Four country houses with their own tennis courts, as seen in Country Life
If Wimbledon has put you in the mood for more tennis, Annunciata Elwes is here with a selection of homes with their own tennis courts.


About midway between Falmouth and the Helford River, close to the village of Mawnan Smith, lie the idyllic 31-acre environs of Penwarne. The manor was first recorded in 1313; the current house was built in the late 18th century, with a major structural renovation in the 1980s, and the gardens open every spring via Cornwall Gardens Trust in support of various charities.
Today, the modernised Georgian house, with its six bedrooms and views of Falmouth Bay, is an occasional film set. As well as a hard tennis court in Wimbledon purple and green, the grounds contain a swimming pool, walled garden, kitchen garden, duck pond, water tower, Japanese garden and ‘Jungle’, all interspersed by pathways and streams, plus a sloping lawn in front of the gravel forecourt fringed by specimen trees. Two two-bedroom cottages accessed via a separate driveway could be let.
£5 million via Savills
Complete with a very familiar bridge, an area of small lakes within the nearly 12-acre landscape of Tappington Grange is a homage to Monet’s lily ponds at Giverny in France.
Within the rest are lawns, woodland, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a line of pleached lime trees and a timber barn — a rural haven that is somehow within quarter of a mile of Wadhurst station, with fast services to London.
The Grade II-listed, eight-bedroom house dates to the late 17th century, with high ceilings, fireplaces galore and some fine plaster work in the drawing room.
£2.75m via Hamptons
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Once part of the estate of Hunstanton Hall, former long-time home of the Le Strange family, five-bedroom The Clock Tower — a reworking of the former Victorian coach house by the architect Charles Morris — is approached through picturesque parkland beyond a small moat; Morris’s Gothic stone-mullion windows are particularly distinctive.
Expansive gardens include a paddock, orchard and tennis court and there is an option to purchase a separate two-bedroom cottage. Old Hunstanton, some 18 miles north of King’s Lynn, is a popular coastal village with its championship golf course, clifftop walks, lighthouse and ruins of 13th-century St Edmund’s Chapel.
£1.7m via Sowerbys
Laid out around Grade II-listed Hatherton Lodge, in Hatherton village, not too far from Nantwich, are some 13 acres, punctuated with formal gardens, woodland, a walled garden, lake, sweeping drive, tennis court and pasture.
A standout feature of the six-bedroom Regency main house, built as a response to the 19th-century Picturesque movement, is its sun-dappled orangery.
Other buildings include the five-bedroom Stables House, a garage with two-bedroom flat above and a two-storey barn.
£2.45m via Jackson-Stops
Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.
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