is thought to have instilled a deep knowledge of and love for the Suffolk countryside.

You've probably noticed that The Old Grammar School isn't quite as wonky as many of Lavenham's houses; that's most likely due to its relative modernity. This Grade I-listed house dates to 1530, and was among the last of the great merchant houses to be built before the collapse of Lavenham’s wool and cloth industry.

After that it fell on hard times for many years. According to selling agent David Burr, it was rescued from near dereliction in the mid 1990s before being sympathetically renovated into the current arrangement: a four-bedroom house, retaining many original features.

The best news of the lot is that things have been brought into the 21st century where you'd want them to be — kitchen, bathroom — but the character of the place is intact wherever possible. Thus, ancient beams have been left unfinished, nooks and crannies are used for storage and bookshelves, and four-poster beds are in most of the rooms. It's a joy.

Arranged across three floors, there are two good-sized reception rooms and a kitchen with an Aga on the ground floor. There's also a wine cellar.

There's also a garden that is pleasant but not huge, as you'd expect of a town centre home. Very usefully, there's a double garage in an outbuilding which also has a workshop and a home office.

The Old Grammar School is for sale at £1.1 million — see more details and pictures.

'You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't,' Stephen Fry once said of the county where he grew up, and still lives. 'It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.'

Fry, naturally, gets it. And so would you, if you'd spent your formative years at a house as beautiful, and as beautifully-situated, as Booton House. It's on the market through Jackson-Stops with an asking price of £1.3 million, and it's full of beautiful character touches that were probably here when the young Fry was still scampering about the place.

Born in Hampstead, and with early years spent in Buckinghamshire, it was in 1965 that the family moved to this home — in the village (a hamlet, really) of Booton, near Reepham, and roughly half-way between Norwich and the north Norfolk coast (both are roughly half an hour's drive). This is the Norfolk of open fields, huge skies and endless streams dotting the landscape.

It's also the Norfolk of great property bargains, because the asking price delivers an awful lot for the money. The house is over 7,000sq ft set over three floors, with seven bedrooms, separate dining room, sitting room and snug as well as a huge kitchen diner that leads off to both a conservatory and a pantry.

The gardens aren't huge at around an acre, but they're clearly much-loved, beautifully planted and ringed by mature trees to give a lovely sense of privacy.

Putting aside the celebrity connection, the decor within is probably the greatest attraction, though. Almost everything you see has a lovely look and feel which harks back to the house's turn-of-the-20th-century origins.

There's a wonderfully-graceful wooden staircase in the hall, gorgeous period tiles on the floors of both kitchen and hallway, pretty wallpaper in many of the rooms, a Beatrix Potter-inspired mural in one of the children's bedrooms, original fireplaces, old-school chunky radiators and a fantastic feeling of space.

The snug alone — essentially set up as a library, with a wall full of books behind cabinet doors on one side — is the sort of space that could sell a house.

In short, it's not hard to see why Fry's love affair with the county began when his family moved here.

'Norfolk is home, that’s the real truth of it. I feel at home here,' the actor, writer and comedian said in an interview a few years ago. 'I can justify it by pointing to its beauty, the “do different” quirkiness, the ideal isolation from smug Home County cosiness, but the real truth is that it’s home. And there are few finer words than that in the whole language.'

Booton House is for sale via Jackson-Stops at £1.3 million — see more pictures and details.

Sometimes you come across a country house where you'd love to be able to whisk the original inhabitants forward in time from their own era, to see what they made of the place as it is today. Never have I felt that more than in the case of Hill House in Bramerton, for sale via Sowerbys at £3.75 million.

This elegant riverside home was built in 1897, at a time when the Tudor Revival was hugely fashionable, and this house is a great example of the style. Towering red-brick walls, a wealth of octagonal chimneys, castellated towers, the rows of windows and a grand, arched entrance porch all fit the pattern, and at first glance give the house the feel of a mini-Hampton Court. As indeed does the setting: like Henry VIII's great palace, it's Hill House is set right beside the river.

Step through that grand entrance, however, and you're catapulted forward in time hundreds of years.

The pictures here tell much of the story: the present owners, who came here in 2020, changed the entire place beyond recognition. Walls have been pulled out, rooms reshaped and Crittal windows installed everywhere you look.

The living space on the ground floor is now dominated by a bright, open, L-shaped kitchen-dining-living space at the heart of which is — and there really is no better way to describe it — a kitchen island that looks more like a City wine bar than the sort of thing you'd order from Neptune.

On the side looking out over the river, huge french windows open onto a terrace that runs the length of the home — a wonderful place to sit out and watch the sun setting in the huge, Norfolk skies.

The downstairs does still have a discrete sitting room and dining room, but both look out through internal windows onto the main space. The interlinking allows everyone to enjoy one of Hill House's other most striking features: the 'floating fireplace' incorporated into centre of the floorplan, hanging from its own flue which — we presume — heads directly up through one of the aforementioned chimneys. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a stylish converted warehouse; the effect in a late-Victorian home is dazzling.

Upstairs, there are more such touches — particularly in the master suite, with a huge glass wall at one end, a balcony and an en-suite made in floor-to-ceiling marble, with a deep, free-standing bathtub as well as a hotel-style built-in shower cubicle.

Families with older children will be particularly pleased to hear that there's another floor above, with the attic space having been turned in to a sort of two-bedroom suite that feels ideal as a teenagers' escape.

It's not the only unexpected extra space. Hill House also has two lower ground floor areas which contain utility room, boot room, boiler room, wine cellar and — because it's 2026, and everyone seems to want one these days — a sauna.

Within the seven acres of grounds you'll find a pool house (plus a pool, naturally) and a series of outbuildings that include a 1,271 sq ft barn, as well as lawns and woodland. There's even some of the land on the opposite bank of the Yare, ideal for punting across to have a picnic.

Finally, for those looking for a project, permission is already in place to revamp the old stables and the pool house with the same glass-wall aesthetic as you'll find in the main house. We can't wait to see what happens at Hill House next.

Hill House is for sale via Sowerbys at £3.75 million — see more details..

The northern reaches of Essex are perhaps one of the best-kept secrets in the Home Counties. Gently rolling countryside, ancient woods and farmland stretching away beneath huge skies are a world away from the nightclubs and bling McMansions closer to London. There are rivers criss-crossing the landscape, breweries that have stood on the same spot for centuries, and ancient mills of the sort immortalised by Constable in The Hay Wain, which while painted in Suffolk, depicted a mill pretty much on the border with Essex.

Another of those mills is now for sale, and it's an idyllic place that's been the subject of a labour-of-love restoration. Strutt & Parker are handling the sale of The Mill House in Hartford End, with an asking price of £4.95 million.

This Georgian home dates to the late 18th century, with the buildings having long been recognised for their beauty and significance. The original house is Grade II-listed, while the watermill itself is Grade II*-listed — yet listing and condition don't always go hand in hand, and when owner Barry Mather bought it in 2013, it had been long neglected.

The main house was unloved rather than decrepit, but the watermill had lain essentially untouched for two centuries, with the roof said to be on the verge of collapse. Mather Barry brought in architects with experience of saving historic buildings, and worked with English Heritage to restore what could be saved and faithfully replicate what could not.

The result, as you see in the pictures here, is pretty spectacular.

The original Georgian house (on the right of the picture at the top of the page) and the brick-built watermill (on the left) were brought together as one building, more than doubling the floor space of the house. Inside, that means a change in character between one side — the traditional 18th century residence with high ceilings and beautiful windows — and the other, where the old mill's interior have been reimagined with modern fittings sitting alongside ancient beams and other original features.

Several of those original elements have been cleverly incorporated into the design. The white weatherboard lucam and winch — once used to haul wheat into the mill — are intact, as is a former hoist door in the centre of the the first floor façade. The latter is now in the principal bedroom, and a full-length glazed window installed into what would once have been a working opening, giving views of the River Chelmer from the bedroom’s sitting room.

The main bedroom is one of the house's real highlights — the agents describe it as 'having the feel of a five-star hotel — with its en-suite, two dressing rooms and seating area.

Equally impressive is the huge open plan kitchen, dining and living space below with ancient beams holding up the structure and giving huge character, particularly effective with the swish charcoal units setting off the wooden beams, exposed brickwork and white walls.

In total there are seven bedrooms in the house, and just under 7,800sq ft of living space. Almost all the rooms have views out over the river, though couple of bedrooms plus the sitting room and drawing room look out instead over the charming walled gardens.

What was once a hard-working mill has become a blissful country house, then; but this property is still also a hard-working spot, since the owners converted some of the many outbuildings into a series of office units.

It'd make the house an ideal place from which to run a small business — or they could potentially be repurposed for other uses. And if working from home is not for you, the benefit of being in Essex is that London is just over an hour away via road or rail.

The Mill House in Hartford End is for sale via Strutt & Parker at £4.95 million — see more details.

'The Old Rectory' is the second-most expensive house name in Britain, according to research that Savills published last year. Sitting behind only 'The Manor House', the 355 Old Rectories that had sold in the preceding years had fetched an average price of £1.3 million.

It's not hard to see why. Many rectories are products of the Georgian and early Victorian age of architecture, with large, beautiful rooms, extensive gardens and charmingly graceful lines. The rectors themselves might be long gone — the church's wealth today being a fraction of what it was in an era when pretty much anyone and everyone attended a weekly service — but the houses they left behind are enormously popular, whether they keep their name or not. When you see a place like Oakley House — on sale with a guide price of £2.45 million — it's not hard to understand why.

Situated in Hampshire, a couple of miles north of Jane Austen's home village of Steventon, Oakley House is the old rectory in the village of that name that's just six miles from Basingstoke, and thus eminently commutable to London. Basingstoke itself might not be the prettiest of towns, but many of the villages around it have plenty of charm and Oakley is just such a place, with a number of imposing period houses in the conservation area at its core.

Oakley House is a classic Georgian rectory, set in just under one and a half acres of delightful gardens and grounds. While it's in the heart of the village, those gardens surround the house, and are ringed by tightly clipped yew hedges that provide privacy and seclusion.

Inside it's exactly as you might imagine. Of particular note are the full-height sash windows in the drawing room and snug, which underline the house’s Georgian credentials.

The house offers 4,487sq ft of free-flowing living space on two main floors, including four good reception rooms, six bedrooms and four bathrooms.

A stable block with pleasing period detail has planning consent to convert to ancillary accommodation to the main house.

There is also a traditional brick built garage for which planning consent was granted for its replacement by a green oak framed garage block, although that permission has now lapsed.

Oakley House is for sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details.

The beautiful Beaulieu River and the prestigious 7,000-acre estate that takes its name are two of the jewels in Hampshire’s crown. A series of secluded properties built on the waterfront in Dock Lane, Beaulieu, from the early 20th century onwards are among the most sought-after in the county and one of the earliest examples, The Rookery, is now on the market. George Clarendon of Knight Frank in Winchester is handling the sale, at a guide price of £5.25 million.

The Rookery is one of the original six houses were sanctioned by John, 2nd Baron Montagu (1866–1929), the grandfather of the present owner and a motoring pioneer, between 1909 and 1914. They’ve been much sought after ever since — as have other properties along the river, where from the 1920s wealthy industrialists, businessmen and architects built holiday homes with private moorings overlooking the water and surrounded by the woods of the estate.

Today, meandering Dock Lane is lined by no fewer than 54 houses and is listed by property website Zoopla as the most expensive street in Hampshire, where the average cost of a home was reckoned at £3,670,466 in February 2021; one of them, the 1930s Tudor-style Spearbed Copse, — owned by the Showering family of Babycham fame — came to the market in 2016 with a guide price of £8m, and which puts into perspective the asking price for The Rookery. It might have less than two acres of land, but this is a coveted location that commands a premium.

Approached via a long gravel driveway, The Rookery was constructed in 1909 in the Arts-and-Crafts style. Beautifully maintained by its current owners during their 25-year tenure, the main house offers 3,419sq ft of light and cheerful living space, including an entrance hall, dining room, sitting room, billiard room, study and a newly built kitchen on the ground floor.

Above, there are five bedrooms, three shower rooms and a family bathroom on the first floor.

Period features, including Crittall windows and open fireplaces, abound throughout. Further accommodation is provided in a large, three-room outbuilding, once used as a cottage. There is also a double garage.

Outside, the garden is laid mainly to lawn, with a south-facing terrace leading off the main reception rooms. A sheltered pool and pool house are perfect for summer days. A flight of stone steps leads down to the garden and through a secure gate to a further lawned area and the jetty that offers direct access to the Beaulieu River.

All this beauty sits at the heart of one of England’s great landed estates. Beaulieu can trace its origins to 1204, when King John gave the land to monks of the Cistercian order. The Abbey they founded grew in size and status until the Dissolution in 1538, when the Beaulieu estate was surrendered to the Crown and sold that same year to Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton, a direct ancestor of the Montagu family that still owns it.

The estate is situated on the southern fringe of the New Forest National Park and occupies a glorious elevated setting overlooking the picturesque Beaulieu River, which rises near Lyndhurst in the heart of the New Forest. It then flows south across heathland to the village of Beaulieu, where it becomes tidal and passes the hamlet of Buckler’s Hard before entering the Solent at Needs Ore.

The river has been key to the development of the Beaulieu estate by successive owners, among them John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, who founded the ship-building village of Buckler’s Hard in the 1720s — now the setting for the prestigious Buckler’s Hard Yacht Harbour and marina.

The Rookery is on the market via Knight Frank in Winchester at £5.25 million — see more details.

'There is always something melancholy in contemplating the building of a house by one who has looked forward to dwelling therein, and to find him cut off before his hope is realised,' wrote Country Life of Lynford Hall in an article of 1903, 'but the history of English dwelling places and their builders is full of such incidents.'

The death of the man in question, a Mr Lyne-Stephens, proved to be just the first of many twists in the life of Lynford Hall since it was completed in 1858. It has been a country house, an agricultural college, a headquarters for the Forestry Commission, an American military facility in the Second World War, a hotel, a wedding venue, a country house for a second time, an organic farming centre and — surely best of all — the filming venue for the classic 1980s sitcom Allo Allo.

Today, 170 years on from the original commission — in which Lyne-Stephens briefed his architect a brief to create Norfolk's answer to Hatfield House — Lynford Hall is all set to begin the next chapter of its life. Set near Thetford, and 12 miles from Sandringham, it's for sale via property agent Tim Phillips, who quotes a guide price of £3.5 million.

That purchase price buys you a very different Lynfield Hall from the one Lyne-Stephens would have known. Originally it was part of an estate of over 7,000 acres, but most of that land is now in the hands of the Forestry Commission, who once owned the place and kept the bulk of the estate while selling off the house and around 20 acres of gardens and grounds.

The great change came in the 1920s, when a terrible fire destroyed much of the building.

Though much of the Hall was later restored — including by the Americans, who installed central heating heating for the benefit of convalescing soldiers — there are still areas which have yet to be returned to their original glory. Of the three original cupolas, for example, only one remains.

While: there are 39 bedrooms, ten of which are in the main house, with 29 more arranged around a courtyard — the courtyard where Allo Allo was filmed, standing in for the war-torn French village in which the action was set.

Look familiar? Those who remember the show might recognise the exterior of Réné's café, and the town square. If not, the blue plaque in the courtyard will remind them. And if you haven't heard of Allo Allo, it's worth knowing that other BBC shows were also made here. Most of Dad's Army was filmed just down the road in Thetford, for example, but whenever they needed a country house background they came down to Lynford Hall.

Lynford Hall's main role over the last fifty years or so wasn't filming: it was a medium-sized country house hotel and wedding venue. Should the new owners wish to take it back down that path, extensive work will be needed, both to the buildings and interiors and also to the services.

It could be a much bigger business, too: Tim Phillips notes in his entertaining walk-through video that planning permission has previously been granted to expand the property from 40,000sq ft to 100,000sq ft — that's roughly half the size of Blenheim Palace.

It's options like that which make Lynford Hall a fascinating prospect: the potential here is enormous. Tim's video also delves in to some of the parts of the building that have laid untouched for a century or more, where ivy grows down the walls and Victorian fittings are still in place.

This is not a project for the faint-hearted, or for those who wish to just move in to a lovely country house. It's a job for a new owner keen to take on a wonderful neo-Jacobean building and create something new which will add to the house's story. Mr Lyne-Stephens might not have seen his house completed, but you can't help thinking that he'd be fascinated to see the may ways it's changed and survived.

Lynford Hall is for sale at £3.5 million — for more information contact Tim Phillips.

There are houses that are grand, houses that are charming and houses that are interesting. Sometimes, though, you just want to find the sort of house where you feel you could tuck yourself away from the rest of the world and live an idyllic life of peace and harmony.

We can't help thinking that Brick Kiln Barn — for sale at £1.1 million — could be just that place. Hidden away among wonderful mature trees, yet still close enough to the local village that you can buy a pint of milk without having to hop in the car, it's a picture-perfect hideaway from the world that is simply idyllic.

There's a bit of land — enough, at 20 acres, that you could do all sorts with it; yet not so much that managing it would be a full-time job. There's a chance to catch a few fish, with your own private stretch of river. And there is, of course, a lovely four-bedroom house that's set up ideally either for a nuclear family or for multi-generational living.

The buyers of Brick Kiln Barn will also be the proud owners of 20 acres of undulating meadows, which have been used for livestock grazing, haymaking and silage crops in the past. This weatherboarded barn conversion also has a private frontage onto the River Brett, offering the perfect spot for some quiet fishing or simply contemplation.

The dual-aspect, open-plan sitting room, with its part-vaulted ceiling, galleried landing, full-height window, exposed wooden flooring and free-standing woodburning stove, is certainly striking, as is the spacious kitchen/breakfast room with its range of wall and base units, colourful tiled splashback and modern integrated appliances.

The sitting room is overlooked by the vaulted galleried landing on the first floor, which offers access to the main bedroom and its en-suite shower room. Two additional double bedrooms are situated in a separate wing.

Brick Kiln Farm is for sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details.

After almost a century and a half in the same family, the magnificently charming, Grade II-listed Peasemore House in Berkshire is looking for new owners.

Located in the village of Peasemore, seven miles north of Newbury, the house has been owned by the Brown family since the 1880s, and stands in 12 acres of ornamental and walled gardens, lawns and paddocks. This wonderful spot, overlooking the Downs on three sides, is for sale through Edward Sugden of Savills at a guide price of £7.5m.

Peasemore House was the much-loved family home of Richard Waldron Brown, who famously lived life at racing pace until his death in June last year. His daughter, Katharine Taylor, recalls a madcap motor-racing career that spanned hill climbing, circuit-racing and rallying in everything from an ex-Formula 1 car to the Papillon Bleu, a 1901 Panhard.

Her father won the London to Beijing leg of the 2000 round-the-world race in a 1936 Bentley (‘thanks to my mother’s excellent navigation skills’) and held the record for nine years at Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb in Worcestershire, the oldest motorsport venue in the world. He once embedded a Range Rover in the porch when racing his son to the front door in the snow. (It's been repaired, thankfully.)

Ms Taylor recalls late-night parties and legendary post-party hangovers at Peasemore House, which was modernised over the years, but retains many of its original features. It was one of the first houses in Berkshire to get central heating, and mains water arrived in the 1950s — up to which point all the water came from wells.

The magnificent 17th-century thatched barn was a working grain barn and the back garden a traditional kitchen garden, which fed a large household. Outbuildings were adapted for a variety of uses, from the storage of vintage cars to a carpenter’s shop, a saddlery and the workshop of the oak-frame manufacturers of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Originally known as Priors Side, the house was probably first built as a great hall for nearby Poughley Priory, which was dissolved by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 and the funds used to build Christ Church, Oxford. Following Wolsey’s downfall, Priors Side reverted to the Crown and was later sold to commoners and renamed Peasemore House.

Although listed in Pevsner as ‘a mid-19th-century farmhouse’, a 2007 historic building survey found that the fabric of the house originated in the 15th century, with additions in the 16th or 17th century, and further additions in the 18th and 19th centuries. Tree-ring dating of the crown post roof undertaken in 2009 gave a felling date range of 1294–1308.

All of this contributes to the essence of Peasemore House — that of a warm and welcoming, well-loved family home that offers 9,192sq ft of characterful accommodation on two main floors, including a reception hall, drawing room, dining room, kitchen/breakfast room, family room and various domestic offices on the ground floor.

Upstairs you'll find principal- and guest-bedroom suites, five further bedrooms and family bath and shower rooms on the first floor; and a memorable party room/gym and wine store on the lower ground floor.

The grounds, meanwhile, extend to 12 acres, with croquet lawn, tennis court, pool, and walled kitchen garden, as well as stables and paddocks.

Peasemore House is for sale via Savills at £7.5 million — see more details.

In north Hampshire, the village and civil parish of Longparish, four miles from Whitchurch and seven miles from Winchester, derives its name — first used in the mid 16th century — from a nickname for the historic ‘long parish’ of Middleton, which comprised the hamlets of Middleton, East Aston, West Aston and Forton and stretched for four miles along the north-west bank of the Test, England’s premier fly-fishing river.

This is the charmed spot where you'll find Longparish House, which‚ along with 122 acres of land — is up for sale via Savills at £16.75 million.

Originally built as a ‘small sporting box’ in the mid 17th century, Longparish House was altered and extended in the late 19th century by the Hawker family, whose most famous member was Colonel Peter Hawker. He served under Wellington during the Peninsular War, but was forced to resign his commission when seriously wounded at the Battle of Talavera in July 1809.

Hawker went on to become a celebrated diarist, author and country sportsman, deemed one of the great shots of the 19th century. One of his celebrated descendants shared that skill: First World War flying ace Major Lanoe Hawker, who was born at Longparish House in December 1890.

Hawker joined the RFC early in the war, pioneered many engineering and tactical improvements to the early fighter planes, and won a Victoria Cross for shooting down three enemy aircraft in a single mission. He was eventually killed in November 1916, shot down by Manfred von Richthofen — the Red Baron himself.

In 1919, Major General Guy Payan Dawnay bought Longparish House and estate, which remained in his family until 1989, except during the Second World War, when the house was occupied by the Bank of England.

Built in the style of a French château, Longparish House stands on high ground overlooking its gardens, parkland, woodland and pasture to the north and south of the river, which meanders gently through the 123-acre estate. It was last offered for sale in 2017, when the house was said to be in need ‘of some cosmetic refurbishment' — a significant understatement, given the work undertaken by the current owners, who bought the estate in 2019.

During their tenure, an extensive and sympathetic programme of renovations has been carried out by the present custodians, which, according to Mr Holborow, ‘showcases the marriage of period design with time-honoured craftsmanship. As a result, the next owners of this wonderful house will only need to unpack their bags and move in’.

In its present incarnation, Longparish House has more than 15,000sq ft of luxurious accommodation on three floors, with entrance and rear halls, four main reception rooms, a study, state-of-the-art kitchen and two cloakrooms on the ground floor.

There is a vast principal bedroom suite — 27ft long, with a huge bay window and two dressing rooms — plus four further suites on the first floor.

A study and laundry room are at mezzanine level, while four further bedrooms (three with bathrooms en suite) plus a family bathroom on the second floor.

The lower ground floor houses a billiard room, snug, games room, pub, darts room, wine store, utility and boiler room.

Further accommodation is available in the three-storey Tower annexe, three refurbished cottages and the two-room chapel. Sporting amenities include a pool and pool house, a thatched fishing hut, tennis court and 1,017m (3,336ft) of fishing on the River Test.

Stabling is provided in a beautifully designed, brick stable and garage courtyard commissioned by the owners, with a fully-fitted office suite on the first floor.

The land at Longparish comprises 47 acres of arable farmed by a contractor under an agreement that expires in February 2026, 27 acres of pasture grazed by the owners’ livestock and 35 acres of woodland, which includes a mix of deciduous native species.

Longparish House is for sale via Savills at £16.75 million — see more details.

Earlier this year a house came to the market with a number of claims to fame. At £15 million via Knight Frank, it was one of the most expensive homes on the market in the Home Counties. It has a stunningly rare early 1970s Ferrari 312PB parked in one of the reception rooms. And perhaps most strikingly of all, it has a barn that's built from the timbers of the Mayflower, the iconic ship which took settlers from England to America in 1620 to set up the first Anglophone settlement in the New World.

We know what you're probably thinking, because we were thinking it too. Really? Timbers from the Mayflower? It's a claim that feels utterly outlandish, like the hawkers who sell 'fragments of the true cross' to pilgrims at Jerusalem or Lourdes. Surely it's not possible?

We couldn't help but dig a little deeper, and the story behind it is utterly fascinating... because there's a decent chance that the story really is true.

Let's start with the Mayflower herself. No documents have survived providing full details of the ship, but she's believed to have been a 90ft, 180-ton ship built in the early 17th century, registered in Harwich, and bought by Christopher Jones in 1608. This was no purpose-built vessel designed for emigrés, but a merchant vessel chartered for a one-way voyage across the Atlantic, carrying the 102 settlers who headed off to a new life in the New World in the last days of the summer of 1620.

After an abortive start in August — during which the pilgrims' other ship, the Speedwell, turned back having sprung a leak — the voyage truly got under way from Plymouth on 16 September. 66 arduous days later, on November 21, the Mayflower landed at Cape Cod, stopping for a few weeks before heading out once more and setting down at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, on December 26, 1620.

The Mayflower stayed put for several months as the pilgrims got on with beginning their new lives at a brutally cold time of year, mostly due to the appalling death rate of those on board, with disease, terrible conditions and malnutrition killing off half the settlers and crew. In April the Mayflower finally got back under way once more to complete the return journey, crossing the ocean in four weeks despite damage to the ship and the decimated crew.

Nothing is known of what happened next to ship until an assessment of her value in 1624, carried out to determine the size of the estate of her recently-deceased owner. Ship surveyors from the Admiralty valued it at the satisfyingly exact sum of £128, eight shillings and fourpence.

And after that, the Mayflower disappeared from history for almost three centuries.

It might have stayed lost in time until an elderly academic named James Rendel Harris bumped into someone at a funeral who told him that the Mayflower had been used to build a barn on a farmstead in Buckinghamshire. Rendel was a biblical scholar of some renown — so much so that two portraits of him are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery — but had no background in maritime history until starting his investigation, which culminated in him writing a short book called The Last of the 'Mayflower'.

The book caused a sensation, as recounted by modern historian Dr Tom Hulme in his entertaining telling of the story for the Mayflower 400 celebrations. 'Scores of people came flocking from around the country (and even the United States) to catch a glimpse of the interior,' he writes. 'Amazed or dubious, journalists reported the most incredible of happenings: an Englishman, James Rendel Harris, had found the last resting place of the Mayflower.'

Among the true believers were many sceptics, who tried to tear down Rendel Harris's argument — much of which, it has to be said, is highly speculative. It also seems that the author had more than a scholarly interest in following the evidence: he was a Quaker who had recently opened a hostel in the village, had written a number of plays about the Mayflower, and was a member of hte Mayflower Club. As Hulme concludes, 'Harris had a motive – "providentially happy" as one newspaper put it – to unexpectedly find the Mayflower in Jordans.'

To read the story from that cynical viewpoint seems a little ungenerous, though, not least because spinning a yarn to line one's pockets seems like the exact opposite of the behaviour you'd expect of a Quaker.

So while some of Harris's extrapolations in his book might stretch credulity, there is plenty of evidence that shows that this really could be the Mayflower as an article on June 19, 1942 in Country Life looking at barn construction notes:

Dr. Rendel Harris has produced a mass of evidence to support a similar local tradition that the barn at Jordans, near Beaconsfield, was fashioned from the timbers of the Mayflower.... Several millionaires hani offered an open cheque for the historic barn, but the Society of Friends [Quakers] wisely preserves this treasured relic... Of chief interest is the cracked tie beam which is claimed to be the original main beam of the vessel. According to Bradford's journal [William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony] the pioneers were greatly troubled by a cracked main beam which was finally repaired with rivets from the printing press.'

Those jigsaw pieces fit, then, as do many others — and with no other obvious alternative explanations for the Mayflower's final resting place, accepting Harris's claim seems as good an idea as any, as Brian Dunning wrote in Country Life on September 10, 1970, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the journey:

'Sooner or later all pilgrims of the Pilgrims make their way to the barn in the grounds of the Quaker hostel at Jordans in Buckingham­shire, said to have been built from the timbers of the Mayflower. That the timbers came from a ship contemporary with the May­flower is hardly in doubt: that they came from the May­flower itself is more debatable, but the speculation is attractive, particularly as we shall almost certainly never know the answer.'

Historic England seem to agree, not definitively agreeing that this barn is made from the Mayflower, but simply saying that the Grade II-listed barn is 'held by some to incorporate timbers from the Mayflower in which the Pilgrim Fathers sailed in New England in 1620.'

For many years, the barn was open to the public, but it was sold off and the house on the site redeveloped into the grand, modern home that you now see on this page.

The interiors of Old Jordans are about as far from the cramped, dark conditions on board the Mayflower as it's possible to imagine. This is a bright, modern, and incredibly grand home, which is being sold off-market by Knight Frank.

There are 10 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, huge glass walls and the sort of look and feel you'd expect of a high-end hotel, rather than a family home near Beaconsfield. Most striking of all is the car displayed proudly in one of the reception rooms: it's a Ferrari 312 PB, dating to the early 1970s, a model which the Italian marque used to win the World Sportscar Championship in 1972.

We don't know which exact example this is, but these are rare beasts indeed: a Ferrari 312 PB sold via Sotheby's for £10 million a couple of years ago. How lovely to think that this icon of 20th century transport has its final resting place so close to that of an icon of 17th century transport.

Old Jordans is for sale off-market via Knight Frank, with a guide price of £15 million (the Mayflower Barn is included; the Ferrari isn't).

‘I assume I know what I’m going to see when asked to visit a Grade II-listed oast and barn conversion,’ says Linda Wesson, director at Hamptons. ‘I get to see a lot.

‘But I was blown away by the incredible juxtaposition and the importance of the architectural feats at Joldwynds.’

It must take a fair amount to surprise Wesson: she has more than three decades’ experience in the prime and country house market under her belt.

But there’s no doubt, the property in question, Joldwynds, really is a smorgasbord of architectural styles. ‘The property's evolution across the ages is a real treat to explore,’ adds Wesson.

On sale for £2,300,000, the 18th century Joldwynds started life as a traditional Kent oast house with two barns, but in the 1930s it was transformed by Wilfred Greene, who was Master of the Rolls at the time. Greene is believed to have commissioned architect Oliver Hill, a pupil of the Edwin Lutyens, to convert the agricultural buildings into an ‘entertainment complex’.

The current owners, both engineers, bought Joldwynds in the 1980s and have taken the property one step further. They have turned it into a fascinating family home, putting their own contemporary stamp on it along the way.

Where to kick off our tour of extraordinary four-bedroom home, located on the edge of Sandhurst, a village on the Kent-East Sussex border? The central barn seems a good place, with its original oak frame and medieval-style leaded light windows. It has been fashioned into a vast reception room with a galleried landing above, and the effect is hugely impressive: ‘cathedral-like proportions’ say Hamptons’ details, and while that’s a bit of a stretch — even Britain’s smallest cathedral could swallow the room comfortably — you can at least see what they’re driving at.

This historic part of the home has been layered with modern touches: see the huge circular window that floods the piano with natural light and the glass panel that separates the dining room and drawing room.

An arched colonnade has also been cleverly integrated thanks to a set of sliding glass doors positioned discreetly and snugly behind.

It’s in this part of the house that you’ll also find a utility room and a ‘guest bedroom suite’.

The roundel of the oast is similarly striking, featuring Portuguese tiles and a sweeping staircase. With a little imagination, this room could be reincarnated. Perhaps as a theatrical dining room with a circular table?

And now for an altogether different aesthetic: the smooth, sleek lines of the contemporary kitchen. Housed in an extension and reached via a glazed walkway, it’s home to a large central island by Leicht, integrated appliances by Miele and Quooker, and sliding glass doors on two sides. One side opens to a courtyard, while the other opens out onto the garden.

Stretching out beyond the kitchen is an indoor swimming pool ‘complex’, which knocks the socks of many others we’ve seen. It offers a space to prep food, indoor and outdoor eating and seating areas, and an ‘ingeniously-designed shower room’. It also boasts a ‘living’ roof and two walls consisting solely of sliding glass doors. On warmer days, I bet you could quite easily spend the entire day and evening here with absolutely no need to go into the main house.

Upstairs at Joldwynds, the main bedroom has a distinctly 1930s feel to it, with an Art Deco-inspired built-in bed surround. The ensuite bathroom is no less quirky, with a dark colour palette and a funky bright red bath. There are two further bedrooms (one with an ensuite bathroom) and a shower room.

Also on this first floor, more unusually, is a sitting room. With a wood burning stove, Juliet balcony, shelves packed with books, and a solid-looking desk, this looks like a cosy spot to hide away.

Joldwynds is not what you’d describe as ‘shy’ - and the colour scheme is no exception. The owners have embraced vibrant shades of red, green, and blue. It is, for the most part, about as far away from ‘greige’ as you can get.

‘The use of colour at Joldwynds is joyous. Again, not what you expect in a period conversion, but it works, the whole house feels truly unique. It's exceptional,’ says Wesson.

‘From the Portuguese tiles in the roundel to the vibrant contemporary styling throughout, this home exudes warmth and character while respecting its historic structure.’

As you might expect from engineers, design and detail are part and parcel of the most recent transformation. There’s programmable, motion-controlled lighting design by Delmatic, air con in the main bedroom, full-height, powder-coated aluminium glazed windows and doors, and a four-person lift between ground and first floor.

Outside too, no stone has been left unturned. The two-plus acres of grounds include immaculately-kept lawn, a wildflower terrace, fountain, and a pretty wooded area. The tranquility is ‘just delicious’, says Wesson.

‘No car noise, no aeroplanes – just nature for company. Joldwynds is surrounded by beautiful countryside with far-reaching southerly views, yet you're not isolated.’

The house is less than four miles from Hawkhurst, where there’s an independent cinema and a Waitrose, normally a handy barometer of an area.

In Wesson’s view, the location ticks several boxes: ‘This pocket of Kent is highly desirable and a wonderful place to live. The local food production with the artisanal wine and beer producers makes this area a gastronomic delight.

‘There's easy access to Europe, close proximity to the coast — Rye is super-close — and you're in the catchment area of Cranbrook School, one of the best grammar schools in the country.’

Joldwynds is for sale for £2,300,000 via Hamptons — see more pictures and details here.

Last night, I had far too much to drink and as a result have spent the day working and also suffering. There is often lots of talk of ageing gracefully, but I am not ageing gracefully. With every passing year, my ability to survive a hangover weakens and their length increases. I will probably still be hungover and suffering tomorrow. When you drink enough mystery cocktails to re-float a warship, that can happen.

When you do it aged 33, it will happen.

I would have preferred to spend the day not working, and not being in London, where there are endless annoying sirens and the air tastes like mistakes. I would have preferred to be somewhere nice, like West Sussex, in something that has aged gracefully, like a 5-7 bedroom Grade II-listed stone fronted humble manor house. Somewhere I can rot in peace, surrounded by nature and nice furniture.

Somewhere, incidentally, like Woodshill House, which by sheer coincidence is a 5-7 bedroom Grade II-listed stone fronted humble manor house in West Sussex. What are the chances?

It is for sale with Knight Frank for £2.85 million, which might explain why I don’t live there, as I don’t have £2.85 million. I might have done, but I spent something in that ballpark on drinks last night.

While we might both be old, Woodshill is not broken, and its insides are beautiful. I cannot say the same for me. The property can trace its origins back to the late 16th century, due to the ‘gun-stock jowl [whatever that might be], heavily weathered timbers to the northern end and the side purling roof’. The house has slowly developed from there, constructed in four phases, until Woodshill as you see it now was created.

The interiors retain plenty of that period feel, with wood-panelled walls, stone fireplaces, exposed beams and Things of That Nature. The house has been modernised in all the right areas, such as the bathrooms and the kitchen, which has been extended and now features a wonderful skylight.

Set over three floors, the property offers plenty of space, as well as a wealth of rooms including the orangery/extension, dining room, two studies, a utility room and a drawing room. There is also a self-contained detached stable annexe in the grounds.

Ah yes, the grounds, in which I wish to lie and repent for my sins. They extend to some 2.8 acres and are very fine indeed, with lots of lawned areas, planted beds, mature trees, and the aforementioned stables. There is also a paddock, a tennis court, croquet lawn, a kitchen garden and a swimming pool.

The property itself is situated on top of a hill and boasts views over the South Downs, and can be found on the outskirts of West Chiltington, just outside of Pulborough, which means there are plenty of amenities within a short driving distance.

Woodshill House is for sale with Knight Frank for £2.85 million — see more details.

What do you do once you’re a billionaire?

If you were to judge by column inches, the most common answer seems to be flying to space, stir up culture wars, meddle in politics or buying once-great sporting institutions. Newspaper headlines always deal with the outliers, though: most billionaires are quite happily snapping up Scottish castles, staying in the world’s best hotels (without worrying about the £3,000-a-night room rates), and struggling to use their means to make the world a better place. Many are still doing what made them wealthy and successful in the first place, even at an age when their contemporaries have long-since retired, since for them it’s about the joy of playing the game, not the scoreline.

But as L. P. Hartley wrote, ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ which brings us to one of the most famed billionaires of the 20^th century: the oil magnate Jean Paul Getty, a US-born tycoon who spent the last 30 years of his life in England, on an estate where a cottage he owned is up for sale at £1.95 million.

Born in 1892, Getty’s wealth — which peaked at around £20 billion, in today’s terms — is no rags-to-riches tale. The son of a lawyer who hit oil with a speculative land purchase, he grew up as a millionaire, educated at Berkeley and Oxford, travelled around pre-First World War Europe in Grand Tour style, and became friends with the future King Edward VIII. On returning to the US, his father helped him get his own start in the oil bus, and he grew an empire of over 200 companies. By the 1950s, he was generally considered to be the world’s richest man, as well as a polymath and connoisseur who spoke half a dozen languages, and could read both Latin and Ancient Greek.

It's fair to say that J. Paul Getty 'leaned in' to his wealth fame, as we’d put it today. He wrote newspaper articles and books with titles such as How to be Rich and It's Tough to Be Billionaire. Much of the advice in those works was pretty much the opposite of the Bill Gates path of using his wealth to take on the problems of the world: ‘If I were convinced that by giving away my fortune I could make a real contribution toward solving the problems of world poverty, I'd give away 99.5 percent of all I have immediately,’ Getty wrote in a 1965 in a Saturday Evening Post article entitled The World Is Mean to Millionaires, (as cited in his fascinating New York Times obituary), ‘but a hard‐eyed appraisal of the situation convinces me this is not the case.’

His belief that donating money creates an unhealthy dependency, ultimately doing more harm than good, is up for debate. What isn't in doubt, though, is that Getty was ferociously stingy even when not dealing with the problems of the global population.

Notoriously, he refused to pay the kidnappers who’d taken his grandson hostage in 1973. After being sent John Paul Getty III’s ear, he eventually contributed $2.2 million towards the $3m ransom, forcing his son John Paul Getty II to borrow money to cover the rest. Why $2.2 million? It was the maximum amount that would be tax deductible.

Even putting that aside, stories of his every day parsimony are the stuff of legend. He haggled on everything and abhorred anything he saw as waste, to the point that when answering letters he’d often scribble a response in the margin of the original missive, to save using a new sheet of paper. He even installed a pay phone in his own home, as he believed house guests were taking advantage of him by making calls while staying there.

The home in question was Sutton Place, a magnificent Tudor mansion set on a small estate on the outskirts of Guildford that Getty bought from the Duke of Sutherland (he apparently paid £60,000 for it in 1959, half what the Duke is said to have paid a four decades earlier). Though he also had homes around the world (notably Italy, California and New York) it was Sutton Place that was his home, and he filled it with things he loved — primarily paintings and women. He was married five times, and had dozens of mistresses right up until his death in his 80s. (‘It is hard to decide which Getty enjoyed more, penny-pinching or bottom-pinching,’ wrote Bevis Hillier in a piece in the Los Angeles Times).

Many of Getty’s female companions were short-lived affairs, but some ended up being housed in one of the cottages in the grounds of Sutton Place — and one of the most beautiful of those cottages is up for sale at the moment. Chestnut Cottage is an irresistible thatched cottage that is the stuff of fairytales, a dinky, two-bedroom home that looks as it has escaped from the lid of a chocolate box.

It'd take you longer to eat the chocolates than it would to look around Chestnut Cottage: downstairs, there’s a kitchen-diner plus a lounge; upstairs, two bedrooms placed on opposite sides of the landing, both of which have en-suite bathrooms. But it’s just wonderfully pretty and full of character — and the true joy of the place is beyond the front door, for the cottage is set in just under five acres of its own grounds.

We can’t help wondering how many properties in this well-heeled slice of Surrey have five acres and two bedrooms — it’s quite possibly unique. Then again, that seems fitting of a storied house on a storied estate. And frankly, if you don’t need more living space than this, it’s a simply fantastical little home — and that goes whether you’re a billionaire, or somebody who wants a big garden without the hassle of too many rooms to sweep and toilets to clean.

Chestnut Cottage is for sale via Strutt & Parker at £1.95 million — see more details.

In 2002, Alan Titchmarsh — gardener, gardening writer, radio/television presenter, novelist, bellringer, poet, polymath and all-round national treasure — and his wife, Alison, bought their much-loved Hampshire home, Grade II-listed Manor Farm House at Holybourne, near Alton, ‘not only because we wanted a Georgian house, but also because I felt that I had one more garden in me’. Since then, he has renovated the former manor house, restored and extended the outbuildings and created a wonderful four-acre garden, described in Country Life’s October 30, 2024 issue as ‘a place of endless delights and charm’.

Now that his work there is done, he and his wife plan to downsize to another Hampshire village house with a couple of acres, not only to be closer to their daughters and grandchildren, but because he feels that he still has another garden in him. Consequently, Manor Farm House has been launched onto the market through Savills in Farnham at a guide price of £3.95 million.

Designated a conservation area in 1977, the ancient village of Holybourne dates from Saxon times and is thought to derive its name from the Celtic practice of worship and burial of the dead beside streams, which were believed to have sacred powers.

According to the conservation statement, a number of waterways rise by the pond in quiet Church Lane, which feeds the small Holybourne tributary of the River Wey. Manor Farm House stands at the top of the lane, next to Holybourne’s Grade II*-listed Church of the Holy Rood with its 12th-century Norman nave and tower, 13th-century chancel and distinctive 19th-century, oak-shingled broach spire.

The late-17th-century Manor Farm House is described as ‘an imposing building in the street scene. It is built in a rich red brick and is of five bays. It has a substantial clay-peg tile-hipped roof with handsome mullioned and transomed windows. The farmyard to the north and east of the Manor Farm House is characterised by a long low range of stables and cattle byres with flint walling… The views from the public footpath into the farmyard from the north are restricted by this long range of buildings and the broach spire of the church in the background’.

Historically, Manor Farm was the demesne of the manor of Holybourne Eastbrook, the origins of which can be traced back to Domesday. Research compiled by Mr Titchmarsh reveals that the older, right-hand side of the present house (seen from the ‘dolls’-house’ front) dates from 1690 and was altered and extended in the 18th century. The double-gabled section at the back was added in 1777, presumably by the Eggar family, prominent local landowners who owned the house from 1761 to 1831.

Sitting beneath the dining room is a vaulted 16th-century wine cellar. Behind the house is a detached stone-and-brick outbuilding incorporating a 42ft party barn/theatre and a large library area with a first-floor office, Mr Titchmarsh’s writing room beneath the eaves.

The main house offers 4,768sq ft of light and airy living-space including, on the ground floor, a formal entrance hall, grand drawing room and sitting room, and a bright and cheerful kitchen/breakfast room with an Aga and bespoke painted units.

Five first-floor bedrooms include the principal bedroom suite overlooking the garden, four further bedrooms and two bath/shower rooms. Attic storage rooms on the second floor could be reconfigured to provide additional accommodation, subject to the usual consents.

‘Shabby chic’ was probably the kindest way to describe Manor Farm House when the Titchmarshes took possession 23 years ago. ‘We found woodworm and death-watch beetle and took out 48 skips of rubbish, but we respected the integrity of the house and made no structural changes,’ Mr Titchmarsh explains.

‘We then put it all back together again, replacing chipboard with floorboards, installing underfloor heating on the ground floor and in the bathrooms and decorating throughout, using bright pastel colours here and there to highlight the elegant Georgian proportions of the interior.’

Working out from the house, Mr Titchmarsh has created the all-organic gardens that are, justifiably, his pride and joy. Based on more than 60 years’ experience of gardening, ranging from his 20-odd ‘How to Garden’ books to the light-hearted Ground Force television series and more serious studies of Britain’s great gardens — as in his recent Chatsworth: The Gardens and the People Who Made Them (2023) — the gardens are a masterpiece of planning, expert planting and knowing when enough is enough.

The focal point of the ‘gardened garden’, with its more formal beds and borders, is the wide Yorkstone terrace that wraps around the house. Here, a towering terracotta figure of Humphry Repton by Jim Keeling of Whichford Pottery in Warwickshire, which overlooks the terrace garden and will remain at Manor Farm House when the Titchmarshes have gone, hints at the owner’s easy grasp of gardening history.

Steps lead down to the more formal areas, which feature a wealth of mature trees, well-stocked borders, striking topiary and spectacular water features and fountains. Neatly manicured lawns are punctuated by tree-lined paths and enticing seats and a pretty octagonal summerhouse provides useful shade.

Having acquired the house with its original two acres of overgrown garden and grounds, Mr Titchmarsh later bought (at vast expense) two adjoining acres of prime arable farmland where he created the wildflower meadow, broadcasting the seed himself by hand from a bucket. Now, thanks to the recent rains, the meadow is a glorious, joyful mass of autumn colour.

Holybourne House is for sale via Savills in Farnham.

This feature appears in the September 10, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

With wellness and physical fitness very much in vogue, family houses with exceptional sporting and recreational facilities are likely to command a premium, both now and for years to come. One such is secluded, Grade II-listed Fords Farm in Surrey, a remodelled and extended 17th-century farmhouse tucked away at the eastern edge of the village of Pirbright, six miles from Woking and just over six miles from Guildford mainline station.

It is for sale for the first time in more than 50 years with a guide price of £3.65 million, through joint agents Jonathan Brandling-Harris, co-founder of bespoke North London agents House Collective, and Joanna Cocking of Hamptons Private Office.

The intriguing 6,800sq ft house, which evolved from a modest farm dwelling into a country house full of character, comes with sporting facilities that include a tennis court, swimming pool and one of the oldest private squash courts in Britain.

Set in some 12 acres of landscaped gardens, woodland and meadows, Fords Farm has been tastefully renovated and carefully maintained by successive generations of the Stearn family, up to and including current owners Michael and Penelope Stearn.

Described by Jonathan as ‘an exquisite balance of the historical and the modern’, the main house offers elegant accommodation across three floors, including an impressive reception hall, a grand drawing room, a sitting room, a wonderful dining room.

There is also a music room, study, snug, traditional farmhouse kitchen/breakfast room, pantry, boot room, eight bedrooms and four bath/shower rooms.

Beyond the main house, an interesting mix of outbuildings includes a period granary, garages, wine and tool stores, workshops, greenhouses, two staff or guest cottages and the 1920s squash court — a piece of sporting history that was listed in a 1997 survey of early squash courts in private houses by the National Trust. Reputedly first played in the 1860s by boys at Harrow School, squash was, in its early days, the preserve of grand private houses, public schools and gentlemen’s clubs; in April 1912, a squash court went down with RMS Titanic.

Michael's eldest daughter, Emily-Jane Gladstone, who is overseeing the sale, has vivid memories of her father’s passion for the sport and hectic sessions with fellow aficionados in the 1980s and 1990s. She recalls a magical childhood spent at Fords Farm, where her favourite rooms are the atmospheric dining room at the west end of the house, with its wood-panelled walls, lead-light windows and splendid fireplace, and the vast, ‘show-stopping’ drawing room in the gabled wing at the east end. Incidentally, after a few trial runs at squash, she chose to hone her tennis skills instead, on the court at Fords Farm.

Research compiled by Michael and Penelope Stearn suggests the property derives its name from one Richard Forde or Fford, who is listed in the archives of the Surrey Musters (troop assemblies) as one of the ‘Pyrbrighte Bill-men of þe beste sorte’ in 1572/73, and as one of the ‘Purbrighte Pike-men Selected’ in 1583/84. Following Richard’s death, Fords Farm was passed down through his family.

In 1750, it was inherited by a Bridget Ford, who married Blunden Moore and lived with him at Fords Farm with their sons, William and Richard, until after his death in 1768. In 1780, she remarried, this time to George Tate, who acquired all the Moore and Ford lands in Pirbright from his stepson William.

By 1829, the Tates’ daughter, Mary, had inherited Fords Farm. She settled there with her stepbrother Richard Moore, who predeceased her and, in 1839, the property passed to his son, the Revd John Fitzmoore Halsey. He was already a major landowner, having married the heiress Sarah Halsey of Gaddesden Park near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. In 1878, his son sold Fords Farm to a local farmer, John Cherryman, who left it to his son, also John. In 1902, the younger Cherryman pulled down the older part of the house, which he rebuilt and enlarged, later selling in 1923 to the trustees of A. H. Mure, who sold it two years later to Basil Hastings Bennett.

Over the course of the next 11 years, the appearance of the house was considerably altered and it almost doubled in size; at the same time, the squash court and swimming pool were built and the tennis court laid. In 1936, the house was sold again, to one Walter Cooke, who built the two cottages near the squash court. Less than two years later, he sold to Harold Rickett, who rebuilt the wooden sheds on either side of the playroom in brick and added the aluminium greenhouses.

The small room at the south end of the house was also extended to fit the pillars supporting the upper floor. Rickett died in 1969 and, three years later, Fords Farm was sold to John Polland, who sold to Michael in 1984.

Fords Farm is for sale at £3.65 million via Hamptons and House Collective

Marlow — £6.25 million

A beautiful, unlisted home full of character is always a great find, and Glenmead — in the exclusive Quarrywood Road, Marlow — is just that. This splendid riverside villa sits in just under an acre of lovely private grounds, with 150ft of river frontage with direct access to the Thames, a deep-water mooring, a full-size tennis court and pavilion and uninterrupted views of Lock Island and Marlow Church.

It was originally built in the 1920s and altered in the 1950s, with the addition of the striking neo-Georgian stucco façade, sash windows and portico entrance.

Hamptons sold the house in 2015 to the present owners, who have modernised and improved the interior with an extensive programme of renovation that has seen the installation of a new kitchen and new bathrooms, with cosmetic redecoration throughout.

The property offers 5,168sq ft of light-filled living space on three floors, including a reception hall, four reception rooms, a study, state-of-the-art kitchen, wine cellar, domestic offices and six double bedrooms with bathrooms en suite. Amenities include a gym, games room/studio and extensive private parking.

For sale via Hamptons — see more pictures and details.

Henley-on-Thames — £850,000

A three-bedroom flat, second-floor flat on a small island in the Thames, linked by a footbridge to the centre of Henley.

The agent's description of it as a 'penthouse' might initially seem a little fanciful, but it's the entire top floor for sale, with 1125 sq ft, river views on three sides and balconies on two, and there is mooring for boats in the communal gardens.

While you're living on the water, the property is linked to land and there's a separate garage included.

For sale via Savills at £850,000 — see more details.

Wargrave — £1.9 million

You can practically stick your feet out of the door and tip your toes in the river at this seven-bedroom detached house in a village near Reading, right where the Thames meets the Loddon.

The price includes the house, gardens and even a cottage on the grounds.

The catch? As the pictures here show, the place is crying out for a refurbishment, having been in the same family for 80-odd years. But the work will surely be worth doing for a house which includes mooring, riparian rights and is close to Wargrave station, making it commutable to London.

For sale via Ballards — see more details.

The garden designer Arne Maynard is one of the most respected garden designers working in Britain today, a man whose work we've covered many times in Country Life — most recently in the case of Mounton House and Banks Fee. So when a house comes to the market with a garden that's benefited from his skills, it's natural for expectations to rise, and Hunworth Mill does not disappoint.

Tom Goodley of Strutt & Parker in Norwich is overseeing the £3.25m sale of this dreamy, Grade II*-listed converted Mill at Hunworth in the scenic Glaven Valley, 2½ miles from Holt, 14 miles from Holkham and 20 miles from Burnham Market.

Hunworth is a converted mid-18th-century watermill with an attached late-18th- or early-19th century mill house, set in 3¾ acres of lovely gardens and grounds laid out along the River Glaven by Maynard, a winner of not only a gold medal from the Chelsea Flower Show, but also a coveted 'Best in Show' award.

The mill was disused for 80 years or more and almost derelict when it was sold in 1974, although the mill workings were largely intact — so much so that it in 1982 it was used as the setting for the film The Kingfisher, starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison.

Set at the end of a long and secluded drive in one of the most beautiful parts of north Norfolk, Hunworth Mill was originally converted in the 1980s, when great care was taken to preserve and enhance its original features. A fine job has been done: the look of the place is entirely unspoilt, and even the original mill machinery is still in place within the walls.

Further modernisation has been carried out by the current owners, who have lived there for more than 20 years. During that time, they have extended the mill house and added the two-bedroom guest cottage, which has lapsed planning consent to extend by converting more of the adjoining outbuildings.

The main house offers more than 4,900sq ft of accommodation on three floors, including an entrance hall, dining room, sitting room, sun room, bespoke kitchen/breakfast room by Naked Kitchens, six bedrooms, three bathrooms, an attic and mezzanine space with potential for further accommodation.

For all that, it's the interplay between the gardens and the buildings which linger in the memory, making Hunworth Mill feel special.

Hunworth Mill is for sale via Strutt & Parker — see more pictures and details.

In folklore, mermaids (‘mere’ meaning sea and ‘maid’ meaning young woman) are sea-dwelling creatures with a human upper-body and fish-like tail, traditionally associated with seductive songs, dramatic storms and shipwrecks. Nowadays, they’re altogether more benign. Think Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Aquamarine, the 2006 teen fantasy-romance film.

Much like the sea and its contents — real and imagined — mermaids have always had a captivating allure over us, appearing in art, operas, books and, of course, on big and small screens. They even pop up in the written reports of Christopher Columbus, made while ‘exploring’ the Caribbean. The navigator, who paved the way for European colonisation of the Americas, was convinced he had seen one, but it was most likely a manatee.

Mermaids do not appear in any of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, but the author is believed to have written plenty of them in Mermaid Cottage — which is now for sale with a guide price of £1.75 million.

The three bedroom, two bathroom beachhouse, set in a breathtaking location in between the White Cliffs of Dover and St Margaret’s Bay, water practically lapping at the front door, is part of a small enclave of four properties. Bizarrely, Fleming isn’t even its most famous owner. That accolade goes to Sir Noël Coward, the singer-songwriter and playwright, whom we have to thank for Blithe Spirit and Private Lives. Coward was renowned for his wonderfully flamboyant nature, and, while living here, had his valet roll out a red carpet across the beach, every day, which he would then walk down and into the sea.

The home, built in 1929 in the Art Deco style, was once part of a thriving community. The area was also a popular holiday destination with Fleming coming down on the weekends to take stock and write. Unfortunately the Second World War dealt it a bad hand with many of the buildings badly damaged, not by the Nazis, but by the practising commandoes and Canadian forces. Thankfully, the four cottages survived unscathed.

The current owner has completely and carefully renovated and modernised the house over almost two decades — using a soothing palette of white and blues that somehow doesn’t look overly nautical (an easy trap to fall into when you’re decorating this close to the sea). Look out for the white wood kitchen with its smart gold fittings and two-part butler’s sink, the roll-top bath in the powder blue clapboard bathroom and bespoke, and handmade joinery throughout — in a matching shade of blue. Large picture windows in multiple rooms frame the utterly unique and uninterrupted view.

Outside, the same colour has been used to paint the window and door frames, and the garden gate. There’s also a separate gym and workshop, and a manageable garden, expertly landscaped by an RHS Chelsea Flower Show Gold Medal winner with hardy coastal plants.

According to the agent, Strutt & Parker, ‘St Margaret’s Bay is a sheltered haven, with a clifftop mainly in the care of the National Trust’. There is a popular café, an inn, and golf courses nearby, plus unique entertainment in the form of cross-channel swimming. France is only 21 miles away and this, apparently, is a favoured place from which to embark…

If you do decide to dip your toe into the water, make sure you keep an eye out for mermaids.

Mermaid Cottage is for sale at £1.75 million — see more pictures and details

Lavenham, which is located some 12 miles south-west of Stowmarket in Suffolk, as the crow flies, is one of the finest and best-preserved medieval villages in England.

Steven Ray of Bury-based agents David Burr is handling the sale of Grade II-listed Lavenham Hall in Lavenham Hall Road on behalf of Anthony Faulkner and his sculptor wife, Kate Denton, who moved there from London in 2009.

Mr Ray quotes a guide price of £2.75m for the impressive, seven-bedroom country house, described in its listing as ‘a mainly 16th–17th century timber-framed and plastered building considerably altered in the 18th century and later, [which] stands to the west of the original hall, the home of the de Vere family’, the ruins of which can be seen in part of the garden next to the lake.

Ms Denton, a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors since 1993, has worked as a sculptor for more than 40 years, producing both her own creative pieces, as well as private and public commissions.

Although she loves Lavenham Hall, she admits that it was its 10,000sq ft range of outbuildings, which now house her studio, a bespoke exhibition gallery and premises where she teaches sculpture, that sealed the deal for her.

She has also established a sculpture garden within the 4¾ acres of beautifully maintained grounds, which feature well-placed terracing, sweeping lawns, a meadow, specimen trees and the impressive lake.

Although located near the centre of the village, Lavenham Hall enjoys a parkland setting that harks back to the days when it served as a hunting lodge used by the Earls of Oxford.

The 5,925sq ft house was extended and altered in the 19th century by William Biddell, who added the panelling and the square window in the dining room. The window is one of the house's more remarkable no ordinary window: the window was salvaged from HMS Foudroyant, which served a spell as Lord Nelson’s flagship during the Napoleonic Wars.

The drawing room overlooks the grounds and lake in one direction and the tower of St Peter and St Paul’s church in the other; the study is thought to have been the ‘pay office’ from when Lavenham Hall was a 600-acre farm; the first and second floors offer a variety of bedroom suites with splendid views over the grounds.

Lavenham itself is full of history — and some of the quirkiest properties in Britain, not least the 'Crooked House' on Lavenham High Street, whose owners Country Life interviewed a couple of years ago.

The manor of Lavenham was held in 1086 by Aubrey de Vere, an ancestor of the Earls of Oxford, in whose family it remained until 1604. In the 15th and 16th centuries, a booming wool trade brought enormous wealth to Lavenham, until a flood of cheaper, more fashionable European imports led to its decline.

Happily, later generations failed to modernise many of its magnificent timber-frame buildings, thereby preserving them for today’s owners to enjoy.

Lavenham Hall is for sale at £2.75 million — see more pictures and details.

It’s always a joy to come across a manor with a great story to tell, and the enchanting Hempnalls Hall is just such a place, with a millennium of history that touches upon everyone from Henry V to Geoffrey Chaucer to Anne of Cleves. This moated manor house in mid Suffolk, for sale for the first time in 23 years, is a Grade II-listed dwelling is set in 10 acres of gardens, woodland, paddocks and flower meadows, three-quarters of a mile from the ancient village of Cotton and seven miles north of Stowmarket. Approached down the long, winding Willow Lane, Hempnalls Hall stands on a rectangular wooded island surrounded by a medieval moat thought to date from the 12th or 13th century.

Matthew Cutting of Jackson-Stops in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, quotes a guide price of £1.95 million.

The manor has been here for a thousand years, but the home which stands today is a relative baby, at a little over four centuries old. It’s a late-16th-century manor house built, according to its Historic England listing, on two storeys with an attic and a small, 1½-storey rear wing, which replaced an earlier range that predated the present main house.

Today’s Hempnalls Hall has colour-washed rendered walls under a tiled roof, with high ceilings throughout and more than 3,500sq ft of light and cheerful living space on three floors, including entrance and rear halls, three reception rooms, a large kitchen/breakfast room, five bedrooms and three bath/shower rooms.

A range of outbuildings includes a one-bedroom coach-house annexe, a party barn, games room, swimming pool, garaging, a further large barn, stabling and stores.

Hempnalls Hall boasts a fine, 16th-century, crow-stepped red-brick gable end to the right, with a plain-tiled roof and a left gable end of a later date. Timber-frame and mainly plastered, the front elevation boasts fine panelled plasterwork of the 1980s.

A couple of generations ago, such delights would have been hard to imagine. The house fell into a woeful state after the Second World War, but was substantially restored in the 1980s, and the current owners — who have been here since the 1990s — continued those fine efforts.

A well-researched history of the site compiled by the present owners traces Hempnalls’ origins to Domesday, when the manor of Caldecota was held by Robert Malet. By 1367, it was held by the knightly de Hemenhale family, from whom the present house takes its name. Hempnalls Hall was probably the birthplace in 1396 of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who served in Henry V’s campaigns against France. William served for many years, became a trusted general of Henry VI and married Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter.

In the mid 1400s, the manor was acquired by Sir John Fastolf of Caister Castle, model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who spent a fortune on the upkeep of the estate and manor house. Fastolf was succeeded at Hempnalls by his cousin and rival, Sir John Paston, author of some of the Paston Letters, several of which were reputedly ‘written at Hempnalls by candlelight’.

In the early 16th century, Hempnalls was granted to Henry VIII’s brother-in-law, Sir Charles Brandon, who stripped out the manor house, removing tiles and other materials for use in his palace at Westhorpe near Bury St Edmunds.

The dilapidated manor eventually became part of Henry VIII’s generous divorce settlement in favour of Anne of Cleves, who rented out the house and surrounding farmland. By 1606, the manor had passed to the Clere family who probably built the present hall.

In the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, Hempnalls was owned successively by the Wroth, Goate, Clarke and Matthew families, before being acquired in 1828 by Edward Venn, a London tea broker. He was succeeded by his son, also Edward, and then his grandson, Gerard, who died in 1877, after which the estate was held by trustees, who, in July 1912, offered Hempnalls Hall for sale with barns, stables, farm buildings and 196 acres of arable land. It was bought by the sitting tenant, Charles Le Grice, and sold again in July 1929 by order of Le Grice’s mortgagees.

After the Second World War, the manor house became increasingly derelict and was used as a grain store for 30 years, until successive owners in the 1970s and 1980s undertook an extensive programme of restoration. The current owners acquired the property in the 1990s and have since continued the restoration of the house and grounds.

Hempnalls Hall is for sale via Jackson-Stops at £1.95 million — see more pictures and details.

On the south coast of Hampshire, Jack Newland of Knight Frank in Lymington is handling the sale of Grade II-listed Little Ashton on Walhampton Hill. This landmark location overlooks the Solent, half a mile from the centre of the picturesque yachting town and within the New Forest National Park, with its miles of walks and cycle tracks.

Mr Newland quotes a guide price of £2.95m for the striking Georgian Little Ashton, built in 1805 for one Mr Wickenden, the owner of Lymington’s Brickfield clay pits, which provided all the bricks for Lymington before the bridge linking the town with Walhampton was completed.

Previously known as Riverside, The Belvedere and then Little Ashton (its then owner lived at Great Ashton, Wiltshire), the house was one of the first to be listed in the area, in October 1959.

Owned by the same family for the past 56 years and comprehensively renovated in 2011, the house stands in more than an acre of gardens and orchard within grounds that extend into ancient woodland.

The classic Georgian façade has a central porticoed entrance with bay windows to either side. Well-proportioned rooms with high ceilings, large sash windows and pale oak flooring combine to create a wonderfully light interior.

There is 3,132sq ft of accommodation on three floors with cellars below and includes an elegant drawing room, a dining room/study, large kitchen/breakfast room, four/five bedrooms and four bath/shower rooms.

To the rear of the house is a separate two-bedroom cottage, converted from the original coach house, stable and hayloft in 2009, behind which are a garden office and boat shed.

From the early 19th century, Lymington had a thriving shipbuilding industry, largely associated with Thomas Inman, the builder of the schooner Alarm, which famously raced the American yacht America in the 1851 America’s Cup.

Still ideally located for sailors, Lymington offers an excellent range of clubs, moorings and marinas, all of which provide unrivalled access to the Solent.

Little Ashton is for sale via Knight Frank at £2.95m — see more pictures and details.

The New Forest estate formerly owned by one of Britain's most flamboyant billionaires has come to the market for the second time in six years.

Newtown Park is a classically beautiful Grade II*-listed Georgian manor house sitting in 405 acres of woodland and parkland just a few minutes from Lymington, on the edge of the New Forest. It was the main UK residence of Charles Burnett III, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 2018.

Burnett was heir to a family retail empire with interests in shops including Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason, but he was better known for his lavish lifestyle and eccentricity than his business life. A self-avowed adrenaline junkie, he held — and still holds — the world record for the fastest steam-powered vehicle, achieved in 2009 by hitting 139.8mph in a car officially named 'Inspiration', but affectionately dubbed 'The World's Fastest Kettle'. Mixing work and play was seemingly in his blood: his uncle was the late British-Canadian billionaire Galen Weston, a man who both founded a food distribution empire and played polo with King Charles.

All this seems a little incongruous alongside the quietly secluded and truly idyllic Newton Park, close to both the charming town of Lymington and the south coast. In Burnett's time here, though, Newton Park catered to all sides of his personality: the 11-bedroom home would ring out with music and laughter from the parties he threw here when he was home. And it's hard to imagine a better spot for entertaining.

The parties didn't always make him popular with the neighbours — and especially not at his birthday celebration in 2007, when a Harvard plane swooped over the property and mock bombs exploded in the grounds, while off-duty soldiers re-enacted battles from the Falklands War.

Burnett was something of a war fanatic — you've probably guessed that from the last paragraph — and had an extensive collection of tanks, planes, speedboats and fast cars, several of which he kept in the three hangers within the grounds at Newtown Park. If you're thinking of bringing your own aircraft, it's an ideal house: there is a private grass airstrip on site, and a designated helicopter landing area on the lawn.

The house was built in around 1790, according to its listing, and barring a few 20th century additions is has all the graceful elegance of the the Georgian era. It is classically proportioned and symmetrical with stuccoed elevations and sash windows. Views from the main house stretch towards the Solent and across the formal lawns to open paddocks and ancient oaks.

Inside there are more bathrooms — 12 — than there are bedrooms (11), a large kitchen, an orangery at the back that opens onto the gardens, and wine cellar.

Perhaps our favourite element, however, is the circular lookout room beneath the dome at the top of the house, offering panoramic views across Hampshire.

There are three more properties in the grounds included in the price: the Old Rectory, North Lodge and Keeper's Cottage. On top of this, there is also an estate office, garages, a swimming pool, tennis courts and a walled garden.

In 2018, Burnett died at the age of 61 in tragic circumstances, when a helicopter he was travelling in crashed in New Mexico, killing five people. The sole survivor was Burnett's long-term partner, Andra Cobb. Cobb also lost her father in the accident.

Shortly after the horrific accident, Newtown Park estate was sold to the current owners for £19,000,000. Six years later the new owners have decided to move on, with Sotheby's International Realty listing the estate for 'offers over' £16,500,000. The lower price reflects changes in the market in recent years — everything from post-Brexit concerns to non-dom taxation and the UK's general economic growth have made this end of the market cautious — but Sotheby's Alex Collins is confident of a sale.

'We feel the house in the current market is worth well in excess of £16,500,000, due to the current market conditions and climate we wanted to price the house competitively to garner interest,' Collins tells Country Life. 'There are few options like this in the New Forest and to be able to have a sizeable country estate which is completely private within a five-mile drive of Lymington is unique,' he adds.

His confidence seems well-placed: there are already three parties bidding on the property. Those interested should move quickly.

The Newton Park estate is for sale at £16.5 million — see more pictures and details at United Kingdom Sotheby's International Realty.

Once owned by the crown, Hunton Manor in Sutton Scotney, just outside Winchester, is first mentioned in a charter of Edward The Elder, son of Alfred the Great. It then belonged to the Bishop of Winchester and received mentions in the Domesday Book and the Norman Distribution. In 1309 it was under the ownership of Edward II who gave it to his son-in-law, Ralph Monthermer. It remained, for almost 250 years, owned by those who had married into, or were, royalty. And now you can own it too.

On the market with Savills with a guide price of £14,000,000, the early 18th century Grade II listed manor house was restored and extended in the 20th century by the architect Raymond Erith, who was also responsible for doing up Downing Street in that same period. You can almost imagine him hurrying down the winding driveway, eager to make haste from Hampshire to his next appointment in the capital to tend to the Prime Minister’s kitchen.

The manor’s Georgian architecture spans all four floors, with tall ceilings, sweeping 12 and 15-panel sash windows, oak panelling, ornate fireplaces and square rooms that are emblematic of the period.

The cantilevered spiral staircase, however, is the highlight of this property — and it is magnificent to look at, bringing to mind elegant entrances to grand parties, hosted in the manor’s many social rooms.

With ten bedrooms, seven bathrooms and a total of over 17 acres, Hunton Manor has plenty hosting capability. The two offices and meeting room allow for numerous working opportunities, while the adjoining bedroom flat and separate two bedroom and one bedroom cottages mean hosting guests would be simple and unobtrusive. All the better if they are tennis fans, as the estate also boasts a tennis court as well as a gorgeous indoor swimming pool with folding doors that open onto the garden.

This comes furnished with a spa complex, jacuzzi and bar. Better still if your guests are fond of riding, as the property also includes a manège and a stable yard with 4 loose boxes and tack room. It also comes with parkland including ancient Wellingtonia trees and its garden features a rose garden, ornamental cherry walk and picturesque trellised summerhouse.

It gives Saltburn vibes, but for all the right reasons.

Hunton Manor is for sale at £14,000,000 via Savills — see more pictures and information.

When the weather gets this hot, it can start to play tricks on your mind. It can make you forget how to do your job. It can make you accidentally drink too much beer in a pub garden. It can make you think about buying a new house. Not a ‘new’ house, of course, but a run-down castle on the Isle of Wight.

I am blaming the heat on my decision to further investigate the sale of Norris Castle Estate on the Isle of Wight. It’s with Savills for £3 million, and I would like to buy it. Do I have £3 million? I do not. Do I know how to restore a castle and manage an estate of some 225 acres? Also no.

But the sun is telling me those are small issues. Perhaps you might feel the same. It’s not like a castle on the Isle of Wight, designed by James Wyatt and built in the 1790s comes up for sale every day.

As mentioned, it comes with 225 acres of grounds and parkland, believed to have been designed by Humphry Repton. It's the only Grade I-Listed landscape on the island. The whole estate is a veritable who’s who of architectural and horticultural excellence.

Along with the castle, the estate also comes with a very cool Grade II-listed bathing house, as well as a landing house.

It’s also in a prime location on the Isle of Wight. Osborne House, the home of Queen Victoria, is next door, while the East Cowes ferry is only a mile away. Views of the Solent come as standard.

I could fix Norris Castle. I could return it to its former glory. Maybe you could too.

Norris Castle Estate is for sale with Savills for £3 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

For sale at a guide price of £10 million through Ed Cunningham of Knight Frank and Phillippa Dalby-Welsh of Savills, the secluded, Grade II-listed Old Rectory at Tunworth, five miles from Basingstoke, sits in 27 Arcadian acres near this ancient downland hamlet, surrounded by the farms and woodland of the Herriard estate. Its private location ensures that the elegant former rectory can neither see nor hear commuter traffic heading for busy Basingstoke station, nor the nearby M3 motorway, which provides quick and efficient access to London, Heathrow and Gatwick.

The former rectory, the oldest part of which dates from the Middle Ages, was substantially altered in the early 18th century and again in Victorian times, before being sold by the Church in 1917. The new owner was a prominent Yorkshire landowner who brought with him four fine Adam fireplaces to be installed in the main reception rooms. In 1952, he sold the Old Rectory to Col the Hon Julian Berry, youngest son of William Berry, 1st Viscount Camrose, owner of The Daily Telegraph and nearby Hackwood Park.

The medieval core of the main house, which offers 10,300sq ft of accommodation on three floors, includes the former dining room and sitting room, now part of the kitchen/diner; the rest is mainly Queen Anne and comprises the drawing room, study, family room, various utilities, a wine store, cellar, seven bedrooms and five bathrooms. Following her husband’s death in 1988, Mrs Berry added the porch and the orangery, which looks out across the rear gardens to the Herriard estate. Further accommodation is now available in the two-bedroom Garden Cottage and the converted one-bedroom Little Barn.

Hampshire’s famous gardens — from the azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias of the Rothschild’s New Forest estate at Exbury, near Beaulieu, to the restored Gertrude Jekyll gardens at Upton Grey Manor, a mile from Tunworth — are associated with some of the great names in garden history.

The Old Rectory itself boasts a fine gardening tradition that was embraced by Col Berry’s daughter and successor, Caroline Wagg, whose husband’s great-aunt Eliza Wagg helped found the National Garden Scheme in the 1920s. Mrs Wagg loved the ‘reposeful quality of Old Rectory’s formal gardens where green is the predominant colour’.

Green is also the ethos of the present owners, who bought the Old Rectory from Mrs Wagg in 2012. Since then, they have significantly improved the interior, reconfiguring and renovating the kitchen, dining room and sitting room to create a central, open-plan living space; installing a new ventilation and heat-recovery system that ensures excellent air quality throughout this busy area and enhances the energy efficiency of the house; fitting a new biological filtration system in the indoor pool to remove the need for chemicals; and installing Ethernet hard-wire throughout the house to provide greater speed, security and stability than standard Wi-Fi.

A similar approach has been adopted throughout the Old Rectory’s magical gardens and grounds, where the entirety has been converted to organic practices, with no chemicals used in the past two years. Remedial work has been done to established hedges and trees, with beds redesigned and replanted. A new treehouse and children’s adventure course, made from natural and recycled materials, has been built to the west of the house, with planning consent obtained for the creation of a swimming lake.

The Old Rectory is for sale with Savills and Knight Frank for £10 million.

It is somewhat telling that I am no longer surprised by homes that shouldn’t be homes. I suppose it comes with the territory of talking to agents and telling them that I would like to write about ‘some weird stuff’. We all enjoy the idea of a house with history, both in its bricks and owners, but we also enjoy looking at water towers and the like and wondering what it would be like to live in one.

So, to Suffolk, where Savills have a water tower, known as The Water Tower, for sale for £2.75 million. I am from Suffolk, and I have been to Aldeburgh, where the Water Tower is, and I have seen it. But now I get to see inside, and so do you.

Priors Hill Road is probably the nicest street in Aldeburgh, which is itself one of Suffolk’s nicest seaside towns. Not only are you already on a hill, you are also in a water tower, so you truly have the opportunity to lord it over everyone. Or just take in the nice views of the seaside.

The Water Tower was converted into a home in 2017, before which it was a water tower. It offers six bedrooms, four bathrooms and five reception rooms over six floors (eight if you include the terrace and the basement), but thankfully there is a lift.

The ground floor has been extended and enhanced to create a large kitchen/dining room space, a separate sitting room and two bedrooms, meaning you can live entirely on the ground floor, if you so wish. Everything is sleek and modern, combining the building’s Victorian past with contemporary amenities to create a comfortable entertaining and living space.

But where’s the fun in owning a water tower (or, indeed, The Water Tower), if you don’t go up. As you ascend, you will find more bedrooms (thankfully with a bathroom on each floor), as well as a further drawing room (second floor) and studio space (sixth floor).

There’s something quite charming about the modular living provided by a water tower house. Fun, exciting, and well designed, it’s also always pleasing to see old buildings being given a second chance. And, in Aldeburgh, where things can be a bit ‘the same’, it stands out in more ways than one.

The Water Tower is for sale with Savills for £2.75 million. For more information and pictures, click here

Suffolk — £4,750,000

Southwold in Suffolk is not usually known as a place of modernity, but 7 Mill Lane is more than happy to buck that trend, while occupying a prime position in one of Britain's best seaside towns.

Built in 2007, with substantial updates in 2022, this oak-framed home offers eight bedrooms and all the top amenities a seaside luxury home could need.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Essex — £10,500,000

An entire eight acres and an exceptional home, within six miles of the City of London? Surely it's not possible.

It is possible at Holmehurst, a 10-bedroom Victorian Gothic masterpiece in Epping Forest. Glorious interiors are matched with spacious grounds and a fascinating history.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Norfolk — £1,700,000

To say Brandiston Hall is one of the finest country homes in East Anglia would be doing it a disservice. Listed Grade II, with 17th century origins, the property offers six bedrooms and 8.7 acres of glorious gardens. The architectural detailing throughout is second-to-none.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cambridgeshire — £5,500,000

A spacious Grade II-listed Georgian country house, Eye Hall is everything you could ever want from an East Anglian home. Approached via a sweeping tree-lined drive, the property offers five bedrooms in the main house, as well as 23 acres of gardens and grounds, a heated swimming pool, entertaining barn, and holiday-cottage business. All finished to a ludicrously high standard.

For sale with Tim Phillips. See more pictures and details for this property.

Norfolk — £2,750,000

The Old Rectory is the jewel in a crown of 40 undulating acres of Norfolk parkland. Listed Grade II, the property offers about 7,000sq ft of living space over two floors, and is ideal for those with equestrian interests. Major prizes for the elegant loggia that sits on the side of the house.

For sale with Strutt & Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

There must be quite a lot of pressure if you are to own and live in the former home of a famous person. If you were to purchase the house where Stanley Kubrick lived, there would be an expectation to at least watch good films while you were there. At Robert Plant’s Welsh retreat, only the best music and singing in the shower. If you were to take on Graham Norton’s old gaff in East London, an urge to present a radio show perhaps.

In Cambridgeshire, the current owners of The Manor House must surely be good gardeners. After all, the Manor House is the former home of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, arguably one of the greatest horticulturists of all time. The property is for sale with Savills for £1.5 million.

Situated in the elegant village of Fenstanton, north-west of Cambridge, the Manor House is a grade II*-listed home of four bedrooms set over three floors. It is everything you would expect a former village home of Capability Brown to be, with lots of nice modern touches to make life a little easier.

Period character and contemporary charm combine behind the black-and-white façade and pitched roof to create an elegant family home throughout. Come for the double-plank front door, the fleur-de-lys hinges, the exposed beams and fireplaces; stay for the Plain English kitchen and the astonishing contemporary orangery.

But that’s not all, the property also comes with a converted barn within its grounds, which is currently in use as a home office, but is easily large enough to be used as ancillary accommodation or as an art studio. Or anything else really.

And, of course, there is the garden. How does the present day Manor House live up to its historic past? Very well indeed. The gardens extend to just under half an acre, but are pristine, with well-stocked shrubs, trees, lawns and hedges you could set your watch to. There are two mature apple trees, which it is believed were planted by Capability Brown himself. Looking around, I feel that great scion of garden design would certainly be pleased.

'Owning the Manor House has been a privilege and a complete joy,' says current owner Nigel Ferrier. 'There are very few opportunities in life to own a home with such character and provenance. We have enjoyed the restoration of all the original features which now add to the relaxed feel of the property. The gardens have given us immense pleasure, and we never tire of sitting in the shade of one of the apple trees that Brown planted.'

Neither would we Nigel, neither would we.

The Manor House is for sale with Savills for £1.5 million. For more information and pictures, click here

If this is your first time here, welcome. If it’s not, then it will be no surprise that we are once again writing about a house that was once a chapel but is now, as just mentioned, a house.

It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it is about the chapel conversion that I find so enchanting, considering that I am not, by any definition, a religious man. I think it’s primarily the combination of the modern with the ancient, and the high ceilings. Induction hobs and stained glass. I do not ask for much.

Today’s edition is this sublime example from Bramdean in Hampshire. For sale with Carter Jonas for £1.395 million, Woodlands Chapel was originally built in 1889 and was a rural chapel under the Diocese of Portsmouth until 1982. It is now a very cool family home of four bedrooms.

It’s got all the ecclesiastical hits — brick and flint elevations, stained glass windows and a bell tower. It also has a Neptune fitted kitchen with granite worktops. I would be in heaven (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Set over two floors, the majority of the home gives way to the double-height dining/sitting room, which I think we can all agree is a pretty terrific use of space. There is also a separate garden room, study/bedroom and the kitchen. Three bedrooms occupy the first floor.

A lot of credit should be given to the current owners, who have found a tremendous balance between the modern and the traditional aspects of this house. It has retained so much character, and yet looks so liveable.

Further credit goes to the fabulous work on the garden, which includes lawned areas, raised beds and well-stocked borders bursting with colour, and lots of terraced areas perfect for al fresco dining and entertaining.

Situated in the South Downs National Park, the only thing more impressive than Woodlands Chapel is perhaps the surrounding scenery in this most desirable part of southern England. Praise be.

Woodlands is for sale with Carter Jonas for £1.395 million. For more information and pictures, click here

There is no doubt that Laverstoke Park in Hampshire is one of southern England’s finest country estates. It stands on high ground overlooking the farms and ancient woodlands of the rolling Hampshire Downs, two miles from the village of Overton and close to the source of the River Test, which flows south-westwards through the estate parkland.

The undisputed sale of the year so far is being handled by Crispin Holborow of Savills and Will Matthews of Knight Frank, who quote a guide price of £58 million for the 1,835-acre estate, either as a whole or in up to four lots.

Lot 1a, comprising the immaculate, Grade II*-listed, 11-bedroom Laverstoke Park House, set in 279 acres of Grade II-listed parkland, with three integral flats, an indoor swimming pool, indoor tennis and squash courts, six estate houses and cottages, and 1½ miles of double-bank fishing on the upper reaches of the Test, is on offer at £32m.

Lot 1b, Home Farm, at £3m, is a charming, brick-and-flint farmhouse set in two acres of gardens and grounds away from the main house, with an extensive range of traditional farm and estate buildings with lapsed planning consent for conversion to 10 residential dwellings.

Lot 2, Turrill Hill Farm, for sale at £15m, comprises three farm cottages, a range of traditional livestock buildings and 826 acres of organic farmland, including 607 acres of arable and 219 acres of pasture. A further 182 acres of mainly mature native woodland, historically the setting for an exceptional driven pheasant and partridge shoot, has been enjoyed by the current owners on an informal basis, but could be reinstated to provide some exciting and challenging drives. There is also scope to build an additional main house.

Lot 3, Berrydown Farm, on offer at £8m, comprises a traditional, four-bedroom, brick-and-flint farmhouse, six cottages and a range of farm buildings including a milking parlour, set in some 433 acres of organic arable and pasture; a further 64 acres of woodland has the potential to create a driven pheasant shoot.

The ancient parish of Laverstoke is described in A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 4 (1911) as ‘a long narrow strip of land 6 miles long and not more than a mile in breadth, stretching from the Port Way, leading from Silchester to Salisbury in the north, to the main road from Stockbridge to Basingstoke in the south, and bounded on the east by Overton, and on the west by Whitchurch and Freefolk. Through the centre of the parish from east to west flows the River Test’.

Owned from medieval times until the Dissolution by the Benedictine Hyde Abbey near Winchester, the manor of Laverstoke was sold by the Crown in 1539 to Richard Andrews of the neighbouring Freefolk estate. Laverstoke later passed from the Trott family to the Stewkleys and the Schuckburghs, before being sold in 1754 to James Dawkins.

Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which deprived French Huguenots of religious and civil rights, Henri de Portal fled France as a child, reputedly concealed by his nurse in a wine cask on board a fishing boat, which landed him in Southampton, where many French refugees were employed in the art of paper-making. The first of the Portal family to settle in Hampshire, Henri established the paper mill at Laverstoke in 1719 and, following his success at pioneering the use of the watermark in paper currency for the Bank of England, bought Freefolk Manor in 1747. In 1759, his son Joseph bought Laverstoke from James Dawkins, thereby uniting the two estates, as Richard Andrews had done in 1539.

Following Joseph’s death in 1793, his eldest son, Harry, a captain in the 10th Hussars, built the present Laverstoke House to the designs of fashionable country-house architect Joseph Bonomi the Elder in 1798. The house was remodelled in the mid 19th century by Hampshire grandee Melville Portal, who, according to Bateman’s The Great Landowners of Britain and Ireland, ‘had 10,966 acres in Hampshire worth £10,922 per annum’. Jane Austen and her family were near neighbours of the Portals and two of her brother Edward’s sons married Portal daughters.

Paper-making ceased at Laverstoke Mill in 1963, having transferred to the more modern Overton Mill, established by the Portals in 1922. In 1995, the Portals’ business, including Laverstoke, was acquired by De La Rue. A year later, Laverstoke House was sold with its surrounding 530 acres of parkland and farmland to former Formula 1 racing driver Jody Scheckter, who won the World Championship with Ferrari in 1979.

In the course of the next 29 years, Scheckter invested heavily in the estate, acquiring surrounding farms and establishing the fine sporting and organic farming operation that exists today. He and his wife, Clare, also embarked on a major restoration of Laverstoke House, the focal point of which is the impressive southern façade with its four-columned Ionic portico added by Melville Portal, together with a campanile water tower and less formal additions to the north front.

Joseph Bonomi worked as a draughtsman with Robert Adam before becoming an architect in his own right and Adam’s influence at Laverstoke is evident throughout the Georgian part of the house. The main doors open onto the flagstone-floored entrance hall, which leads through to the flamboyant, double-height reception hall, with its impressive imperial staircase.

The main suite of reception rooms, all of which retain their Adam-style decoration and are accessed from the reception hall, include the Summer Dining Room, the focal point of the interior, with three arched windows leading to the southern terrace. Five tall sash windows in the Yellow Morning Room offer lovely views to the south and east; the spacious library has a secret bookcase that links through to the Summer Dining Room; the formal dining room, to the north of the reception hall, is a versatile entertaining space; and the comfortable study to the east of the library has pleasant westerly views.

Wood-panelled doors lead to the dramatic inner courtyard, which was incorporated into the main house by the current owners and can accommodate up to 70 guests for dinner. To the east of the courtyard is the beautifully fitted, open-plan family kitchen, which has direct access to the formal dining room; a corridor leads to a separate commercial kitchen. The ballroom lies to the north-west of the inner courtyard, beyond which is the Edwardian stained-glass gallery, which includes three original stained-glass windows, each honouring a member of the Portal family. The 11 bedrooms, 10 of which are en suite, are spread across the first and second floors.

Sport and fitness are part and parcel of life at Laverstoke Park, where the creation of the spectacular indoor leisure complex has extended the built space of Laverstoke House from 28,093sq ft to 48,663sq ft. Along-side the ballroom is a dual-aspect gym, which leads through to the magnificent orangery, where the swimming pool is housed under a barrel glass roof: here, on a scorching summer’s day, 20 sets of arched windows can be opened to bring in the country air.

Laverstoke Park is for sale with Savills and Knight Frank as a whole for £58 million, or in lots. Click the links for further information and pictures.

Charlie Graham-Wood of Sowerbys in Norwich is handling the sale of the pristine Tasburgh Hall estate in south-east Norfolk, an imposing red-brick, neo-Jacobean country house set in 23 acres of landscaped formal gardens, parkland and woodland bounded by the River Tas, eight miles south of Norwich and a mile west of the ancient village of Tasburgh.

He quotes a guide price of £3.1 million for the estate, comprising the painstakingly restored, late-19th-century manor house, which is unlisted and offers luxurious accommodation on three floors, including six grand reception rooms, seven bedrooms, a guest and leisure wing, plus outbuildings, a two-bedroom gatehouse and lake.

Tasburgh Hall stands on the site of an earlier, 17th-century house known as Tasburgh Lodge, which, according to White’s Directory of Norfolk 1836, was the ‘pleasant seat’ of Gen William Gwyn, a one-legged veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who bought the estate in 1815.

Sometime in about 1880, the estate was acquired by Edward Johnson, son of John Johnson of St Osyth Priory in Essex. Between 1885 and 1890, Philip Berney Ficklin, scion of a distinguished Norfolk family, replaced the lodge with the present Tasburgh Hall. A serious art collector, philanthropist and a generous host, he extended the house considerably, adding a gatehouse and a ballroom.

During the Second World War, the Hall was taken over by the army and later became a Buddhist centre, before being sold to four families who lived there in separate dwellings.

In 2007, Tasburgh Hall was acquired by the current owners, who embarked on a massive 15-year project to bring it back to a single private home of great distinction. During that time, the hall has been renovated down to the smallest detail, with the installation of elaborate plaster mouldings, gilded radiators, oak and stone flooring, luxury designer bathroom fittings and a bespoke Clive Christian-designed kitchen.

The gardens have been enhanced by the planting of specimen trees and topiary, the creation of a stocked lake and the addition of two Hartley Botanic greenhouses and a cart lodge.

Tasburgh Hall is for sale with Sowerbys for £3.1 million. For more information and pictures, click here

Some 10 miles north-west of Norwich and 2½ miles from the medieval market town of Reepham, Ben Rivett of Savills in Norwich has overseen the launch — at a guide price of £1.7m — of handsome, Grade II-listed Brandiston Hall, set in eight acres of wonderful gardens and grounds on the edge of Brandiston village.

It boasts 17th-century origins with later remodelling in the 19th century and, for Mr Rivett, ‘is a house that really fills the eye, with the approach through the trees revealing the striking architectural detail of castellated parapets, mullions and shaped gables, likely influenced by the nearby great houses of Heydon and Blickling’.

For the past 25 years or more, the hall has been the cherished family home of the current vendor, a former director of ITV, who, over the years, has sensitively renovated the house, which provides some 6,000sq ft of easily managed living space on two main floors, including an entrance hall, four reception rooms, a kitchen/breakfast room, utility and boot room, six double bedrooms and four bath/shower rooms; attic rooms above have potential for conversion to further accommodation.

Outside, a range of traditional outbuildings includes the original stable block, a studio, garaging and store rooms.

Approached off a quiet country lane through wooden posts framed with wrought-iron park fencing, the gravelled drive meanders through woodland before opening up to a fine view of the house.

The maturity of the grounds ensures maximum privacy, with the sunken Victorian water garden one of the highlights. Expanses of lawn surround the house, blending into mixed broadleaf woodland to the south, with paths leading through a private pathway to St Nicholas Church. Formal lawns to the east of the hall are framed with clipped yew and provide a charming view of the house.

Within the grounds are an orchard, a kitchen garden, greenhouse and lawned areas divided by hedging, with obvious locations for a tennis court and swimming pool. To the north and west are large paddocks, dotted with some fine, ancient trees that enhance the timeless feel of Brandiston Hall.

Brandiston Hall is for sale with Savills for £1.7 million. For more information and pictures, click here

In 1930, William van Alen wanted to design the tallest building in the world. His problem was that H. Craig Severance also wanted to build the tallest building in the world. Van Alen was the architect of the Chrysler building, while Severance was in charge of 40 Wall Street. How to win?

What van Alen did was hide the spire of the Chrysler building inside the crown of the building, and then wait until 40 Wall Street was finished. For a month, Severance’s building was the tallest, until van Alen revealed his spire, and victory was his.

I assume that something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, took place on the mean streets of Cliff Hill in Gorleston. For number 24 on this street is just a bit taller than all the other period homes that flank it, courtesy of this magnificent lookout on its roof. It is for sale with Sowerbys for £550,000.

More homes should have lookouts, if you ask me. How else are you to appreciate a view, or be able to see your enemies approaching from afar? How else are you supposed to enjoy a cup of tea while looking down on your pathetic neighbours? All of these are very reasonable things to consider.

Number 24 Cliff Hill is listed Grade II and dates back to the 1850s, and is very much of the rich Victorian seaside tradition. Set over three floors (four floors, if you include the lookout), the property offers five bedrooms and bags of character.

Highlights include the first floor sitting room, to maximise sea views, the garden room, the snug and of course the lookout itself. Plenty of period features remain, making this an elegant home in one of Norfolk’s better seaside towns.

But that’s not all. The property comes with a separate two-storey accommodation space, that could serve a variety of uses, a basement and a very well planted and spacious garden to the rear. Gorleston itself offers plenty in the way of things to do, should you be tempted to leave your lookout.

24, Cliff Hill, is for sale with Sowerbys for £550,000. For more information and pictures, click here

On the Hampshire end of the South Downs is Lyewood House in Ropley, a village five miles from the Georgian town of Alresford. It’s on the market with George Clarendon of Knight Frank in Winchester for £2.95m. Enjoying an elevated position, the Victorian six-bedroom house lies at the end of a long gravel drive and is surrounded by its own gardens and open fields.

Within its 3½ acres is an attractive walled garden where the current owners have installed an outdoor heated swimming pool sheltered from the wind. With its adjoining pool house, the area makes for a fantastic entertaining space during the summer months. Along the south-facing wall is a large greenhouse and potting shed — a perfect spot for instilling an interest in growing plants and vegetables in young minds.

To the front of the house is a terrace leading to lawned areas with mature trees, a flint folly and a summerhouse. A paddock lies to the west of the walled garden and, from only a couple of fields away, rise the rolling hills of the South Downs. The vendors have lived in the house for nearly two decades, but now that the children have grown up and finished school, they are looking to start a new chapter somewhere else.

Lyewood House has six bedrooms and retains many original characteristics, including decorative fireplaces and stripped wooden floorboards. It comes to the market in good condition, boasting a spacious entrance hall painted in fresh white with attractive Victorian floor tiles, which leads to the drawing room and dining room.

Beyond the open-plan kitchen is a recording studio, where the music-producer owner, Ash Howes, has produced, written and mixed several hits for artists such as One Direction, Dido and Ellie Goulding. ‘It’s the most amazing space,’ says Mr Clarendon. ‘The acoustics are extraordinary as there is no echo. If the new owner wanted to use it beyond music making, it could be a playroom, home office or art studio.’

The house is situated on the edge of the village, which has a community-run shop that is open every day and is run by a combination of paid staff and volunteers. Established in 2006 as a hub for Ropley, it stocks food from local suppliers, as well as wine, basic groceries and household essentials. The staff also run The Tack Room next door, which has been converted into a small convivial space where locals can enjoy a coffee from the shop. For fast trains into London Waterloo, Winchester station is about 20 minutes by car.

Lyewood House is for sale with Knight Frank. For more information, click here

One of England’s great secrets is East Anglia and one of East Anglia’s great secrets is that some of the houses are pink. I grew up in Suffolk, so this is not a secret to me, nor are the great villages, beautiful fields, sublime coastlines and kind people — all within two hours of London. We are in the business of sharing our secrets here at Country Life.

This property on the outskirts of Southburgh in Norfolk feels like a secret worth sharing. It is that fabulous East Anglian shade of pink. It has a splendid thatched roof. It has two acres of gardens and grounds, and four bedrooms. It is for sale with Sowerbys for offers in excess of £700,000. It has a rare ‘Cheese Room’ tax sign, whatever that might mean.

With elements listing from the 16th century, it is a home of considerable character. Thankfully, however, it has seen some more modern additions, notably in the 19th and 20th centuries. The interiors have been updated even more recently, and within the astoundingly traditional exterior is a modern home ideal for family living.

As discussed, the property offers four bedrooms over its two floors. The interiors have been carefully designed to be bright, welcoming and modern, while all the while respecting the immense character within the beams and walls.

Highlights include the spacious kitchen area, with central hob, and the enormous master bedroom suite. The dining room is also achingly traditional, with the vast brick fireplace taking centre stage. Everything here has been designed thoughtfully, which is always easier said than done.

So what is a Cheese Room tax sign? In 1696, William III introduced a window tax, which was a levy on the number of windows in a property. However, rooms such as dairies and cheese rooms were exempt, assuming they were clearly labelled. Before the Cayman Islands, there were cheese rooms. More traditionally associated with the north of England, the label is a rare find.

Outside, the gardens and grounds are a mix of lawned areas and wild meadow. Trees provide privacy, while a detached car lodge and garage provide plenty of space for storage. The city of Norwich is 15 miles to the north.

Willow Farm is for sale with Sowerbys for offers in excess of £700,000. For more information and pictures, click here

With energy-saving, connectivity and sustainability in mind, many home buyers would happily build a bespoke new house in the countryside, yet are deterred by stringent planning restrictions, which regulate the construction of isolated new homes in rural areas. The launch onto the market of this striking new country house highlights some of the risks and rewards involved should you set out to build the country home of your dreams.

Replacement dwellings are a popular source of new builds in the countryside and this was the approach taken by the owners of The Gable House at Mill Green near Headley, four miles from Kingsclere in north-west Hampshire, when, some 15 years ago, they set out to extend their country cottage set in 5½ acres of wooded gardens and grounds at the end of a long no-through track.

Currently for sale through Alex Barton of Strutt & Parker’s Newbury office at a guide price of £4.25 million, The Gable House is located roughly halfway between the commuter hubs of Newbury and Basingstoke, and within easy reach of leading independent schools, among them Cheam (a mile away), Horris Hill, Downe House and St Gabriel’s.

Working with local architect Alex Oliver, both parties soon decided that a simple extension wouldn’t work and planning consent was sought and eventually granted to rebuild rather than extend the existing house. Commenting on the striking three-gable design from which the new building takes its name, Mr Oliver says: ‘Most new houses built in the countryside tend to be square boxes in the neo-Georgian style and I wanted to create something with a more vernacular exterior that would fit both the setting and the relaxed informal style of the interior. The façades of the house are lime rendered to provide a soft and timeless appearance.’

The Gable House is centred on a large, light-and-airy hallway with a galleried landing above. The downstairs living space is flexible, with a large kitchen that flows into the dining room and out onto the south-west-facing stone terraces that surround the house. Three further reception rooms — drawing room, sitting room and study — and a large laundry room, boot room and wine store complete the ground-floor accommodation.

The first floor houses the principal bedroom suite, three further bedrooms and two bathrooms; these rooms all enjoy delightful views over the gardens, with more distant rural vistas beyond. One of the more ingenious elements of Mr Oliver’s design is the layout of the suite of rooms on the second floor, which adds considerable flexibility to the building’s 5,725sq ft of living space. This area currently comprises two bedrooms, a bathroom and an open-plan central space used for yoga and gym equipment.

The gardens closest to the house are a sumptuous mix of flowering borders and climbing plants. The terraces are positioned to maximise the sun and link with the main living areas. Beyond the formal gardens are wildflower meadows, an orchard, vegetable garden, a large area of flat lawn used for football and family games over the years and a pony paddock in front of the house, which protects the view.

The Gable House is for sale with Strutt & Parker for £4.25 million. For more information and pictures, click here

How big is too big in a country house? It's not an easy question to answer, and much will depend on whether you want to graze a few sheep, keep a few horses or build your own nine-hole golf courses. The idea of owning the land for as far as you can see is, of course, a wildly romantic notion — but for most people looking to swap city for country, a few acres can be just ideal.

That, at least, is the thought that sprang to mind when we spotted Pipers Haigh, a gorgeous Edwardian home in the village of Belaugh, which sits on the River Bure a few miles to the north of Norwich, and on the market with Fine & Country at £1.9 million.

In the space of two and a half acres, you'll get a fine-looking four-bedroom house, a cottage, a coach house, an original greenhouse, stables, a swimming pool, several more outbuildings, and a field which was once a paddock, and easily could be again. Unless you have 17 children, or a desire to open a racing stable, it makes you wonder what more you could need.

Inside, the house is completely charming — particularly with the sitting room which opens up, via a pair of arches, into the library, complete with fitted ladder for those higher-up shelves.

As cosy and delightful as the library is, the heart of the house is the open-plan kitchen-dining-living space, over 40ft long, lit from a skylight above and french windows to the side that head out onto a sheltered patio area.

Eating in the open-plan space isn't the only option: there's a good-sized separate dining room as well, with an original fireplace.

The four bedrooms — two of which are en-suite — are all upstairs, as is a fifth room that's used as a study, but could be another bedroom if needed. The current owners' fun, bohemian style is just as eloquently expressed in these areas as it is downstairs.

So there you go — pretty much every box ticked, so far as we can see. And it's even within a mile of a station which runs to central Norwich, from where it's an easy trip to London or elsewhere. For those looking to swap town for country this year, it's a wonderfully tempting slice of the world to call your own.

Pipers Haigh is on the market with Fine & Country at £1.9 million — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

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Homes with original period features are the very bread and butter of Country Life. That and homes that are just a bit weird. But mostly homes with period features. 

You know the ones. Exposed beams, pleasing windows, fireplaces, ornate plasterwork. If you’ve spent any time on this website, or indeed reading the magazine, you’ll be well acquainted with such properties. You probably want to live in one (or already do).

So it seems a little silly to describe this home in Horsham St Faith, Norfolk, as having period features. I mean it does: there are exposed beams, and fireplaces, and bricks, and windows with mullions and transoms. But this property goes a bit further, by also being a former Benedictine monastery that dates from the 12th century. It is for sale with Abbotts for £1.25 million.

For starters, the property is a large one. Probably not big enough these days to house a bunch of monks, but it does have seven bedrooms. It also comes with six acres of ‘serene’ land surrounding it. 

The heart of the home on the ground floor, where you will find a dining room, sitting room, large kitchen, study and, of course, a snooker room. There’s also a small conservatory to the rear of the home and an attached coach house and barn. 

Those are all very interesting rooms, but not as interesting as the in-house chapel, which features an underground cellar. If that was not enough, there remains a 13th-century monastic painting on the walls. Period features indeed.

Outside, the gardens feature a pond, the aforementioned barn and coach house, and plenty of lawn. There’s also a patio to the rear of the property to enjoy some al fresco dining. 

The property is located on Church Street, because of course it is, in the heart of Horsham St Faith. Local amenities include, but are not limited to, a pub, garage, post office, store and doctors surgery. Norwich itself is very close to the south. 

Horsham St Faith Priory is for sale with Abbotts for £1.25 million. For more information and pictures, click here

Long outliving the pandemic, hybrid working remains a highly popular lifestyle choice. Areas east of London are tempting due to their good access into the capital — especially the City — but also because they can offer greater affordability than comparable pockets in the north, west or south.

Cambridgeshire, north Essex, Suffolk and south Norfolk are all rich in charming villages and market towns within one to two hours of London on the train—here are some of the most sought after.

This is part four of a series of articles looking at the new commuter hotspots. The previous three articles can be found here (West), here (North), and here (South).

Dedham

Heading beyond the commuting hubs of Chelmsford and Colchester on the A12 towards Ipswich, there is a scenic pocket where Essex meets Suffolk in the Dedham Vale that is perhaps better known as Constable Country; it was here that the Romantic artist revolutionised landscape painting in the early 1800s.

A National Landscape, Dedham Vale’s gently undulating hills and pretty villages with waterfront pubs and properties on the River Stour — a paradise for paddleboarders — are protected from development, with electricity cables buried beneath. A handful of charming villages are easily accessed from Manningtree station on the Great Eastern Main Line, a highly commuter-friendly station on the edge of a small town free from parking issues.

Higham, Dedham, East Bergholt and Stoke-by-Nayland (where The Crown gastro pub comes highly recommended) are especially popular with young families moving out of London, says Peter Ogilvie of Savills in Ipswich. ‘It’s easy to get off the train at Manningtree, glimpse the meadows and feel at home.’ En route is Flatford Mill, little changed from Constable’s paintings.

The area’s timber-frame houses brim with character and are a legacy of its prosperous wool-trading past. A lot of families aim to get their children into Dedham Church of England Primary School, according to Mr Ogilvie, although Ipswich offers a good selection of independent schools within easy reach. He adds that buyers should expect to pay £800,000 to £1.5 million for a four/five-bedroom detached house in the area — money goes further here than in Kent. This area is closer to the coast than Hertfordshire or the Essex commuter belt, but, despite all that, there remains a slight element of postcode prejudice against the county of Essex.

What you could get: Essex, £1.45 million

Dedham is at the heart of the beautiful lowlands of Constable Country on the River Stour in north Essex and is only four miles from Manningtree station. It offers an outstanding-rated primary school and a superb art-and-craft centre, together with tea rooms, pub and shops. This former inn offers five bedrooms, three bathrooms and sits on half an acre with separate workshops in its old cartshop.

For sale with Jackson Stops

Diss

For those who don’t mind a slightly longer train journey, stations north of Ipswich close to the Suffolk/Norfolk border also offer possibilities, before Norwich becomes a stretch too far for some at an hour and 51 minutes. The Norfolk market town of Diss has become popular with part-time commuters, says Ian Burnaby-Parsons of Strutt & Parker Norwich. ‘The Diss train line into London Liverpool Street is a selling point for many commuters, as City workers don’t have to factor in the additional time or cost of extra travel when they get into town — they can simply walk into the office.’

He adds that Diss ticks every box you could want: beautiful architecture with Georgian and Edwardian buildings at every turn, a weekly market in the historic main square and lashings of community spirit. However, the most notable feature is undoubtedly the mere — a six-acre lake with a park that sits in the centre of town.

Many moving here set their sights on one of the beautiful period homes, he says. Denmark Street, leading into Denmark Hill, has large, detached houses that sell for upwards of £1 million and are only a short stroll into the town centre. ‘Outside the town, there are so many lovely villages to choose from, but Pulham Market always seems to top buyers’ wish lists, only eight miles from Diss,’ adds Mr Burnaby-Parsons. It’s one of the prettiest villages in the area, with a close-knit community that offers a whole host of clubs including a yoga group and an orchestra. Eye-catching thatched cottages dotted around the village green start at about £350,000.

Ely and Cambridge

Heading west across country, the small Cambridgeshire city of Ely on the King’s Lynn line from Liverpool Street has been garnering interest. Celebrated for its Norman cathedral, the ‘Ship of the Fens’, it is also only 20 minutes by train from Cambridge. A 70-minute journey from London King’s Cross is a palatable commute; alternatively, trains run from Ely via Cambridge into London’s Liverpool Street.

‘Ely’s riverside charm and variety of historical architecture attracts downsizers and families,’ explains Edward Russell of Jackson-Stops in Newmarket. ‘Buyers often come from London or Cambridge, two of the most expensive cities in the UK to buy a home, so purchasing in Ely is comparably good value.’ Budgets of about £500,000–£1 million will cover a good-sized family home with green views on the city fringes; older homes closer to the centre are snapped up within days.

For young families, King’s Ely is a historic independent day and boarding school and, for graduates and professionals looking to stay near Cambridge, Ely provides a strong sense of community. ‘Well connected to the east coast and beyond, it is ideal for weekends away — the best of both worlds,’ adds Mr Russell.

What you could get: Cambridge, £2.95 million

New to the market, this beautiful former rectory sits in the quaint village of Weston Colville, close to the amenities of Balsham and with good access to Whittlesford Parkway for trains to London, Newmarket and Cambridge. It has six acres of parkland, with a separate home office and playroom, plus a paddock and tennis court. There are six bedrooms, three bathrooms and three reception rooms.

For sale with Knight Frank

Newmarket

Newmarket, in nearby Suffolk, is another beneficiary of the ‘race for space’. It’s a 20-minute train journey from Cambridge — to which there are about 300 trains a day from London — giving a total journey time of about an hour and 40 minutes. Plenty of families moving from the London suburbs have found value in the beautiful countryside here, with good road connections: the A14 to Cambridge and the Midlands and the A11/M11 to London.

The pretty villages in the rolling countryside south and east of Newmarket tend to come at a premium, according to Richard Garrard of Cheffins: ‘Dalham, Dullingham and Moulton are particularly popular. Moulton has a great pub, The Packhorse Inn, a bustling village shop and picturesque 15th-century, medieval bridge, and the famed Three Churches Walk takes you through the villages of Moulton, Dalham and Gazeley.’ These villages are in the catchment of Moulton CEVC Primary School, and King’s Ely and Barnardiston Hall preparatory schools are renowned in the area.

Newmarket is, of course, known for its racecourse, with events such as the Newmarket Nights with racing and live bands especially popular. Those wishing to gallop further afield can ride (or mountain bike) in Thetford Forest, and the Suffolk coast is easily reached within 1–1½ hours. For this sort of lifestyle, about £500,000–£700,000 is needed to buy an attractive character period property in a village, or an elegant townhouse in the centre of Newmarket; £1 million will cover a fairly substantial property and land.

South of Cambridge, Whittlesford Parkway station is on a useful line (West Anglia Main Line), providing good access for those who wish to live in attractive villages such as Balsham or Brinkley, suggests Paddy Pritchard-Gordon of Knight Frank. ‘This area offers lovely countryside not too far out and within easy reach of Cambridge,’ he explains. ‘We have sold homes in this area to a lot of people who had not initially considered looking north-east [of London], but realised the value when compared with Kent, Hampshire or Surrey.’

The golf courses definitely appeal, he adds — especially the Gog Magog — and Balsham (20 minutes by car to Cambridge) is famed for its cream teas. There you can find a four-bedroom barn conversion or pretty thatched cottage for £700,000–£800,000.

What you could get: Newmarket, £600,000

In Gazeley, one of the most sought-after villages close to Newmarket, is this Grade II-listed thatched cottage in Stubbins Lane, close to the centre and approached by a shingled driveway. The village has its own pub and micro-brewery and nearby Moulton offers further key essentials. The 18th-century property has four bedrooms, three reception rooms and a separate studio/office.

For sale with Cheffins

Saffron Walden

Closer to London, the station at Audley End makes Wendens Ambo and Saffron Walden good choices, according to Mr Pritchard-Gordon. Saffron Walden is a picture-postcard market town with pubs, independent shops and cafés, such as The Goat and Grass, and Jamie Oliver’s favourite restaurant, Chater’s.

‘For £500,000, you can buy a three-bedroom period house in the centre of Saffron Walden or newer properties on the town’s edges, with more space and land as you go out to the villages,’ says Bruce King of Cheffins, who adds that Saffron Walden County High is ‘exceptionally popular’ for children from local villages.

The villages of Newport and Great Chesterford, which Mr King also cites, feature many attractive period buildings, each offering two good pubs and the former a tennis club, farmers market and Arts groups; walkers and equestrians can enjoy the glorious countryside of the Icknield Way. Here, a four- or five-bedroom house with a garden might cost £1 million. For greater proximity to Cambridge and the M11 and similar property prices, the village of Great Shelford is worth a look; it even has a cycle path link to the centre of Cambridge via the Bio-medical Campus.

Alternatively, only 2½ miles north of the city and three miles from Cambridge North station, Anton Frost of Carter Jonas suggests the ideal village setting can be found at Histon & Impington, where a four-bedroom, semi-detached home might cost £750,000, or a detached house with a larger garden £1.2 million–£1.4 million. ‘The bustling high street includes restaurants, cafés, a library, butcher and the area’s famous duck pond,’ he says. The annual Histon & Impington Feast is a highlight of local life.

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I like Suffolk. I like it for many reasons, but probably one of the most important is that I grew up there. There are also other reasons. There aren’t too many hills, so walking around it is quite easy. I like the miles and miles of colourful farmland. It has a beautiful coast. It also has some of the nicest houses and churches in the country, due to the immense wealth it generated in the Middle Ages. One only needs to look at the houses of towns and villages such as Lavenham to see what I mean.

A house that looks like it could be in Lavenham, but is not in Lavenham, is Elms Farm, near the market town of Halesworth. It is for sale via auction at a starting price of £565,000, with Abbotts, and it is glorious. 

Behold the pink exterior, the external beams, the fact that it’s a bit slanty. This is pure Suffolk heritage through and through. It also comes with an acre of gardens.

Originally built in the 12th century and later extended in the 15th, the property is listed Grade II*. It’s set over three floors and offers three bedrooms. The entrance hall/dining room resembles a mediaeval banqueting hall.

One thing Elms Farm is not short of is character and period charm. Just look at all those beams, the stone floors and the fireplaces. According to the agents, the property is believed to be one of two in the UK that still has Queen Beams.

Thankfully, the current owners have made efforts to modernise the property where it’s needed. The kitchen, for example, has been freshly refurbished and the bathrooms have also been updated.

Outside, the gardens extend to an acre and are mostly laid to lawn, while an outbuilding can be used as garaging or extra storage space. 

Elms Farm is for sale with Abbotts via auction for a starting price of £565,000. For more information and pictures, click here

Credit: Strutt and Parker

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Buyers prepared to consider a renovation project will surely be tempted by the launch onto the market of a rare find: Lodge Farm at Castle Acre, which is being sold via Savills on behalf of the Holkham estate. A guide price of £2.75m is quoted for the substantial former farmhouse with its outbuildings, farmstead and shoot lodge set in some 21 acres of gardens, pasture, meadow and woodland. Sounds great? It is. But as the pictures here show, you'll have to be prepared to put some serious work in.

Although few may be aware of its existence, Lodge Farm sits in undulating countryside, a mile north-east of the charming and historic village of Castle Acre with its Norman castle, ruined Cluniac priory and medieval church of St James, three miles from the Georgian market town of Swaffham, 11 miles from Fakenham and 18 miles from Brancaster.

Originally an important farmhouse on the Holkham estate, Lodge Farm, which is unlisted, has been let to long-term tenants over many years and now requires updating and refurbishment throughout.

The original approach to Lodge Farm was from a lane to the west, over a drive that swept through a hedged avenue via open, park-like grounds and through woodland before arriving at the handsome south façade. The drive is shown clearly in old images and will need to be reinstated by the new owner to provide access and re-create the sense of arrival that the house deserves.

Built of the distinctive Holkham estate brick, the main house is Georgian with a substantial Victorian addition. It offers more than 8,700sq ft of living space, with five reception rooms, nine bedrooms and five bathrooms, the most important of which are laid out along the south side of the house, overlooking the grounds and the countryside beyond.

A courtyard of single-storey buildings to the north of the house currently provides garaging, stabling, a workshop and stores, but could be converted to a variety of uses.

As is Lodge Farm itself, the gardens are a blank canvas, ripe for landscaping, but with an old structure that provides a useful starting point, whereas the farmstead to the north of the house, which incorporates the former walled garden, combines both traditional and modern barns that could also be converted to a number of alternative uses.

Lodge Farm is for sale at £2.75m — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for