This house has a whiff of the sea. In the middle of landlocked Wiltshire, The Spa would make a sheltered haven for superannuated admirals, captains on sabbatical and pirates and parrots put out to pasture.
The L-shaped house greets you with open arms. It’s whitewashed stone, with a roofline in descending steps like a family portrait. On the ground floor the kitchen, hall, drawing room and study — each a modest 4.3m (14ft) wide — are laid end to end, domino fashion. A new annex stands at right angles, seamlessly blended into the pre-existing structure and providing light-filled dining and sitting rooms.
The house is immaculate after a recent redecoration. However, someone has read those articles about how blandness sells — so the decor veers towards Alpine sanatorium: beige carpets, antiseptic white walls and pale sofas slumped like convalescents. At last, in the kitchen, there’s a splash of colour. It’s only a patch of terracotta wall tiles but after so much arctic purity this is Lady Gaga’s dressing-up box. Here is our dream country kitchen: wooden worktops and a stone floor, a gnarled beam over the Aga in the inglenook, a touch of New England in the tongue-and-groove cupboards, and a snug breakfast area with a working stove. It aches for muddy wellies, steamed-up windows, daisies in a jamjar and the smell of wet dog.
Upstairs is the same, only less so. Three bathrooms, three bedrooms and a bedroom/study are again of modest size, and further constricted by the stairwell and landing. But here the compactness feels cosy, the flawless decoration is humanised by the bedroom and bathroom furnishings, and there are lovely views.
The Spa is surrounded by its own land, with cows beyond. The only sound is birdsong; the only human presence is a farmhouse chimney over distant trees. The 2.5ha (6 acres) comprise gardens, three paddocks and an orchard from which the owners, Ian and Karen Mason, last year bottled 100 litres of apple juice (it’s delicious). Next to the house is a new wooden garage block with a workshop, car port, two storerooms, a double garage and a whimsical little clock tower. Hidden away is a new double stable in the same handsome pine, with a tackroom, a patch of hard standing and a turnout yard.
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The Spa is almost afloat. There are two ponds in front, a lumpen stone fountain behind, and beyond the orchard stands the building that gave the house its purpose. The Pump Room has no pump. Instead its waters are endlessly renewed and were drunk for centuries by the locals, who were not best pleased when this natural spring was enclosed in the 1850s. In the floor of the hexagonal, Grade II listed edifice, under what looks like the wooden lid from my granddad’s earth privy, through a hole in the centre of what seems to be an old millstone, is the glint of black water, 3m deep. Here, miles inland, is the taste of cold brine.
A stone plaque over the door, dated 1860, advises us that the water is “sulphated”, and indeed its sea-going tang is overlaid by a breeze from the bowels of Mother Earth. The house comes with documents covering its 100 years as the admin centre for these healing waters (the last bottle was sold in 1952), including touching testimonials from old ladies miraculously raised from prostration.
The Pump Room is 4m across, with electricity, a fireplace and two leaded windows. There are windows in its useable loft. Damp-proof the walls, clear the encroaching shrubbery and you have a beautiful workspace. Do your accounts here (no liquidity problems now), work on that novel (your prose will flow) or paint a masterpiece (watercolours, obviously).
Maintenance on The Spa’s private road is shared with three other homes. Nothing has been done for years, but it seems sound enough on its half-mile course to Purton Stoke, a straggly village with a good pub. Another couple of miles brings you to the shops and schools of Cricklade, an old wool town beside the first droolings of the Thames. The M4 is six miles away and Swindon station is seven, from which Paddington is 55 minutes.
After two-and-a-half years, the Masons are downsizing. They are sorry to leave. At £985,000, here is seclusion as absolute as anywhere in southern England. You could almost be at sea.
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Jackson-Stops & Staff, Cirencester, 01285 653334, jackson-stops.co.uk