A golden-stone manor that's just about as perfect a Cotswolds home as you could wish for
Ford Manor sits in an idyllic hamlet in one of the most beautiful parts of England. Toby Keel takes a look.
I’d never heard of Ford before this week. I mean, I’d heard of Ford, the car company, of course. And I once caught a train from Ford station, in West Sussex. But I’d never heard of the Gloucestershire hamlet of Ford. And now I can’t think about much else.
The reason for me coming across this charming spot — full of beautiful cottages built from golden Cotswolds stone, with an award-winning pub and a proper red telephone box — is that one of the best houses in the village has come on to the market. It’s called Ford Manor — and it’s enchanting. It’s the sort of place they’d put on the cover of Lonely Planet: The Cotswolds, should that book ever come to exist. Savills are the agents, and they list it for sale at £2 million.
It’s name suggests that this home has been the local manor house for centuries, but that’s not actually the case. Dating to the 18th century, it was originally three separate cottages, but in the 1930s they were combined in to one to make a single, larger home that is now Grade II-listed.
Far from being an issue, the conversion from three homes into one actually seems to have helped the flow. Take the gorgeous, vaulted kitchen-diner as an example: it's effectively a separate building that’s flooded with light from Velux windows, and linked to the rest of the house via a passageway. French doors open directly onto a south-facing terrace. It’s bliss.
In the main part of the house, you’re in a classic Cotswolds cottage. Built in local stone under a traditional pitched roof, there are period features throughout: flagstone floors, ancient beams, mullioned windows with leaded panes, and original fireplaces in the living room, dining room and study.
There are three bedrooms and a family bathroom on the first floor, and another bathroom and bedroom on the second floor. The master bedroom has an en-suite bathroom, and also a feature I don't ever recall seeing in a Cotswolds cottage before: it's own separate staircase leading up to a second-floor dressing room.
The gardens — as the pictures here show — aren’t huge (two-thirds of an acre) but they just as idyllic as the rest of the place: terraces, lawns, and flower beds, ringed by mature trees to give you plenty of privacy.
And there’s another bonus within the grounds: an entirely separate garden room that’s set up as a self-contained annexe, with its own kitchen and shower room. It’s perfect for guests, multi-generational living, or use as a very fine home office.
In short, there’s a lot of property here — almost 4,000sq ft, once you take into account that garden annexe and a couple of storage areas in an outbuilding that the owners have dubbed ‘The Pavilion’.
But it’s not the space, the suite with upstairs dressing room or the garden bolt-hole that’s the big draw here: it’s the prospect of living in a home with an ‘atmosphere of understated character and gentle refinement’, as the agents put it. What a joy.
Ford Manor is for sale via Savills at £2 million — see more pictures and details.
