Lawns, glorious lawns at this Grade II-listed home in Hampshire where a sustainable future meets a storied past

For sale at a guide price of £10 million through Ed Cunningham of Knight Frank and Phillippa Dalby-Welsh of Savills, the secluded, Grade II-listed Old Rectory at Tunworth, five miles from Basingstoke, sits in 27 Arcadian acres near this ancient downland hamlet, surrounded by the farms and woodland of the Herriard estate. Its private location ensures that the elegant former rectory can neither see nor hear commuter traffic heading for busy Basingstoke station, nor the nearby M3 motorway, which provides quick and efficient access to London, Heathrow and Gatwick.

The former rectory, the oldest part of which dates from the Middle Ages, was substantially altered in the early 18th century and again in Victorian times, before being sold by the Church in 1917. The new owner was a prominent Yorkshire landowner who brought with him four fine Adam fireplaces to be installed in the main reception rooms. In 1952, he sold the Old Rectory to Col the Hon Julian Berry, youngest son of William Berry, 1st Viscount Camrose, owner of The Daily Telegraph and nearby Hackwood Park.

The medieval core of the main house, which offers 10,300sq ft of accommodation on three floors, includes the former dining room and sitting room, now part of the kitchen/diner; the rest is mainly Queen Anne and comprises the drawing room, study, family room, various utilities, a wine store, cellar, seven bedrooms and five bathrooms. Following her husband’s death in 1988, Mrs Berry added the porch and the orangery, which looks out across the rear gardens to the Herriard estate. Further accommodation is now available in the two-bedroom Garden Cottage and the converted one-bedroom Little Barn.

Hampshire’s famous gardens — from the azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias of the Rothschild’s New Forest estate at Exbury, near Beaulieu, to the restored Gertrude Jekyll gardens at Upton Grey Manor, a mile from Tunworth — are associated with some of the great names in garden history.

The Old Rectory itself boasts a fine gardening tradition that was embraced by Col Berry’s daughter and successor, Caroline Wagg, whose husband’s great-aunt Eliza Wagg helped found the National Garden Scheme in the 1920s. Mrs Wagg loved the ‘reposeful quality of Old Rectory’s formal gardens where green is the predominant colour’.

Green is also the ethos of the present owners, who bought the Old Rectory from Mrs Wagg in 2012. Since then, they have significantly improved the interior, reconfiguring and renovating the kitchen, dining room and sitting room to create a central, open-plan living space; installing a new ventilation and heat-recovery system that ensures excellent air quality throughout this busy area and enhances the energy efficiency of the house; fitting a new biological filtration system in the indoor pool to remove the need for chemicals; and installing Ethernet hard-wire throughout the house to provide greater speed, security and stability than standard Wi-Fi.

A similar approach has been adopted throughout the Old Rectory’s magical gardens and grounds, where the entirety has been converted to organic practices, with no chemicals used in the past two years. Remedial work has been done to established hedges and trees, with beds redesigned and replanted. A new treehouse and children’s adventure course, made from natural and recycled materials, has been built to the west of the house, with planning consent obtained for the creation of a swimming lake.

The Old Rectory is for sale with Savills and Knight Frank for £10 million.