One of the great challenges — but also the great joys — of owning a traditional country house is deciding where to draw the line between old and new. We love historic homes because they're beautiful (a point made beautifully by Adrian Tinniswood on the Country Life Podcast last week) but they are not museums. Living and working in a period home means doing what you can to respect and preserve the past while also making sure that you don't live in a place with damp walls, ruinous energy bills and an unwieldy layout.
So what goes out and what stays put? There are as many ways of striking that balance as there are houses, and in recent weeks we happen to have focused in on several. Last month Arabella Youens looked at unlisted houses, and the huge flexibility owners have when Historic England isn't looking down their necks. Then, not long after, a gorgeous house refurbished with the lightest touch imaginable came under the spotlight. All the quirks, cracks and crumbles were only fixed where absolutely necessary to the structural integrity of the buildings — and the rest left alone to add vast amounts of character.
Most owners fall somewhere between these two extremes, but the house we look at today takes a completely different approach: take a picture-perfect country cottage, keep it as original as possible, and then build a wildly original, fantastical and exotic extra building within the grounds. The result is an extraordinary home called The Gasworks, where even the name is a like a twisted punk-era inversion of the usual tropes of Cotswolds charm.
The bare facts of the house — which is now for sale with Savills at £1.85 million — are that it's a 3,000 sq ft home with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a deliciously secluded location within wraparound gardens, tucked away in the famously beautiful village of Upper Slaughter.
As you'll already have seen in the pictures, it's a home that — appropriately enough, in the week that ex-England captain David Beckham is our guest editor — is a game of two halves. One the one side you have a pretty cottage built from the traditional golden stone of the Cotswolds; on the other, a metal box with a deep, rust-red hue, boasting a circular tower, glass walls, corrugated iron and state of the art internals. It's certainly a jarring juxtaposition at first, one that gave us a 'do not adjust your set' moment — but somehow, against expectations, it works.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that the different parts of this home — which are linked via a covered, glazed walkway section — have been this way for 150 years. They might look like they belong not so much to different eras as different planets, but The Gasworks really was a gasworks, constructed in 1877 to provide acetylene for a nearby estate; the industrial half was on one side of the plot, the workers' cottage next door on the other.
Needless to say it's a long time since acetylene was produced in this postcode, and the property has been 'lovingly transformed over time', in the agents' words, with the original industrial buildings gone, and today's metal part being a more recently constructed CorTen steel replacement, with its deep red hue coming from intentional rusting that protects the metal beneath. The cottage is still the original from 1877, though its stone façade has been meticulously restored, and the insides refurbished gently, with a huge open living space, a kitchen, snug and a bedroom with en-suite.
Other than that bedroom, the cottage is the living space, while the metal edifice it's attached to has three more bedrooms plus two tower rooms — one of which can be used as a fifth bedroom.
It won't appeal to everyone, but it really does hold together after the initial shock, with Savills calling it 'a bold, modern twist... harmonising beautifully with the natural tones of the surrounding landscape' and 'a remarkable fusion of history, craftsmanship, and contemporary design'.
'The Gasworks is a fabulous marriage of industrial and domestic – a remarkable piece of design while also being a wonderfully comfortable home that makes the most of its idyllic surroundings,' adds 'Kay McCluskey of Savills. 'Its architectural provenance will likely attract those with an appreciation for design, or who are in search of a creative retreat.'
The Gasworks if for sale at £1.85 million — see more details.
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