This week sees the launch in Country Life of Grade II-listed Kingcombe in Chipping Campden, a striking Arts-and-Crafts house for which joint agents Rupert Wakley of Jackson-Stops in Chipping Campden and David Henderson of Savills in Stow-on-the-Wold. This Gloucestershire gem has a guide price of £5.5m.
Chipping Campden is one of the most beautiful and unspoilt of all the Cotswold market towns, its High Street described by Pevsner as ‘the best piece of townscape in Gloucestershire, arguably one of the best in England’.
The town’s wealth, largely derived from the wool trade, is highlighted by the great, Grade I-listed, Perpendicular church of St James, which dates from the 13th century and is one of the finest ‘wool churches’ in the Cotswolds. In the early 20th century, Chipping Campden became known as a centre for the Cotswold Arts-and-Crafts Movement following the move to the town from London of the architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee in 1902.
In 1925, Sir Gordon Russell, a modern furniture maker who was inspired by the movement to champion traditional skills over machine-made furniture, commissioned the architect Leslie Mansfield to build Kingcombe, with later additions by J. C. Shepherd.
Russell was a passionate gardener and, having built the large Cotswold-style house of traditional rubble with Cotswold-stone roofs, stone-mullioned windows, a garden front with two Cotswold gables and a gable end inscribed GTR 1925, he commissioned the distinguished landscape architects Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and Russell Page to design a garden in sympathy with the aesthetics of the time: clean lines, the use of modern materials and the separation of the garden into a series of rooms.
Located less than a mile from the centre of Chipping Campden, 3½ miles from Broad-way, Worcestershire, and 8½ from Moreton-in-Marsh, Kingcombe stands in more than 11 acres of enchanting gardens and grounds, which include a wild swimming pool, a tennis court and a quaint folly tower.
Lovingly maintained by its long-term owners, the substantial main house offers 8,398sq ft of pleasantly rambling, Arts-and-Crafts-inspired accommodation on two main floors, including a galleried reception hall, five impressive reception rooms and a kitchen/breakfast room.
Elsewhere in the house are six bedroom suites, a seventh bedroom, and a bathroom.
Unusually there is also a 'gardener’s room' with a separate kitchen, plant room and storage, as well as a home office/studio and two one-bedroom flats.
Kingcombe is for sale via Jackson-Stops and Savills at a guide price of £5.5m.
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