After a slow spring, the country-house market is bouncing back. Anna Mikhailova looks at what’s on offer, from traditional piles to mansions with a makeover.
From the outside, Sandley, set in 178 acres of Dorset countryside near Gillingham, looks like the quintessential English country house. Open the front door, however, and you are transported somewhere else completely — Notting Hill, perhaps. It’s all clean, crisp interiors, marble and oak floors, plasma television screens, halogen ceiling lights — and not a swirly floral pattern in sight.
Surely some mistake? Not at all, says Jan Scott, 54, who has overseen the transformation of the Grade II-listed six-bedroom house into something quite extraordinary. When she and her husband, Peter, head of a marketing and communications agency, bought the house five years ago, she was underwhelmed by its quaint interiors. “The style was really rather tired,” she says. “We needed to strip everything bare.”
The couple, who spend weekdays at their home in South Kensington, central London, and weekends at the estate, rebuilt parts of the house, created a new wing for a summer dining room and swimming pool, and installed underfloor heating, as well as the latest technology and fittings. It now has a media room, a gym, a games room and even a “dog spa” (essentially a custom dog-washing area, but sadly no sauna).
The work took two years and cost “a couple of million pounds”, says Scott, who adds that she is no fan of the traditional Colefax and Fowler style. “It’s quite an eclectic look, inspired by Andrew Martin’s designs.” A few antique pieces are on show, as well as her husband’s art collection, but everything else is a mix of leather, glass and chrome, as well as plain, understated fabrics and neutral colours.
The couple paid £5.375m for the estate, which was once the principal part of the Sandley Stud and was given to the nation by the Queen Mother. Now, with their son no longer at school in nearby Sherborne, and Scott busy renovating their ski chalet in Méribel, they are putting it on sale this week for £9m.
Not everyone feels the need to import London chic into the countryside. Holt Manor, set in 94 acres in neighbouring Wiltshire, is another large country house that’s new to the market, and its interior, although smart, is much more traditional than Sandley’s. Yet there’s a surprise behind the floral soft furnishings, fittings and chintz: a labyrinth of high-tech sound, lighting, television and security systems more often found in a hedge-funder’s bachelor pad. The large TV screen in the study, for example, is hidden behind a mirror.
Anthony Fisher, a semi-retired entrepreneur, and his wife, Jeni, paid £4m for the Grade-II listed house, parts of which date from the 12th century, in 2002. They have since spent £500,000 on renovating the property, which is now on sale for £5.95m. Anthony says he did not want to strip away Holt Manor’s heritage. “Everything was modernised, but to keep a traditional feel,” he says. “We’re not in London. It’s important to match the inside of a house to its exterior and its history. I don’t think it’s fair to drag a property of this age so far forward.”
However different their views on interior design, both the Scotts and the Fishers have decided that now is the time to bring their homes to the market. They’re not alone. After one of the slowest starts in recent history, which has left the number of houses for sale 15% lower than last year — blame the budget, followed by the general election — there are signs that the traditional spring country-house selling season is finally getting under way.
“The election left people in turmoil,” says Rupert Sweeting, head of the country department for Knight Frank estate agency. Now that’s out of the way, he expects stock levels to rise over the next two or three weeks. “I think we will see the spring/summer active country market period extend into August, when it usually stops because of people going on holiday,” he says.
Nevertheless, we are not quite back to the boom times of 2006 and 2007.
“Buyers still feel the need to view at least four or five houses before they make a decision, even if the first one they see is perfect for them,” Sweeting says. “They have become much more distrustful of the market because it has proved so difficult to read since the start of last year.”
Most properties are also now being put openly on sale, rather than being offered discreetly “off market”, as was the fashion last year. Buyers apparently prefer this, Sweeting says, because they are worried they might be paying too high a premium on an “off market” deal — even though he has seen people who’ve been offered a house privately, turned it down, then ended up paying more for it in a bidding war on the open market.
What sells well now? The most important factor, as ever, is the quality of the house. Savills estate agency has studied properties that were valued at £1.5m in October 2007, dividing them into three categories — “best in class”, “average” and “blighted” — and looked at what has happened to their prices since. It found that the best were back at an average of £1.46m, while the average ones were selling for £1.39m and the blighted languished at £1.26m.
“Over the past six months in particular, the gap between properties that are best in class and average has narrowed, but buyers are still differentiating on quality,” says Lucian Cook, the agency’s head of research. In this respect, the country market is following London, where the best homes are already back above their peak 2007 levels, while less attractive properties are lagging behind.
So, what is considered quality in today’s market? Crispin Holborow, head of Savills’ country-house department, puts it down to three things: how attractive a property is, whether it is in a private setting and whether it is peaceful and quiet. If it ticks at least two of the boxes, it will sell.
“It is not necessarily where it is, it’s what it is,” Holborow says. Still, some parts of the country have certainly been doing better than others. Hampshire, East Anglia, Devon and Cornwall are leading the recovery, while the north is still struggling — except for a diamond-shaped area bordered by Leeds, Ilkley, Harrogate and Wetherby, where prices are rising gradually.
Are perfect modernised interiors still a crucial factor in determining how fast a property will sell? Not any more. “Buyers are more confident and, unlike a year ago, are prepared to put money into the property,” Holborow says. “So it’s no longer going to be a problem if something is not in good condition.”
This shows how much things have changed since last year, when it was only the high-spec, recently refurbished houses that sold well, as shown by the respective fates of two of the most important houses to come onto the market: Malverleys, in Hampshire, which was expensively and tastefully refurbished by its hedge-fund owners, sold at its £12m guide price almost immediately, while Kiddington Hall, in Oxfordshire, which was beautiful, but rather stuffy inside, with not a television in sight, was on sale for seven months before it was bought by Jemima Khan this March for close to £15m.
As a result of this renewed willingness by buyers to take on a project, even properties that have been on the market throughout the downturn are beginning to sell. Wix Abbey, in Essex, for example, has been available for 18 months at £995,000, with no interest — until now, as two buyers have tabled offers.
Those with the inclination, and money, to put their stamp on a country house might want to look at Toddington Manor, in Bedfordshire. This is a quintessential piece of England, a sporting estate with a pheasant shoot and fishing lakes, gardens, a croquet lawn, a cricket pitch, orchards and a romantic dusky-pink manor house that has 12 bedrooms, a billiards room, an orangery and a turret. It also comes with 176 acres of farmland, pasture and woodland.
The manor was last on the market more than 30 years ago, when the current owners, Sir Neville and Lady Bowman-Shaw, bought it in a dilapidated state for less than £100,000. “The whole place was in a state when we came here in the 1970s, but we loved it,” says Georgina Bowman-Shaw, standing in the Aga-warmed kitchen, with its lofty ceilings. “We had the builders here for two years before we even moved in — nobody had lived in the house for decades.”
The Bowman-Shaw family more than made up for that. What with the enormous renovation, their four children and now 10 grandchildren, the house and grounds have been well lived in, but the couple say they now want to find somewhere smaller to live.
In spite of the scale of the main reception rooms and the high ceilings, the house has a homely warmth. It’s in the gardens, however, which were brought back to life by Lady Bowman-Shaw (with the help of a team of gardeners), that the extent of the renovation becomes clear.
“It’s incredible what we discovered under all the undergrowth,” she says, pointing out once buried wrought-iron gates, now set back into the garden walls. “The children loved digging around. One of our buried treasures was this old stone path — they rolled the turf back and we found that it went on and on.” That path now runs the length of the herbaceous borders, elegantly lined by an avenue of pleached limes and lusciously planted with hostas, allium and hellebore.
So, with optimistic sellers such as the Bowman-Shaws putting their properties on the market, is there a danger of an excess supply that might drive prices down again, leading to the dreaded “double dip”?
Estate agents say the rare, top- quality properties are unlikely to suffer, but warn that others risk falling short. “There will be more property on the market, but not necessarily more buyers,” warns Henry Holland-Hibbert, a partner at Strutt & Parker estate agency who covers Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. “Those buyers will pay a fair and good price, but they will not be pushed into paying a big premium.”
Tags: Edinburgh buying agent, Matthew Sinclair, Saint Property, Scottish properties
