Property market
Penny Churchill
All things bright and beautiful Two ancient Shropshire manors look good in sunshine, as do two more in Cheshire, one of which was a base for Cromwell’s army Grade II*-listed Marche Manor in Shropshire dates from the late 1500s and offers 4,778sq ft of living space on three floors. £1.85m
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HE sun is shining, the grass is growing and, finally, photographers frustrated by a cold, grey April and a wet, windy May can take their ‘killer shots’ of pretty manors and farmhouses that will lure prospective buyers to quiet unspoilt corners of the English countryside. Widely recognised as England’s quietest county, Shropshire boasts some of the leastcluttered landscapes in the country. Here, Tony Morris-Eyton of Savills in Telford (07967 555652) is handling the sale—at a guide price of £1.85 million—of exquisite Grade II*-listed Marche Manor, near the village of Halfway House, two miles from Westbury and 10 miles from Shrewsbury, in picturesque south Shropshire. For locals, Halfway House is said to be midpoint between Shrewsbury and the Welsh border town of Welshpool; outliers see it as halfway between Birmingham and the Welsh university town of Aberystwyth.
According to its listing, the manor, which dates from the late 1500s with early- and late17th-century additions, was the Gough family home from the late 15th century until the 18th century and it was probably Thomas Gough who added the early-17th-century cross wing. Divided into farm cottages in the 19th century, it was restored in about 1898 by F. W. Wateridge, who bought the estate in 1892. The manor stands in 17 acres of gardens, grounds and paddocks, the whole beautifully restored and renovated by the present owners, who have incorporated a 17thcentury dovecote into the main building and created an impressive new walled garden. The main lawn area, originally tennis courts, now serves as a helipad. A summer house, tucked away behind an arbour, has a 43ft rose arch that frames magnificent views towards the Stiperstones National Nature Reserve and the Welsh hills.
The classic black-and-white, Elizabethan manor house offers 4,778sq ft of living space on three floors, including four main reception rooms—sitting room, dining room, drawing room and garden room—plus a study and a David Orton fitted kitchen/ breakfast room on the ground floor. The principal bedroom suite overlooks the gardens and there are three further bedrooms and a family bathroom on the first floor, plus three more bedrooms and a box room on the floor above. Traditional farm buildings arranged in an L-shape around a grass courtyard, currently used as storage, have planning consent for conversion to seven residential dwellings. In 2001, the owners built a large, steel-framed farm building with scope for a variety of uses, including American-barn stabling or to house a classic-car collection, the agents suggest.
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Charlie Kannreuther of Savills in Chester (01244 323232) has just launched onto the market—at a guide price of £1.25m—the ‘achingly beautiful’ Plas Wiggin, a charming Grade II-listed country house set in 5½ acres of immaculate gardens and grounds, a mile from the village of St Martins, 6½ miles from Oswestry and 23 miles equidistant from Chester and Shrewsbury. The village is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Ryder Cup golfer Ian Woosnam, who, despite being only 5ft 4in in height, was one of the longest hitters of his day; he attributes his power to lifting hay bales as a boy on his father’s farm in St Martins. An oasis of peace and tranquillity in the heart of rolling Shropshire countryside, Plas Wiggin has medieval origins, its listing referring to a 14th-/15th-century core with later remodelling. The house stands in a wonderfully private position, flanked by mainly timberframed outbuildings, currently used as garaging, stabling, workshops and storage, but with evident potential for redevelopment. It offers
Plas Wiggin sits in the Shropshire village of St Martin’s, the birthplace of Ian Woosnam, and boasts 3,089sq ft of space and outbuildings that are ripe for development. £1.25m
Cheshire’s commitment to peaceful living was a forlorn hope 3,089sq ft of accommodation on two floors, including a pretty drawing room, sitting room, garden room and kitchen, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the first floor. Across the county border in Cheshire, Mr Kannreuther is selling another rural haven, The Barracks near Bunbury, at the western edge of the Cheshire Plain, four miles from the sought-after village of Tarporley and 15 miles from Chester. He quotes a guide price of £2.25m for the fine thatched country
house, which stands in 36 acres of pristine gardens, grounds and paddocks, half a mile from historic Bunbury village with its narrow twisting streets, half-timbered Tudor cottages and Georgian brick houses. In December 1642, Cheshire’s commitment to peaceful living was underlined by leading Cheshire landowners who signed up to the Bunbury Agreement, whereby the county would remain neutral during the first English Civil War. It was a forlorn hope, however, given the strategic importance of Cheshire and the city port of Chester, and national interests prevailed. The Barracks is said to take its name from its use by Cromwell’s army during the protracted siege of nearby Beeston Castle, which ended in victory for the Parliamentarians in 1644–45 and the partial demolition of the castle; its ruins are now a historic local landmark. 141
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Property market
Above: Cheshire’s The Barracks takes its name from Cromwell using the property as a base during the Civil War. £2.25m. Below: Towns Green Farm in Cheshire offers some 5,000sq ft of space as well as more than 61 acres of fields and woodlands. £2.25m For sale for the first time in more than 40 years, The Barracks was extended by the present owners in the 1980s and 1990s and now offers 4,636sq ft of comfortable living space, with a reception hall, three good reception rooms, master and guest suites, two further bedrooms and a family bathroom, plus a suite of rooms on the ground floor previously used as a home office.
The main house caters for easy family living on three floors To the north of the A55, five miles or so from Bunbury and 4½ miles east of Tarporley, Bells Lewers of Strutt & Parker in Chester (01244 354872) is handling the sale of another peaceful and secluded country retreat. Towns Green Farm at Wettenhall offers more than 5,000sq ft of living accommodation in the impressive main farmhouse, which stands surrounded by more than 61 acres of fields and woodland. Mrs Lewers quotes a guide price of £2.25m for the classic Victorian house, which comes
with more than 35,000sq ft of traditional Cheshire brick barns and outbuildings, including an equestrian yard with extensive stabling, numerous modern barns—one is used as an indoor riding school—with livestock buildings set well away from the house. The land is split into well-fenced paddocks, with graduated areas for mares and foals, an outdoor school, lunge pen and a track for
riding out within the farm boundary. The main house caters for easy family living on three floors, with three reception rooms, an office and a large, triple-aspect, kitchen/ breakfast room on the ground floor; a large principal bedroom suite, two further bedrooms and a family bathroom on the first floor; and two/three further bedrooms and a modern shower room on the second floor.
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Properties of the week
Edited by Annunciata Elwes
Those gorgeous Georgians From waterside idylls to the abodes of masquerade impresarios, these are houses to beat
Somerset, £2.95 million The owners of classically Georgian, Grade II-listed Haygrass House, in the village of Shoreditch, near Taunton, must have been thrilled to hunker down last year. Beyond the grand, but not too grand, portico’s double doors lie a wine cellar, study, two kitchens, a library, ballroom, cinema room and six reception rooms, some with floor-to-ceiling sash windows and open fires. The south-facing drawing room’s bay window looks out over extensive formal gardens in grounds that extend to almost 30 acres and contain a tennis court, swimming pool, American-style barn, stables and paddock. The main house has nine bedrooms and there’s a lodge and stable flat with two bedrooms apiece. Jackson-Stops (01823 325144) Lincolnshire, £1.65 million Commanding a gentle hillside with far-reaching views in the hamlet of Creeton, 10 miles north of Stamford, The Old Rectory was built in about 1750. It now has a Victorian front created in 1850 and further 20th-century additions. Lovely original features include fireplaces, window seats, tall sash windows and shutters, plus stone and timber flooring, and the seven-bedroom house’s two acres include a swimming pond, vegetable garden, orchard and former grass tennis court, plus three double-storey stone barns with development potential. The annexe with studio and home office boasts the all-important fibreoptic broadband and there’s even a wine cellar. Fine & Country (01780 750200) 144
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Properties of the week
Essex, £3.5 million An impressive London plane tree that towers over the 19th-century ‘puddled’ pond at Grade II-listed The Old Rectory, in Little Bardfield, is thought to be the biggest in the county. Elsewhere in the eight-acre idyll are mature silver birches and a 500-year-old oak, plus a swimming pool and tennis court. Accommodation in the pretty red-brick house consists of seven bedrooms, plenty of oak-floored rooms warmed by fireplaces and log-burning stoves, a games room, snooker room, wine cellar, gym and sauna; there’s a converted two-bedroom stable block, too. Knight Frank (020–7861 1114)
Oxfordshire, £3.95 million Wisteria festoons the southern elevation of Cotswoldstone Tubney Warren House, set in four acres only two miles from the village of Appleton, not far from Abingdon. Nature commands further attention from the sevenbedroom house’s deep sash windows, with exuberant displays of daffodils and snowdrops at the year’s start, leading to bluebells in the woods in spring and irises and lilies by the large pond, with its charming jetty and island duck house. There’s a rose garden, walled kitchen garden and specialist tree specimens to be found in the arboretum; a winding path through woods leads to the newly resurfaced tennis court, sheltered by a Christmastree copse and an orchard of greengages, apples, pears, plums and quince. Inside, attractive period details include tapestry rails, shutters and plaster ceiling roses, all complemented by the welcome modern intervention of superfast broadband. The double-aspect dining room overlooks a croquet lawn and a four-door Aga is the centre of a farmhouse-style kitchen with French doors leading outside. Savills (01865 339702)
Montgomeryshire, £2.65 million At Llanfyllin, close to the Shropshire border, a house has stood on the site of Bodfach Hall—Georgian with Victorian additions—since the 13th century and, although it’s been a family home for many years, it was once a hotel. It has 11 bedrooms (five en suite), plus two more in the guest wing; within the rolling 83 acres are a pair of two-bedroom cottages, a handsome Coach House (topped by a cupola and clock) that was residential, but now acts as office and storage, and a number of other barns and outbuildings ripe for conversion. As the River Cain meanders through the glorious parkland (both house and gardens are Grade II listed), it passes ancient oaks, a castellated walled garden, sweeping lawns, a cricket pitch, statue garden, bluebell-carpeted woodland and a lake —all overlooking the Welsh Marches. Mark Wiggin (01584 817977) 146
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Properties of the week East Sussex, £875,000 A coastal village for the discerning, Rottingdean—between Brighton and Newhaven—has been home to Fred Perry, Angela Thirkell, Rudyard Kipling and Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who holidayed at Prospect Cottage for nearly 20 years at the end of the 19th century, as its Blue Plaque testifies. With three bedrooms and a roof terrace, the house overlooks Beacon Hill windmill and the village green, with its 13thcentury St Margaret’s Church, for which Burne-Jones designed stained-glass windows made by William Morris. Laid out over four floors, the house has been modernised, but still retains sash windows and a Victorian thunderbox; the beach is only a short walk away. Hamptons (01273 803290)
Local heroes The mature dressage rider Illustration by Emma van Zeller
Melissa was promised a horse for her 57th birthday, but her husband didn’t realise she was going to go to Holland with Carl Hester to buy one. Nor did he foresee the tennis court turning into an all-weather arena. A new lorry is the size of a cottage: when he pointed out that Melissa is quite a way off the World Cup circuit, she sharply retorted that all ‘athletes’ need somewhere peaceful to ‘visualise’ their test. The paraphernalia—everything’s either spangly or Persilwhite—is endless. So are the training videos Melissa watches in bed. The golfing fortnight in Marbella has become five days at Aachen show in Germany. Melissa now doesn’t seem to be able to listen to music without prancing around weirdly; she calls it ‘piaffe-passage’. KG
9000
London TW9, £6.5 million The extraordinary history of Maids of Honour Row has it built in the grounds of Richmond Palace in about 1718, to provide lodgings for the maids of honour attending to the Princess of Wales, wife of George II. This is only the second time in 85 years that No 4, at the end of the terrace and modernised extensively in 2007, has come to the market. It is made doubly distinctive by its entrance hall panels, painted in 1745 by Antonio Joli (a pupil of Giovanni Paolo Panini). The artist was a friend of then owner Count Johann Jacob Heidegger, the impresario of masquerades who, at George II’s Coronation, apparently arranged the lighting of 1,800 candles in less than three minutes. It has five bedrooms with handsome proportions and a southfacing garden. Hamptons (020–8940 2772)
Bath, £1.25 million The first-floor ballroom at 93, Sydney Place— where Queen Charlotte, consort to George III, stayed to take the waters in 1817—has been converted into a sizeable two-bedroom apartment that features an unusual sun room (above) over the Doric portico of the main entrance and an attractive balcony with views over leafy Sydney Gardens and the Holburne Museum. Original cornicing and ceiling roses have been painstakingly restored, both bedrooms are en suite and current planning permission could reinstate a balcony that once overlooked the Church of St Mary the Virgin to the south. Strutt & Parker (07818 553465)
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