COUNTRY PILES WITH CITY GLOSS
Reports on the ‘weekender’ county of Gloucestershire, with its acres of charm and a royal seal of approval
Gloucestershire has always attracted members of the Royal family. They feel at home in its old mansions circled with stone walls and sheep. It is de rigueur here to pull on your wellies and muck out the horses. To Londoners it is bucolic bliss. These days you are more likely to find celebrity interior designers than agricultural workers roaming the lanes. The Prince of Wales has created his own mini-kingdom at Highgrove near Tetbury, a classic stone house into which he has poured much of his creativity, making magical, wild and formal gardens and wild-flower meadows, and where he raises his own Angus beef. He was also running a Veg Shed selling produce from the estate (including eight different kinds of carrots) until bad spring weather forced it to close. Other members of the Royal family have settled here too. The Princess Royal has raised her children Peter and Zara at Gatcombe Park, next to the estate of her exhusband Mark Phillips, where she runs the Festival of British Eventing each summer. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent also owned a large Grade I listed house at Nether Lypiatt, but reluctantly sold it a few years ago for between £5m and £6m. The Prince of Wales’s nearest neighbour, the glamorous blonde publicity doyenne Kelly Luchford, is selling Ashworth House at Westonbirt (below right). It has all the Gloucestershire credentials – staff cottage, stabling, polo barn, polo exercise track – and it sits opposite the Beaufort Polo Club founded by the Tomlinson family, international polo players and friends of Princes William and Harry. “I have fallen in love with someone who works in Formula One racing, so my polo ponies are being replaced with fast cars,” says Kelly. The interior is a symphony of designer greys and whites. “I wanted to take London to the country,” she says. Savills (01285 627550) has priced it at £1.9m. The thing about Gloucestershire is that it is weekender rather than commuter country. “Trains to London take at least an hour and a half,” says search agent Rob Fanshawe of Property Vision. The Oxfordshire border is where the Chipping Norton set hang out (David and Samantha Cameron, Lady and Viscount Astor, Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, Jeremy Clarkson). “They are more flashy than the true Gloucestershire set, I would say,” says Julian Archard of Savills. It can seem like an enchanted county. The lanes at this time of year froth with cow parsley, the villages appear moulded from burnt caramel, the undulating slate rooftops on the cottages are still as they were centuries ago. Operagoers arrive with picnics at the garden opera house at Longborough, and weekly farmers’ markets are packed with honey, cheeses and apple juice. This weekend the food festival at Cheltenham even brings a touch of Tuscany to the area. Cheltenham exerts a neverending pull on families moving out from London, who find it a good alternative to Oxford. “It is all to do with the good private schools and good state schools,” says Julian Archard of his home beat. “We have Cheltenham College, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Dean Close, St Edward’s, and an excellent state school in Richard Pate. People in Fulham, Clapham and Wandsworth have done really well because the London market has kept going and they can move here with budgets of between £700,000 and £5m.” “There are a lot of old-school families who are into polo and horse racing. I have friends who inherited small farms from their parents and just crack on with them. It isn’t like The Archers. There are enough families who have stayed on and will always remain. Many villages made their fortunes out of wool. In Painswick, the fabulous Georgian facades of the houses were built by competing wool merchants.” No wonder the 19th-century Arts and Crafts evangelists William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti found it an ideal place to rediscover the styles and skills of the preindustrial age. Modern-day stars include pop star Lily Allen, interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and film stars such as Hugh Grant 1. Enter the Forest of Dean and you find ancient woodlands, old ways and lower prices. Minsterworth Court (right) is a nine-bedroom Georgian mansion with a ha-ha and outbuildings at £995,000, Savills (01242 548000). Move this into ‘Posh Gloss’ and it would cost at least half as much again. 2. Gloucester has an atmospheric old core, linked by canal to the Severn estuary, used as a location in the Harry Potter films. Lower house prices are in the newer suburbs all around. Average house prices are put at just over £151,700. You can get a modernised five-bedroom farmhouse for £500,000. and Elizabeth Hurley. Bad-boy artist Damien Hirst has also moved into Toddington Manor, a run-down 300room mansion built like the Houses of Parliament, which he is restoring and filling with works of art. They like to be close to Cirencester, known among agents as “Posh Gloss”, which still glitters like a Knightsbridge street, full of boutiques, restaurants and cafés. Savills says house prices in the county are down on peak values by nearly 10 per cent, less than the average for the rest of the country but still noticeable. “People come to Gloucestershire because it offers a sense of timelessness,” says Rob Fanshawe. “It has more mud on its boots than some of the other counties. Up the Stroud Valley you still find the time-forgot feeling described in Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.” But so popular is it with holidaymakers and weekenders that a new product has been developed around the lakes at South Cerney by Watermark, in the form of serviced second homes with 24-hour security. The Hamptons, on Summer Lake, is on at £725,000 (01285 869031). Or the busy Londoner could buy a little “serviced cottage” for £275,000 to £425,000 in Rose Walk, Upper Doddington, through Strutt & Parker (01608 650502).