If you are after a status symbol, a country mansion is guaranteed to meet this need. If, however, you are also seeking a family home, many stately piles do not deliver. Often this is because they have been renovated in such a way as to enduce shock and awe at the expense involved, rather than comfort.
The main purpose of the makeover of Inchreed, a seven-bedroom house near Crowborough, East Sussex, was, however, as much to create a home as to repair the fabric of the timber-framed house, which sits in a 24 acre-estate, with a swimming pool, tennis courts and stables. These grounds include lovely stretch of woodland and an ancient stone bridge; in spring you walk through a carpet of bluebells along a stream. Here the owners, Stephen Welton, a venture capitalist, and his wife, Lisa, organised orienteering parties for their children and their friends, who swung across the water on ropes, returning in a boat across the pond.
Mrs Welton says: “When Stephen and I came to live here in 1996 I lay on the grass and said to the house: ‘I’ll look after you if you look after me’. ” Now, after 12 years of sustained work, she says that the next owners “won’t even have to replace a gutter. The only thing that will need doing is to replenish the planting in the garden.”
Now that two of their children, Alice, 16, and William, 18, are about to fly the nest, the Weltons are selling up to downsize. Inchreed is now on the market for £3 million. The Weltons will continue to live in Sussex to be near Mrs Welton’s mother.
For me, the delight of the house lies in its varied textures, mellow hand-made clay tiles on the roof, a flash of warm tile-hanging on a gable and freshly painted weatherboarding on the garden front. The venerable age of the house is signalled by two dormer windows with Jacobean carved oak bargeboards. The matching carvings on the porch are new but so well-executed that you would not know. The front door opens into a small hall that leads to a delightful small Jacobean staircase.
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The house has just one main chimney that serves two splendid 17th-century fireplaces standing back to back behind the stair. To the right is a 23ft-long drawing room, matched on the left by a dining room of similar proportions, with old terracotta floor tiles. The ceiling heights are good, although you have to duck occasionally at the doors. “I believe you can pull an old house in 21st century. There are no dark corners, no draughts,” Mrs Welton says.
Timber framing and ceiling beams are on show in virtually every room in the house. Over one first-floor doorway original carpenters’ marks are visible — a form of arrow head — showing how timbers were matched up and allowing the frame to be taken apart and reassembled.
The numerous smart outbuildings are almost a village in themselves. The potting shed bristles with neatly marshalled spades and forks, there are stores for garden machinery, new-tile roofed timber-framed garages and an oast house restored as a party room with its own kitchen and guest suite above. The pool pavilion comes with changing rooms, as brightly painted as beach cabins.
The whole property has been rabbit fenced, and a high wire fence around the oast house keeps out the deer prevalent in this area. There are also nesting boxes for barn owls: from the house, you can glimpse baby owls learning to fly. As I said, this is a house for a family.
Fast facts
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What you get: Timber-framed mainly Jacobean house of 5,500 sq ft, lovely garden, newly restored oasthouse, 24 acres.
Where is it: Three miles from Crowborough, eight miles from Tunbridge Wells, 15 miles from Lewes. Trains from Crowborough to London bridge take 62 minutes.
Price: £3 million via Strutt & Parker, 020-7629 7282, www.struttandparker.com