A Cotswolds cottage so perfect it's the stuff of movie fantasy — with a Hollywood A-list asking price to match
This gorgeous, 14th century home is probably the prettiest cottage we've seen all year. It's also one of the most expensive — though there's a very good reason for that, as Toby Keel found out.
The search for the perfect country cottage is the property market's answer to the quest for the Holy Grail. Should it be thatched or tiled? Is it okay to be spacious so long as it's charming, or does it need to be a dinky little two or three-bedroom place? And how about the garden; a picture of perfection, or slightly overgrown?
There's no one size fits all, but perhaps the closest is the cottage featured in the 2006 film The Holiday, a movie almost universally panned by serious critics, and seemingly beloved by pretty much everyone else. The film's plot is as flimsy as the celluloid it was filmed on — Cameron Diaz goes to stay in Kate Winslet's cottage, and falls in love with Jude Law — but the true star of the show is the cottage itself, which is the very picture of country charm.
The idyllic cottage from 2006's The Holiday was actually a façade built purely for the film, and the was demolished after the film was made.
The only problem is that the cottage doesn't exist, and never did. Like the cardboard cut-out towns of Golden Era cowboy films, it was purely a façade built in a field in the village of Shere, not far from Guildford, and the whole thing was torn down after filming finished. And as they dismantled it, the closest we'll ever get to a perfect cottage went with it.
Or so we thought, because Chantry Cottage, in a Cotswolds village half-way between Cheltenham and Cirencester looks, if anything, even more perfect.
And so you'd hope, with an asking price of £1.7 million for a three-bedroom home set in a third of an acre of land.
For context, a few miles away, for the same sort of price, you could buy this four-bedroom house which comes with a separate three-bedroom cottage, and a swimming pool, plus three acres, a barn and several more outbuildings. Or this 11-bedroom home in two acres of land, and almost 6,000sq ft — which is three and a half times more space than you'd get at Chantry Cottage.
And while Chantry Cottage does have three bedrooms, one is very tiny indeed (around 9ft 3in by 7ft 1in). On a price-per-square foot basis, and excluding shells with planning permission such as this beach hut, it's the most expensive cottage we could find on the market in Britain today.
So what's the story here?
Quite simply, Chantry Cottage isn't so much being sold as a home, as a destination. So perfect is it that it's been a hugely popular (and profitable) holiday home that's been let out via the Unique Homestays website, where it was marketed as 'Under The Yew Tree'. With similarly-sized cottages in the area being rented out for £2,000-a-week and more, the potential income is huge; £70,000-£75,000 a year, according to Unique Homestays. With mortgage rates now dipping below 4% for the first time in years, all the sums begin to add up.
Crunching numbers is so unromantic though, unlike this 14th century home itself, which lies in a setting that looks like it's been torn straight from the pages of Cider With Rosie. Chantry Cottage is ringed by a dry stone wall, partially covered by hopelessly romantic creepers, and surrounded by secluded gardens.
Inside, it has been decorated very simply but stylishly, kitted out with classic mid-to-late 20th century furniture that gives it a dose of retro chic. There's a bathroom with a sink carved from a single piece of stone, next to a free-standing bathtub and a glass-box shower cubicle. And outside, the simple garden furniture beneath the centuries-old trees looks like a set from an EM Forster TV adaptation.
It's beautiful and charming, and looks every inch the sort of escape from the world where Cameron Diaz could indeed fall in love with Jude Law. And that's just as well, since you'd most likely have to be a Hollywood A-lister to be able to justify spending £1.7 million on a house that's cute as a button.
Chantry Cottage is for sale at £1.7 million via Savills — see more details.
