Up in north Hampshire, the countryside around Basingstoke is a magnet for country-house buyers who are drawn to the area by its choice of excellent schools and ease of access to the capital. It is also Jane Austen country, which this year has been celebrating the 250th anniversary of the much-loved novelist’s birth in December 1775.
By happy coincidence, the event coincides with the launch onto the market of a splendid former rectory, the Old Rectory at Dummer and Oakley House at Oakley, located a hop, skip and jump either side of the village of Steventon, where Austen’s father, the Revd George Austen, served as rector from 1765 to 1801.
The Austen link at The Old Rectory in Dummer — being sold through Savills at a guide price of £3.4m — isn't based purely on proximity. The author was close friends with the Terry family, who lived here at the time, and Austen was a regular visitor. The Terrys had daughters called Jane and Eliza, not far off two of the Bennet daughters names in Pride and Prejudice, and it's been suggested that the Terry sisters' marriages tally with the love matches made in Emma.
All that said, the rectory that stands in this charming village is a very different beast to the one that was here in Austen's day.
Approached through a large set of electric oak gates, the handsome former rectory was built in 1850 to the design of the eminent architect William Donthorne, drawings for which are housed in the V&A Museum.
The design is the very height of Victorian Gothic style and combines Tudor-patterned chimneys with the unusual use of square knapped flints and Bath-stone dressings — the flints thought to be the discarded remains of old flint stones cut in an earlier age for use in flintlock rifles.
Beautifully maintained by the current owners, who have lived there for 14 years, the main house offers 7,158sq ft of generous family accommodation on two floors, including a spacious entrance hall, a drawing room/former music room, a dining room, library, study, recently refitted kitchen, breakfast/family room and boot room on the ground floor.
A fine oak staircase leads to the first floor where a grand principal bedroom wing comprises a large bedroom, a dressing room and a luxurious en-suite bathroom; four further bedrooms and three bathrooms are located on this floor.
Additional accommodation is provided in the one-bedroom coach house and beyond the breakfast/family room is a splendid indoor swimming pool and gym, for which the new knapped flint used in its construction was sourced at great length from Dorset.
The Old Rectory in Dummer, Hampshire, is for sale £3.45 million — see more details.
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