The call of the Cotswolds
Post-covid-19, the picturesque Cotswolds are proving more popular than ever
WHENEVER recession looms, the Cotswolds is the first port of call for buyers seeking a safe haven for their families and their assets. Vendors deprived of the traditional spring selling campaign are making up for lost time by launching their houses on the market in July, as this bumper issue of Country Life shows.
High-achievers will find themselves at home in the small south Gloucestershire farming village of Tormarton, near Badminton, where the Duke of Beaufort and Sir James Dyson are near neighbours. Here, the Cirencester office of Strutt & Parker (01285 653101) is handling the sale, at a guide price of £6.5 million, of historic, Grade Ii-listed Tormarton Court, a beautifully renovated Georgian family house set in more than 10 acres of wonderfully private gardens, parkland and woodland on the edge of the village.
The house, originally a rectory, was altered and enlarged in the 17th and 18th centuries. The village became part of the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton estate in 1789 and, in 1812, the house was extensively remodelled for the Duke’s son, Lord William Somerset, who was rector of the village’s 12th-century St Mary Magdalene Church. In 1929, the Church Commissioners sold the former rectory to Edward Grigg, 1st Baron Altrincham, who renamed it Tormarton Court.
In 1996, the present owners acquired the property and embarked on a substantial renovation and modernisation of the main house to provide 9,462sq ft of elegant living space, with five spacious reception rooms arranged around the splendid reception hall that is the hub of the house. All seven firstfloor bedrooms, including the impressive
principal suite, are large and come with original fitted wardrobes and garden views; there are four further bedrooms on the second floor. In addition, there are plenty of relaxed family rooms, including a small sitting room, a large country kitchen and a games room.
The original gardens were created on former 16th-century rectory glebe land by Lady Altrincham in the 1950s. Impeccably restored by the incumbents, they include an Italian courtyard garden, a walled garden with a kitchen garden and swimming pool and a traditional apothecary garden—all previously open under the National Garden Scheme.
With some prospective purchasers looking to move their businesses lock, stock and barrel out of London, Tormarton Court offers a triedand-tested formula with no worries about social distancing. Former stables, garaging and two staff apartments have been converted to a 3,627sq ft conference building, and a converted, 2,842sq ft stone barn, known as Somerset House, provides a further two floors of green and pleasant office space.
In contrast, a wall and a pair of gate piers are all that separate Grade I-listed Poulton
Manor from the village street of Poulton, five miles east of Cirencester on the southern edge of the Cotswolds. Described by former
Country Life Editor Marcus Binney as ‘a perfect William-and-mary doll’s house’
(Country Life, May 27, 1976), the exquisite, late-17th-century, small Cotswold-stone house, which ‘speaks more of an exalted yeoman than of the lord of the manor’, has remained almost unaltered since it was first built.
Little is known about the history of the house, partly because the village of Poulton is close to the borders of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire and, over the centuries, passed back and forwards between the two, before finally being incorporated into Gloucestershire in 1844. At the same time, it also changed between the Dioceses of Salisbury and Gloucester, further obscuring its history. Recorded in Domesday as Poltone, then
held by Earl Roger, the village was the site of a small Gilbertine priory (the only purely English monastic order), traces of which survive to the south of present-day Poulton.
After the Dissolution, the manor was granted to John Paget and the present house is variously attributed to Paget or Peter Mills, one of the surveyors appointed to supervise the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. In the 1930s, it was bought, ‘in a forlorn state’, by the Cartwright family, who apparently renewed the roof and replaced the ground-floor mullions.
After the war, Poulton Manor was acquired by Sir David Gamble, who sold it to Mr and Mrs Anthony Sanford in 1964. Mr Sanford, an architect, replaced the manor’s brick chimneystack with a more appropriate one in stone. Otherwise, apart from repointing, little has changed from that day to this, when the house is being offered for sale by the family through Savills in Cirencester (01285 627550) at a guide price of £2m.
Much of the charm of Poulton Manor lies in its simplicity. Each floor has two rooms at the front and two at the back, with the hall and landings in the centre and the staircase behind; as a result, almost all the main rooms have windows in two walls. The house stands in two acres of enchanting gardens and woodland in the centre of the village, with some 4,200sq ft of symmetrical living space over three floors, including three reception rooms and the kitchen on the ground floor, three bedrooms and a bathroom on each of upper floors and a playroom in the cellar. The sale includes a one-bedroom guest cottage, with a further cottage available by separate negotiation.
Four miles to the north as the crow flies and seven miles from Cirencester, picturesque Bibury in the wooded Coln Valley was described by William Morris as ‘surely the most beautiful village in England’. Here Savills (01285 627550) are handling the sale, at a guide price of £1.895m, of one of Bibury’s most delightful houses, Grade IIlisted Arlington Manor. According to the
Victoria County History (1981), this is ‘a 17thcentury house with an 18th-century south-west front which dates from a rebuilding of a south wing’. In 1839, it was a farmhouse on the Barnsley Park estate, and the outbuildings to the south included a barn dated 1808.
In April 2004, the house was acquired by its present owner who, over the years, has sympathetically renovated the entire house, incorporating the attached stone barn at the rear into the main building to create a large
The manor’s quirky charm is highlighted by its recent updating
additional reception room. It now offers light, spacious and flexible accommodation on three floors, including five reception rooms, a study, a fully-fitted kitchen/breakfast room, five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The manor’s inherent quirky charm is highlighted by its recent inspirational updating at the hands of interior designer Joanna Wood, whose Cotswold credentials are second to none, having bought and restored her own Georgian manor house at nearby Southrop.
A paved courtyard at the rear of the house leads to the manor’s magical walled gardens— a mix of totally private landscaped areas divided by dry-stone walls. Included in the sale is an attached one-bedroom cottage, which can be reached either from the main house or via its own access next to Arlington’s tall wrought-iron entrance gates.
An interesting comparison between the price of a classic Cotswold former rectory in the late 1980s and its value today is presented by The Old Rectory at Shipton Oliffe, 7½ miles east of Cheltenham, currently on the market with the Cheltenham office of Savills (01242 548000).
According to a report in Country Life (July 9, 1987), Hamptons were due to offer The Old Rectory at auction in June 1987, when a private buyer stepped in to buy ‘the six-bedroom, Grade Ii-listed house standing in four acres of gardens and grounds, for more than £350,000 before the auction’. Now, The Old Rectory, set in three acres of gardens and grounds with the River Coln running through, is on the market at a guide price of £3.5m. Selling agent Christian Swaab hosted more than 20 viewings in the first week of marketing alone.
The imposing former rectory was rebuilt on the site of a smaller house by rector John Anby Carr in 1863, to designs by the almostforgotten Gloucestershire architect Thomas Fulljames. It stands on former glebe land to the south of the village overlooking rolling Cotswold countryside and offers 6,632sq ft of accommodation on three floors, including four reception rooms, a kitchen/breakfast room, a family room, six bedrooms and five bathrooms, all beautifully restored and impeccably maintained by its current owner over the past 20 years.
Across the county border in Oxfordshire, Knight Frank’s Stow-on-the-wold office (01451 600610) is handling the sale of intriguing, Grade Ii-listed Hackers House in the lovely Cotswold village of Churchill, 1½ miles east of Kingham and three miles south-west of Chipping Norton. The original village of Churchill was largely abandoned at the end of the 17th century, following a disastrous fire in 1684—allegedly caused by a baker trying to avoid the chimney tax. Thereafter, the villagers moved up the hill to the present site and sensibly built in stone rather than timber.
According to its listing, the original Hackers House was built in the mid 17th century with later additions and alterations, and ‘considerably extended in the early 20th century’. An advertisement in Country Life (September 16, 1939) announced the sale of the ‘well known Cotswold property, Hackers House, Churchill, having just been “judiciously modernised”, and within four miles of the kennels of the Heythrop’.
Knight Frank quotes a guide price of £5.5m for Hackers House, which has again undergone a complete renovation. It now provides 7,538sq ft of internal floor space in the main house, with a converted barn and outbuildings making a total internal floor area of 10,695sq ft. The house stands in 1½ acres of formal and informal gardens and boasts light and spacious accommodation, including a reception hall, drawing room, formal and informal dining rooms, a kitchen/breakfast room, two sitting rooms, a master bedroom suite, five further bedrooms, four further bathrooms, and a wine cellar with storage for 2,000 bottles.