A Dartmoor manor house with its own hydro-electricity, and space for horses and helicopters
Holystreet Manor lies in a sweep of the River Teign and some magnificent ancient woodland.


The wilds of Dartmoor are right on the doorstep of seven-bedroom Holystreet Manor, which commands a handsome position over ancient woodland, within a sweep of the River Teign.
Close to the popular market town of Chagford, it’s powered by a hydro-electricity and heat-exchange system (which also generates an annual income), cleverly disguised in a pretty Grade II-listed thatched millhouse, and also comes with a three-bedroom cottage and a two-bedroom staff flat.
The main house has 16th and early-17th Century origins but was mostly rebuilt in 1913-1914 in the Tudor style, principally from the local granite stone for which Dartmoor is renowned. The same granite is used in all the buildings on the land, including a delightful thatched outhouse.
The coach house (or garage) dates from the same time and is believed to be one of the first purpose-built garage blocks in England.
During the 1950s, the property was a private school known as St Brides and there is a private chapel (not consecrated) dedicated to St Boniface which the current owners have decorated with a stunning mural of the Sienna town square.
The current owners have undertaken an exacting restoration and refurbishment of the whole house, extending it and bringing Holystreet Manor firmly into the 21st century.
The works were expertly and sympathetically done under the guidance of the Nash Partnership, a highly-regarded architectural practice, in collaboration with interior design firm Artichoke.
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The surrounding landscape is also in excellent condition, with a tennis court, a natural swimming pool, stables, a helicopter hangar, three idyllic paddocks and a manège.
There are lovely walks to be had among beech, oak, rowan and holly trees and the manor comes with fishing rights, providing seasonal sea trout, brown trout and salmon.
Holystreet Manor is on the market with Knight Frank at a guide price of £5.5 million.
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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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