Houses with libraries so lovely you’ll feel positively bookish

published 7 October 2017

London NW3– £7.95 million

Skeel Library, part of the Grade II-listed Hampstead Manor heritage conversion by Mount Anvil, was originally commissioned for the bluestockings of Westfield Women’s College.

Completed in 1904, it’s being reimagined as a four-bedroom residence, with a galleried former reading room with a mezzanine level as the main reception room, and will be ready for occupation next year. Residents of the Hampstead Manor site enjoy a spa complex with a pool, sauna, hammam and gym, as well as manicured gardens, a 24-hour concierge and town-car service.

Hampstead Manor is for sale via Mount Anvil – see more details and pictures.

Hertfordshire – £1.75 million

Agents describe Home House, by award-winning architect Platform 5, as a creation of ‘contemporary rustic outside-inside living’.

In secluded 1½-acre grounds just outside St Albans, the main house is made up of layers, courtyards and walkways, with both indoor and outdoor living spaces, using light to maximum advantage. Including the separate Little House, there are four bedrooms.

Home House is for sale via Strutt & Parker (01727 738298)

Devon – in excess of £7 million

There are 22,000 books in the Great Library at The Chanters House, Ottery St Mary, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that many of them were thumbed through by, and perhaps inspired, Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose family had the house for 200 years.

Grade II-listed, Chanters is considered to be of ‘national historic importance’ and has 10 bedrooms, a Victorian conservatory, ornate wood-panelling, a palm house, kitchen garden and separate lodge and coach house. Extensive lawned gardens, with woodland and parkland, incorporate 21½ acres.

The Chanters House is for sale via Knight Frank – see more details and pictures.

Staffordshire – £5 million

The library at moated Caverswall Castle has an original Wedgwood ceiling, added by the Wedgwood family, who owned the Grade I-listed medieval castle on three separate occasions.

Built of red sandstone, there are 18 bedrooms, an octagonal gatehouse, an orangery and a dungeon. Outside, there are 19th-century pleasure gardens and you can fish for trout in the lakes.

Caverswall Castle is for sale via Paul Carr – see more details and pictures.

The grand house with the largest library west of Salisbury

The library at Chanters House was designed for Lord Coleridge’s 18,000 books.

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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.