WHO wants a second home? The supermarket run, the Friday night squashed on the motorway, the bleak arrival at stone-cold rooms and the ever-present risk of failing mechanical devices. The view may change but the drudgery, surely, doesn’t. My idea of hell. Plus the guilt, oh the guilt. If I owned a second home I would feel haunted by the spectre of local families unable to find anywhere for their children, who would be forced to endure ghost-town weekdays and weekends populated by spotless 4x4s and Barbours.
On the other hand, there is nothing like a country landscape. Nothing like pulling off muddy boots, after a day’s hiking, in front of a log fire. Nothing like the familiarity of return, again and again, to the same old haunts in different seasons. Which I know my children would love.
So what to do? Here is one possible answer. One weekend I took The Husband to Bruern Stable Cottages in the Cotswolds. “Am I dreaming?” he asked on the Friday night, manfully lighting the fire that someone had thoughtfully laid and sinking into an astonishingly comfortable armchair, “or is this a second home without the hassle?” The Cotswolds has spawned an entire industry providing second homes to outsiders. More than one house in 20 is now owned by people who presumably spend most of their time elsewhere, including Kate Moss, Kate Winslet and Elizabeth Hurley. The attraction is clear: the rolling countryside and the honey-coloured stone is stunning, and it’s close to London. But it is deadly expensive.
A number of families are now renting cottages at Bruern, near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, several times a year, perhaps as an alternative to buying. The visitors’ book at Epsom, the three-bedroom cottage where we find ourselves, is signed by many enthusiastic return visitors. Quite a number are Americans who gush about the exquisite style. “My children thought they were in a Jane Austen novel,” says one.
You can see why: the cottages are in golden limestone, some converted from a 19th-century stable block and others dotted about the grounds. Each is decorated in gorgeous muted colours, in Colefax and Fowler and Nina Campbell and the like, but subtly. Our cottage has two little antique desks and a four-poster bed and the kind of books that you really want to read or read again. But it is also modern where it needs to be modern: no clanking taps or fatal “antique charm” in the bathrooms or kitchen. Unusually for a rental cottage, there is good lighting and proper feather pillows. The Husband greatly approves of the pillows, although he complains that the curtains don’t keep out the morning light.
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I can see why people come back. Our cottage, Epsom, is emphatically not cheap — an average summer weekend costs £1,423. But you can really relax. The cottages are billed as self-catering, but the latter is minimal. Milk, eggs, sausages and a home-made casserole are already in the kitchen. Bicycles stand ready outside. Ordnance Survey maps are on hand. Tea things have been laid out for our arrival in just the way I would have liked to have laid them, except that I would never have got round to it. There is a children’s Wendy house to die for in the garden, and pedal cars. Plus a glorious indoor swimming pool has just been built, with a little gym and two small spa rooms. We arrive as the staff are having a party to celebrate its completion, and there is a strong sense of continuity and care. Fran, who cheerfully helps us with everything from booking a taxi to getting more food, has worked there for 26 years. The cottages are owned by Judy Astor, who began converting them in 1992 and who lives close by. You get the feeling that she would feel happy to put up any of her own friends in them.
Not having needed to cart down bags of shopping, we went down by train and strode out from our front door each morning straight into the fields. On the Sunday we made the ambitious decision to cycle to Stow-on-the-Wold for lunch, a long uphill ride that made us tremendously smug, and found The Old Butchers, which served me the most succulent roast beef and crispy-and-spongy Yorkshire pud I can remember ever having eaten. The Husband raved about the artichoke soup.
These sensations may have been brought on partly by raging hunger. But the restaurant staff were also so friendly that we began to feel as if we lived there. I like to think this is what country life might be like, but I would like it part-time, and guilt-free. The upmarket rental is not cheap. But it is the closest thing I have yet found to an answer.