Country houses for sale

OnTheMarket

A handsome Ashlar stone property in a village named 'The Queen of the Cotswolds' has come to market

Meticulously restored in recent years, Loveday's House is an early Georgian property set in beautiful gardens in a well-known Cotswolds village.

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(Image credit: Hamptons)

We’re not 100% convinced by the sometime stretching of the term West Country into the Cotswolds, but for the purposes of including charming Loveday’s House in our round-up, why not?

The Lovedays were a Quaker family of clothiers and farmers in Painswick and local builder John Bryan created this handsome home for them in about 1740, which is on the market today at a guide price of £1.25 million via Hamptons.

Of the five bedrooms, one adjoins a roof terrace with exceptional views over the Painswick Valley and the master could easily be siphoned off as a separate flat with its little kitchenette, shower room and extra bedroom/office above.

Carved-stone fireplaces, shuttered sash windows and Georgian cornicing abound and the four reception rooms include a library with a Clearview stove in the hearth, flanked by 18th-century niches.

As well as updating and maintaining the house, the current owner has completely redesigned the gardens, which now form rooms that flow into each other, with lawns, ponds, dry-stone walls, raised beds, woodland, terrace and loggia.

Loveday's House is currently on the market for £1.25 million via Hamptons — see more pictures, or enquire with the agent for further details.

Painswick: What you need to know

Location: Painswick is approximately 6 miles south of Gloucester, 11 miles from Cheltenham and 4 miles north of Stroud — with mainline rail services linking Stroud and London Paddington.

Atmosphere: Known as one of the most famous villages in the Cotswolds (lovingly dubbed 'the Queen of the Cotswolds') Painswick has a thriving and welcoming community with good amenities including a general store, two pubs, several cafes/restaurants and a wonderful old church which is famous due to a folk-law surrounding its 99 Yew trees.

Things to do: The Painswick Rococo Garden and Painswick Golf Course are both located within the area. Further afield, the regency spa town of Cheltenham is located to the north and offers excellent shopping facilities, is home to annual literature, science and music festivals and the National Hunt Racecourse. Nearby Stroud has an award-winning weekly farmers market plus a large Waitrose and other supermarkets. The surrounding countryside is popular with walkers and cyclists as the town sits along the Cotswold Way National Trail.

Schools: The Croft Primary School, Sheepscombe Primary School and Cranham Church of England Primary School are all rated 'good' in Ofsted reviews. North Bridge House School is a well-regarded secondary school, as is Stroud High School, Marling School and Cheltenham Ladies College.

See more property for sale in the area.


Credit: Strutt and Parker

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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.