What price perfection?

Cecil Beaton’s cherished Chalke Valley country home and an award-winning Dutch-style house near the West Sussex coast come to the market

- Penny Churchill

ATHORNY question facing countryhouse agents, vendors and buyers alike is: how do you value a dream country house in these unpredictable times?

The honest answer is, probably, that nobody knows. However, the arrival on the scene of two notable properties—an early- Georgian gem in Wiltshire’s Chalke Valley and a restored 17th-century masterpiece near Chichester, West Sussex—may provide some clarity.

In 1947, following Broadway success and a new contract with film-maker Alexander Korda, the Society photographer, artist, stage and costume designer Cecil Beaton was looking to buy a house in the country. A friend, the writer Edith Olivier, introduced him to pretty, red-brick Reddish House in the village of Broad Chalke, eight miles from Salisbury. Instantly captivated, he readily agreed to buy it for £10,000. For the next 32 years, until his death in 1980, the house, described by Christopher Hussey as ‘an outstanding example of rustic Baroque’ (COUNTRY LIFE, March 21, 1957), was Beaton’s cherished country home, where he entertained his many friends from the worlds of the Arts, stage and screen. Among them was Greta Garbo, to whom he proposed marriage, inviting her to ‘build her nest’ here. The offer was politely declined.

Previously known as Littlecotes Farm, Reddish House was originally a farmhouse on lands given to Wilton Abbey by King Eadwig in 955 and transferred to Sir William Herbert after the Dissolution. From 1560, the manor farm was owned by the Reddish family of nearby Maiden Bradley, who sold it to a wealthy clothier, Jeremiah Cray, in 1696.