'When it came up for sale again, it felt like destiny': Philip Mould on his first home in the country

Duck End House — (Image credit: Hugo Rittson-Thomas)

Philip Mould (below) is an art dealer, writer and broadcaster. He is currently working on a book about life through art due out next year and his latest television series of Fake or Fortune? will be broadcast this summer.

Where is it?

Near Chipping Norton in west Oxfordshire.

A quick description

An early-17th-century, four-bedroom stone house with a garden and surrounding fields

How did you find it?

It came onto the market four years before we found it. My wife, Catherine, asked for the brochure and kept it close. We live in London and weren’t really in a position to buy anything — it was a whim — but then, when it came up for sale again, it felt like destiny.

What made you buy it?

There was something about the brave way it had stood on the landscape for so long.

Favourite aspect of the house

The embracing smell of wood, smoke and water, which has become the smell of home. We’re high up and surrounded by ponds and a stream in the garden. Inside, it’s full of oak beams, panelling and, in winter, two fires burn in its capacious fireplaces.

Best memory of living there

During lockdown, we removed an unnecessary curtain of yew hedge and thereby visually reconnected the house to its surrounding meadows. Restoring the ancient meadows has been a 20-year project. Ten years ago, upliftingly, an abundance of self-seeded orchids moved in.

Biggest mistake

Before we knew better, we allowed cement rather than lime mortar to fill crevices on one of the outer walls. The house looked as if it wanted to spit them out. We got it redone instantly.

Is there anything unusual about the house?

Despite small accidents of age, the house has resisted all of the akrasia that you would normally expect, such as porches and lean-to extensions. It stands like a neglected Jacobean portrait: shabby, but true.

Biggest indulgence

We removed a section of stone wall over the stream to create a dropping waterfall on the edge of the rose garden.

What happened to it?

We still own it. London is a necessity, but this is home.

Jeremy Musson’s ‘Secret Houses of the Cotswolds’, with photographs by Hugo Rittson-Thomas, is published by Frances Lincoln (£18.99). Click here for more information and to purchase a copy.

Julie Harding is Country Life’s news and property editor. She is a former editor of Your Horse, Country Smallholding and Eventing, a sister title to Horse & Hound, which she ran for 11 years. Julie has a master’s degree in English and she grew up on a working Somerset dairy farm and in a Grade II*-listed farmhouse, both of which imbued her with a love of farming, the countryside and historic buildings. She returned to her Somerset roots 18 years ago after a stint in the ‘big smoke’ (ie, the south east) and she now keeps a raft of animals, which her long-suffering (and heroic) husband, Andrew, and four children, help to look after to varying degrees.