Where to find your own Howards End

Although Edwardian domestic architecture is often associated with London's garden suburbs, here are four country houses of the era, two of which are Thameside

- Arabella Youens

When the Edwardian professional classes went house-hunting beyond the suburbs, they sought what Mark Rimell of Strutt & Parker's country-house department describes as 'their very own Howards End', referencing the 1910 novel by E. M. Forster. That is '[country homes] close to a railway station with trains into the city'. As a result, the countryside surrounding London and other large cities is peppered with Edwardian country houses that typically feature landscaped gardens and high boundary hedges, providing a secluded retreat.

Rignalls, a mile outside the Buckinghamshire village of Great Missenden, is one such example. Designed by the architect Charles Holden in the early days of his career, the house is influenced by the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, although Holden later performed something of a design U-turn by going on to champion a more unadorned style, free of 'unnecessary' decorative detailing. Among his later and better-known works are several stations along the London Underground and the University of London's Senate House in Bloomsbury (which some described as Stalinist when it was first unveiled).

The house, launched on the market this week with Savills at a guide price of £4.5 million (020–7016 3780), was commissioned in 1909 by Sir Felix Semon. He was a German-British pioneer in neurobiology and a prominent throat-and-speech specialist who had been appointed Physician Extraordinary to Edward VII in 1901 and helped a 23-year-old Winston Churchill overcome his lisp when in the military. In his biography, he is quoted as saying, after the first appointment with the future prime minister: 'I have just seen the most extraordinary young man I have ever met.'