A gorgeous country house covered in rambling roses and with one 'great feature' that sets it apart from most Cotswolds mansions

Launching in Country Life this week, at a guide price of £5m through Anthony Coaker of Savills in Cirencester, is Grade II-listed Aycote House at Rendcomb. This fine Cotswolds country house looks like it could have been here for centuries; in fact, it's much newer, having been designed by the eminent Arts-and-Crafts architect Norman Jewson and built between 1929 and 1932. That relative newness gives it a crucial advantage over many country houses in the area — of which more later.

Prominently located on the high ground of the scenic Churn valley some six miles north of the Roman market town, Aycote House, set in 13¾ acres of gardens and pasture, boasts spectacular views over four surrounding counties — Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire.

Built of local stone, much of it quarried on site, Aycote House is laid out on an L-plan, with a steeply pitched stone slate roof and a striking, south-east-facing garden front with projecting gabled wings and a central, five-sided, two-storey bay window.

The interior has many notable features, including tall ceilings, stone mullioned windows, a beautifully crafted staircase, beamed ceilings and open fireplaces. The layout is versatile, with a selection of reception rooms that cater for both formal and informal entertaining.

In all, the elegant main house offers 7,685sq ft of living space on three floors, including three principal reception rooms, a study, kitchen/breakfast and sitting areas, eight double bedrooms and five bathrooms.

According to British History Online, the high ground — also once owned by Bruern Abbey — was originally cultivated as open fields, with the valley below providing rich meadow land, although most of the hillsides appear to have been wooded from ancient times. In 1837, the Rendcomb Park estate, which was owned by the Guise family for more than 200 years from the 1600s, boasted 285 acres of woodland.

Rendcomb remained in the Guise family until 1864 when Sir John Wright Guise sold the estate to Sir Francis Goldsmid, MP for Reading, who rebuilt the manor house and gentrified the village. In 1883, Goldsmid’s nephew sold Rendcomb to James Taylor, a Bradford cotton manufacturer, whose executors sold off much of the land in 1914.

The post-war years brought the break-up of the once-proud 1,000-acre farming estate, which saw Frederick Noel Wills acquire the manor house and village, where he founded Rendcomb College in 1920. Later in the decade, Jewson would oversee the building of Aycote House on a lofty wooded site overlooking Rendcomb Park on the west side of the valley, one of only two country houses designed by him in the Cotswold style that remained true to his Arts-and-Crafts principles.

For owner Philip Dinkel, a retired international architect of considerable distinction, ‘the great feature of Aycote House is that it has a damp-proof course, which, unlike the usual Cotswold historic houses, keeps it warm and dry’.

Having acquired the classic Cotswolds house from a German shipping broker in 1996, Mr Dinkel has painstakingly maintained and upgraded the building to modern standards of efficiency and comfort.

Not only that, in 2007, inspired by Jewson’s design principles, he added The Tallet (old English for a loft, in this instance a charming three-car coach house with a guest suite above).

This extra building stands away from the main house and is built in the Cotswold vernacular, using natural stone and incorporating enhanced thermal insulation.

Aycote House is for sale through Savills at £5 million — see more details.