Six heartbreakingly pretty cottages for sale at under £500,000
You can live in a picture-perfect home for the price of a small city flat – our property editor Annunciata Elwes picks out some of her favourites from among those on the market at the moment.


Suffolk – £450,000
A quaint little village made famous by Gainsborough, Constable and the BBC’s Lovejoy, Long Melford also boasts an accomplished former resident: Admiral William Hanwell, who commanded vessels against Napoleon in the early 1800s, and this home – Hanwell House – has a Blue Plaque to show for it.
A Grade II-listed Georgian property, it has high ceilings, three bedrooms and a courtyard garden. The market town of Sudbury is only two miles away and Bury St Edmunds is 12 miles to the north.
For sale with Carter Jonas. See more pictures and details about this property.
Norfolk – £400,000
The Old Beams is a Grade II-listed 16th-century cottage that has a lovely west-facing garden with a natural pond.
It's set in the low-density village of Forncett St Peter, not far from Wymondham, and which has three churches, an well-regarded primary school and a pub.
For sale with Jackson-Stops. See more pictures and details about this property.
Warwickshire – £499,950
Period features about at this picture-perfect, three-bedroom cottage with inglenook fireplace, thatched roof and several wood-burning stoves.
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The cottage is in Stoneleigh, five miles from Leamington Spa and Kenilworth, and backs on to a meadow.
For sale with Wiglesworth. See more pictures and details about this property.
Somerset – £395,000
On an elevated spot, just opposite the beginning of a footpath in the village of Crowcombe, near Taunton, that leads up onto the Quantock Hills, picture-perfect Grade II-listed Dairy Cottage has two bedrooms, open fireplaces and an Aga.
The south-facing gardens are on two levels, with raised flowerbeds and a crescent-shaped terrace.
For sale with Jackson-Stops. See more pictures and details about this property.
Oxfordshire – £495,000
In the village of Marcham, about two miles west of Abingdon and 10 miles from Oxford, lies this picturesque, stone-built thatched cottage.
It has two main bedrooms with a third that's currently used as a study, plus two separate receptions and beautiful gardens adjacent to the grounds of Denman in Marcham Village.
For sale with Thomas Merrifield. See more pictures and details about this property.
Devon – £275,000
The proportions of Flowerpot Cottage are deceptively large, say agents, with two bedrooms, a dining room with stone floors, wood-burning stoves and an inglenook fireplace with a bread oven.
It’s one of the oldest cottages in Yealmpton, which has a primary school, two pubs and two churches and is surrounded by miles of footpaths, including in the inviting Yealm valley.
For sale with Marchand Petit. See more pictures and details about this property.
Credit: H Tiddy
12 stunning character properties for sale at under £400,000
Thatched homes in Cornwall and West Sussex are among the many highlights of these gorgeous character cottages for sale.
Credit: Strutt and Parker
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An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for
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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