An impeccably restored country house with prime views over Constable country
Polstead Hall has been sensitively restored by its current owners, and now makes an elegant family home in the heartlands of East Anglia.
The dreamy River Stour forms most of the county boundary between Essex and Suffolk as it passes through a tranquil rural landscape of few towns, but many unspoilt ancient villages on its way to the North Sea at Harwich.
Today, much of the lovely Stour Valley is part of the Dedham Vale National Landscape, an area of rare beauty immortalised by the artist John Constable, who grew up beside the river at Flatford in Suffolk, where his father was the miller.
Now, as Constable’s native county celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth, East Anglian agents are marking the event with the launch onto the market of some classic Suffolk houses in sought-after villages within the Dedham Vale or the wider catchment area of the River Stour.
Barclay Macfarlane of Savills country department (07779 905904) quotes a guide price of £5.5 million for Grade II*-listed Polstead Hall in the charming rural village of Polstead, Suffolk, three miles north-east of Stoke by Nayland, five miles south-west of the medieval market town of Hadleigh and nine miles north of the commuter hub of Colchester in Essex.
This impeccably restored Georgian country house, set in 13 acres of formal gardens, parkland and woodland overlooking the valley of the River Box, a tributary of the Stour, enjoys superb southerly views over the Dedham Vale towards Stoke by Nayland village and its Grade I- listed, 15th-century church of St Mary, the 125ft-high Gothic perpendicular tower of which dominates the landscape for miles around.
According to Suffolk historian H. R. Barker, Polstead Park was held in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Waldegrave family. They were succeeded by the Brands, wealthy clothiers from nearby Boxford, who lived there until 1814, when it passed by marriage to the Cooke family. According to Barker, the present house is largely the work of the Yorkshire-born architect William Pilkington, who, between 1816 and 1819, transformed the previous house into a substantial Regency mansion by remodelling the façade and adding a new 100ft-long wing to the north and a ballroom of similar dimensions to the south.
Having served as a school ‘for the sons of nobility and gentry’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and as a hotel between the wars, the 1960s saw the hall drastically reduced in size, when the ballroom and outbuildings were demolished and the north wing scaled down to half its length. Polstead Hall was again a private residence when, in 1997, it was acquired by the current owners, who embarked on a complete overhaul of the entire property, commissioning Newmarket-based garden designer Jonathan Pringle to lay out the splendid formal parterre and landscape the rest of the gardens. They also built a tiled swimming-pool complex surrounded by flowerbeds to the north-west of the house.
Approached through a former deer park, elegant Polstead Hall offers more than 9,200sq ft of well-organised family accommodation, including, on the ground floor, reception and inner halls, a fine cantilevered staircase, four main reception rooms, a snug, boot room and a Shaker-style kitchen and breakfast room with cellars below.
A notable feature of the dining room is an original fireplace that was sourced from a Pilkington house in Norfolk. The first floor houses a grand principal bedroom suite, four further bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a staff apartment and four unconverted attic rooms on the second floor.
Polstead Hall is for sale with Savills for £5.5 million. For more information, click here.
